Dr. Metablog

Dentists I Have Known

When I was a child, there were two neighborhood dentists.  One was named Caress and the other was named Yankowitz.  My parents chose Nathan Caress, possibly for onomastic reasons, but they might have made a mistake;  Nathan Caress should have been called Nathan Butcher.  Dentistry sixty years ago was much inferior to dentistry today, especially in our dark corner of the universe.  There was no anaesthetics, no novacaine.  Baby teeth that developed cavities were summarily yankowitzed with a pair of what looked like industrial pliers.  Adult teeth that needed repair were excavated with a low-speed mechanical drill, then sterilized with carbolic acid, and filled with a mercury compound that has over the years not doubt lowered my IQ by dozens or scores of points. Dentistry was painful. No, it wasn't painful, it was torture.  Dr. Caress, whose office was in the living room of his house on Rugby Road, had a big black ugly mole on his left cheek. I studied that mole for many too many hours.

Sometime in my early teens I was sent to an orthodontist, Irving Pollack, who had a very official suite of rooms in a high-rise on Joralemon Street, a subway ride away.  I am grateful to him because, although he made a miserable adolescence even more miserable, his "appliances" helped keep my mismatched, askew anthology of teeth in my head.  In fact, I have all but one of them to this day.  

No thanks to my next dentist, T. Gorfein of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a genuine criminal who asserted that I had twenty-two cavities and set out to fill them. I left him after a couple of weeks, not because I was wise enough to suspect that he was  a cheat, but because while he was working on me, he called over his assistant and said -- genuine historical quote coming here -- "Would you look at that sucker bleed."  At the university clinic, the dentist to whom I was assigned could find only two cavities, which she (my first female practitioner) painlessly filled. I must have had other dental experiences before Colorado's Amiot and Johnson, both of whom were competent but both of whom insisted on talking Republican nonsense to defenseless me while my mouth was filled with equipment and fat fingers. Johnson left a crown too high, causing enormous pain; searching for an alternative for his ham-handedness, I remembered that I had bus-commuted with a dental student who seemed intelligent. She became a dentista of high regard for many years until she took very early retirement from the trade -- I never knew why. She sold her practice to another competent woman who charges outrageous sky high prices for her services, but keeps me healthy.

So the score as we head into overtime:  one fake tooth, two root canal jobs, a couple of tender spots, two unerupted wisdom teeth waiting to cause trouble, but unabated ability to eat and enjoy corn on the cob. Nevertheless, lots of residual Caress-caused nervousness every time I need to see someone in the tooth business.  

More tooth news:

First Week in the West, August 1969

Our final stop on the road westward was Gothenburg, Nebraska.  We set up the old canvas tent in a park in the heart of town and slept to the screeching of cicadas (a sound new to me).  (In those days we couldn't possibly have afforded the $10 or $15 for a motel.)  By noon the next day we had reached Crook, Colorado (population 128 in 2000 but considerably more in 1969 -- the town was then large enough to support a restaurant and a gas station). We ate lunch but when we got back into the green Dodge station wagon, purchased ($2500) for our new life in the Rockies, we discovered that something had gone terribly wrong with the gears and that the car would only go backwards. I worried that we were going to be stuck in Crook with two boys under four years old while we waited for a transmission part to be trucked in from Detroit. Filled with financial trepidation, I backed the car around the block (there was only one block, fortunately) to the town's lone mechanic. He said he'd "take a look." He did, got himself a great big screwdriver and banged away under the hood for a few minutes. "Fixed it." When he charged me $1.00 for the service, I began to think well of Colorado. We piled back into the car and continued with the last 150 miles of the trip, gazing at the mountains in the distance and the arid steppes, populated only by the occasional cow -- with nary a human being in view.  

We made it to Boulder sometime in that  same afternoon. It took a while to find the house we had rented by mail. We missed it on the first pass and drove by the old Pioneer Cemetery, which became our first landmark. We had no idea that we had rented a cute small 1915 arts and crafts bungalow with the original fir woodwork still intact -- what a change from our Manhattan apartment overlooking Broadway. Our few sticks of furniture were delayed in transit (and would be for three weeks), so we all slept on air mattresses for the while.   

The Daughter (at whose request I am writing this reminiscence), was conceived before the furniture arrived.

Our landlord and next-door neighbor was Jack David Angus Ogilvy, a rangy cowboy and professor of Anglo-Saxon who was, contrary to all expectations, a distant relative of the queen of England.  (Was it 1969 or the next year that I met Jack's cousin, a pimply English boy named Angus, known across the sea as Lord Ogilvy)?  That was a surprise. Another surprise:  the alley behind our house was bordered with a huge crop of wild plums. The boys discovered the plums very soon after our arrival.

I was taken by surprise by the Colorado light.   had always lived in the cloudy east, and that bright western sun was a complete surprise. High altitude, no humidity, and very big sky. I'm still not quite used to it.  

Boulder was not the sophosticated, foodie, high-tech, trendy town it has become. It was all white bread, the downtown unMalled and still dominated by banks, car dealerships, Valentine's Hardware, Smith's Shoes, a big old Woolworth's and wide empty streets. There were only a few restaurants -- I remember the Harbin Inn, a mediocre Chinese joint, and the Gondolier ditto but Italian (still in business but much changed). And our favorite, the Aristocrat, a breakfast place with portions that could remedy in a single sitting those dangerous drops in cholesterol.

On our first day in town, we drove by Boulder High School. Mrs. Dr. M. said, "That's where I want to teach when I go back to teaching." Which she did, a few years later and then for many years.  

Antres, Antrees, Antars

One of my loyal readers (see "Comments" to previous post) wants to know how the word "antres" was pronounced. It's a reasonable inquiry but like many questions about Shakespeare, its answer is not easy.  

I myself pronounce "antres" just as I would "antlers," but without the "l". If I were to guess at an Elizabethan pronounciation (and it would be a guess, even though I've stumbled through the volumes on Shakespearean pronunciation by Kokeritz and Cercignani), I would say the word with a more open initial vowel:  "ahnters." But can we ever be certain how words were pronounced four hundred years ago?  Especially nonce-words like antres? 

Moreover, Shakespeare did not spell antres, "antres.'  Antres is a brilliant editorial intervention that made its initial appearance in Lewis Theobald's The Works of Shakespeare in 1733.

The first time that Othello saw print, in the 1622 quarto, antres was "Antrees." The second time, in the first Folio of 1623, antres was "Antars."  Are either one of these spellings, each of which yields a different pronounciation, authoritative?  It is impossible to know. With some plays, it's clear that F was set from Q, and that therefore any divergences are likely to be errors. But in the case of Othello, Q and F descend independently from a lost original (and it's been suggested that Q reveals evidence of the interpolations and misunderstandings of actors). Neither "Anteers" or "Antars" is definitive. Either pronunciation can therefore be justified.   

Perhaps Shakespeare changed his mind. Perhaps a scribe or a typesetter, struggling with a unique and unfamiliar work, took a guess. The rest is silence.            

 

All About Antres

"Antres" is among the rarest of rare words. Shakespeare's Othello speaks of "antres vast and deserts idle" in the magnificent oration in which he takes issue with the Venetian bigotry that claimed that he was only able to win white Desdemona by employing drugs and witchcraft. No, it wasn't because he was a sorcerer; it was because he was accomplished, heroic, romantic. "Antres" is one of the exotic words that defines the great African general as a non-Venetian -- an outlander, an "erring barbarian," an "extravagant and wheeling stranger."

Shakespeare coined "antres" just for the occasion, deriving it from Latin antrum, a cave. He never used "antres" again, nor did anyone else until Keats fleetingly revived the word two centuries afterward. "Antres" never domesticated into English and remains curious and remote, eternally in need of an explanatory footnote. It is unlikely that Shakespeare expected that a popular or even a courtly audience would grasp "antres" at first hearing. It's a risky word, but Shakespeare didn't become Shakespeare without taking risks.

The playwright coupled the neologism "antres" to another shiny new Latinism to produce "antres vast," a phrase which translates into the language of 2017 as "really big caves." Yet no translation can do justice to the spacious resonance of "antres vast." The caverns to which Othello refers are monstrously huge -- grown grander and even more inaccessible because Shakespeare ingeniously placed the modifier after rather than before the noun. "Antres vast" are a hundredfold more mysterious -- darker, more echoic, more glinty with stalactites and stalagmites -- than "vast antres."  

"Antres vast" occurs in tandem with a second and equally remarkable noun-adjective combination: "deserts idle." Othello reports that before he came to Venice, he had not only traversed "rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven" but had also dwelt among "antres vast and deserts idle." Strictly speaking, deserts cannot be "idle," but they can be vacant or useless. "Deserts idle" reinforces and augments "antres vast." Taken together, the two phrases are infinitely more evocative than either alone.

As a structure of sound, "antres vast and deserts idle" pivots on the "d" of "and" and the "d" of "deserts" and it positions "antres" and "idle" in symmetrical opposition. The two key words are dissimilar yet cleverly interlinked, each comprised of an open vowel (Antres, Idle), a dental (anTres, iDle), and a liquid (antRes, idLe). It is not by accident that "antres vast and deserts idle" is such a euphonious and mouth-filling phrase.      

Shakespeare not only invented "antres" for Othello's oration but also took care to surround it with other linguistic novelties. For example: Othello claims to have encountered "cannibals that each other eat/ The anthropophagi." "Cannibal" is now a commonplace noun, but in 1604 it was a newcomer to the language. "Cannibal" derives from "Carib," the name of a recently-encountered people--reputed to be man-eaters --who gave their appellation to the sea in which they lived. "Cannibal" was sufficiently strange--it had only made harbor in England (arriving by way of Spain) in the 1550s--that Shakespeare felt a need to define it, which he did once in English ("that each other eat") and once in Greek ("anthropophagi"). "Anthropophagi," a word that had originated with Herodotus, was as new to English--and as seldom employed--as "cannibal."   

"Antres vast," "deserts idle," "cannibals" and "anthropophagi" play crucial parts in Othello's stirring autobiographical fragment.           

         I spake of most disastrous chances,

Of moving accidents by flood and field,

Of hair-breadth scapes i'th'imminent deadly breach,

Of being taken by the insolent foe

And sold to slavery;  of my redemption thence,

And portance in my travel's history:

Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,

Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven,

It was my hint to speak -- such was the process.

And of the cannibals that each other eat,

The anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders.

It's an astonishing story, each element more incredible than the one that precedes it. Hair-breadth escapes?  Every hero can boast of them. Redemption from slavery? A bit less likely. Hills whose heads touch heaven? A pardonable hyperbole. Cannibals?  Surely, less believable still. The Othello landscape then crosses the border from exotic to fabulous when it adduces "men whose heads/ Do grow beneath their shoulders." These headless men are the blemmyae -- Nubian or sometimes Ethiopian -- who were a feature of  pseudo-anthropological folklore from Pliny to Sir Walter Raleigh. The skepticism that these monstrous creatures ought to provoke is diluted because the road to the blemmyes passes through "antres vast and deserts idle." If audiences had not been lulled and seduced by "antres," they might dismiss Othello as a mere braggart soldier--rather than admire him for the near-magician that he becomes in his self-dramatization.   

Shakespeare had yet another purpose for "antres vast." In the sentence that treads on the heels of the "men whose heads/ Do grow beneath their shoulders," Othello abruptly turned his attention to Desdemona. His language dulls. "This (i.e. his exotic narrative) to hear would Desdemona seriously incline,/ But still the house affairs would draw her hence." Shakespeare strategically contrasts Othello's vocabulary to Desdemona's when he juxtaposes "antres vast" to "house affairs." Only the tinnest of ears can fail to be struck by the difference between the two phrases. Antres vast--house affairs; house affairs--antres vast. The gap between these two most pregnant phrases is small enough to allow the electric impulses of sex and romance to spark, but is too wide to allow genuine understanding or empathy to shoot the gap. The tragedy of Desdemona and Othello arises out of the unbridgeable space between "antres vast" and "house affairs."

Shakespeare therefore knew exactly what he was about when he invented the word "antres."

If he had been in a more antic mood, less determined to characterize Othello's massive dignity, he might have coined a word from another Latin word for cave, e.g. spelunca.  But "spelunkies vast" -- or even "spelunkies splendid" -- could not possibly do the work of "antres vast." 

Gamboge-coloured Bluchers

I have, on occasion, noted that modern readers of the great classic novels of the previous era are unaware of the social 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 exactly what is meant when our hero arrives in a jeep, Jaguar, Jetta, or jalopy, but we are utterly clueless as to the valence of barouche, basket carriage, berlin, britchka, brougham, buckboard, buggy, cabriolet, caleche, cariole, carryall, chaise, chariot, clarence, concord wagon, coupe, croydon, curricle, cutter, daumont, dearborn, dennet, diligence, dog-cart, fiacre, fly, four-wheeler, gig, go-cart, governess cart, hansom, herdic, 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, or wurt."

I'm not the only person who has taken note of the variety of horse-drawn vehicles.  In an early essay (one of the Sketches by Boz), Charles Dickens reported that the road to Greenwich Fair was "in a state of perpetual bustle.  Cabs, hackney-coaches, "shay" carts, coal-waggons, stages, omnibuses, sociables, gigs, donkey-chaises -- all crammed with people... roll along at their utmost speed."  What, pray tell, is a "sociable?" 

In another of Dickens' sketches, a newborn is taken to be christened in a "glass-carriage." It can't be made of glass;  it must be windowed.   

On an "assembly night", "a 'double-fly' was ordered to be at the door of Oak Lodge at nine o'clock precisely."  A "double-fly" would appear to be twice as large as your run-of-the-mill fly.  Twice as long?  Twice as wide? 

As little as I know about vehicles, it appears that I know less about nineteenth-century clothes for men.  What does it mean that one of Dickens' characters wears "cordury knee-smalls?"  Fashionable or ridiculous?  What about "spotless inexplicables?"  "Black knee-shorts?"  "A black-glazed stock?"  "Cloudy Berlins?"  "Drab shorts and continuations?"   "Knee-cords and tops?" What does it mean that a man had "various particles of sawdust, looking like so many inverted commas, on his inexpressibles."  And what, finally, are "gamboge-coloured Bluchers?"  I can't even begin to imagine.  Help!  I need an annotated Boz. 

In Which the Blogger Loses his Cool

The Takacs Quartet graces us with six superb concerts a year.  It's true that they sometimes hanker after strange new composers -- Psathos, Part etc. -- whose compositions set my teeth on edge like the vile squealings of the wry-necked fife or like a brazen canstick turned or like the gratings of a dry wheel on an axletree  -- but mostly they play what distinguished Quartets are ordained to play, that is, the great central European tradition from Haydn to Brahms.  But last night, the Takacs, eek and alas, ventured into new and grim territory.  Horribile dictu, they offered an original, commissioned Drama that purported to be Serious and Illuminating.  It warn't.  It was a interminable playlet about Beethoven's last years founded on the composer's letters and conversation books.  It was barren.  It was predictable, uninsightful, reductive, shallow, witless, dull, and pretentious.  I started to squirm (boredom feeding on embarrassment and embarrassment on boredom) after a couple of minutes, then broke into a sweat, but after a few minutes resigned myself to my middle-of-the-row captivity and I did what I always do in such situations -- recited to myself long-ago-memorized poetry.  When the Drama mercifully ended, I was consoled to hear the woman in front of me (a member of the music faculty) say to her companion, "Do you think they know how bad that was?"

Do they?  I hope so.  I hope that the playwright, a tyro named  ------ Morse, recognizes that he's not Tom Stoppard or even Tom Stoppard diluted to a 1% tincture, and that he takes up a profession that inflicts less pain on innocent bystanders.   

I left dispirited, especially for the actors, who tried to force a marriage of Shakespearean style of performance to prosaic vocabulary and sentence structures.  I do not use the word "Shakespearean" in a good way:  I refer to that highly artificial, unnatural way of speaking and moving that, inherited and debased from an ancient tradition, has stupefied and narcotized dutiful culture-hungry audiences at summer festivals all over America.  Shakespeare himself was clear that he did not want his actors to strut and bellow, but strut and bellow was what they did last night.  If the actors did not split the ears of all the groundlings, they certainly split mine.  Why do they speak in that ridiculous manner when their aim should be "to hold the mirror up to nature."  It's wrong of me to say so, but I felt that I could look into the soul of the actor who played Beethoven and see a man who imagined that  he was playing Lear at the Old Vic, when he was in fact performing in a play that might, just might, satisfy the requirements for an M.A. in creative writing at some off-brand college ("he's worked very hard on this so we might as well pass him"), and that he was going to show "them" how it's done, but instead he offered us sufferers a copy of a copy of a pale copy.

Egads, I'm breaking into a sweat again just thinking about it.

I pay good money to hear the Takacs -- and concert after concert, I get my money's worth, and much more.  I want Schubert.  I want Mozart.  If I wanted amateur theatricals, I would go to he local dinner theater.  Or to the high school around the corner.  

More on My Brain

How come my friend Ken W. can hike for three days in the mountains, dig a hole and cache his supplies, and then, the next summer, return to the exact spot to retrieve his stuff, while I can't turn around twice without getting lost?  Why is it that my college roommate, Allan K., could draw a detailed map of any place on earth from memory, while my friend Ellen P., equally intelligent, cannot remember whether Kansas is north or south of Nebraska or east or west of Missouri, or whether Wales is on the east coast or the west coast of Great Britain?  How come some people have perfect pitch and others can't tell if one note is higher or lower than another?  Why is it that some people who can't tie their shoelaces are brilliant at mathematics?

How does it happen that there are baseball players who can take a quick look at a ball coming off a bat and run to the spot where it's going to land and stick out a glove and catch it?  How do they instantaneously calculate and plot their course?  Why did I, as a youth, start in, veer left, turn right, and then circle about in hopeless confusion? 

Why is it that the only act of the human brain at which I am naturally superior, gifted even unto genius is one of the least important?  I refer, of course, to speling!