Dr. Metablog

What Have We Come To?

Just back from the post office, where I mailed the granddaughter her gift, a zester. What is a zester, you ask?  It's a kitchen device designed to remove the "zest," that is, the outermost skin of a citrus fruit.  The granddaughter's zester is an inch and a half wide and thirteen inches long, including its five inch handle. Essentially, it's a hand-held grater, very useful if you're a cooking enthusiast. And why, you ask, would I venture out in 15F, snowy weather to mail the zester to California, when the grand-daughter could have put it in her backpack when she returned home? Because, I was creditably advised, the zester would certainly be confiscated by airport security.  

What have we come to, when, rightly or wrongly, we seriously entertain the idea that an eleven-year-old child could hijack an airplane armed only with a zester?  What would she do, abrade the pilot to death? 

Secession Nostalgia

The Sons of Confederate Veterans celebrated themselves with a $100-per-person Secession Ball on Dec. 20 in Gaillard Municipal Auditorium in Charleston.  The event centered on a play highlighting key moments from the signing of South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession 150 years ago.  Jeff Antley, who organized the event, said that the Secession Ball honors South Carolinians who stood up for their rights.  “The secession movement in South Carolina was a demonstration of freedom,” said Antley. “What I’m doing is honoring the men from this state who stood up for their self-government and their rights under law."

Is the act of secesion a "demonstration of freedom?"  What sort of freedom?  Let us now read from South Carolina's Articles of Secession, which asserts that the federal government has impinged upon states' rights. 

"The right of property in slaves was recognized [under the Constitution] by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety."

Yes, it's true.  Citizens of some states have not captured fugitive slaves or returned them to their owners, have denounced slavery as sinful, have elected a president who is hostile to the "peculiar institution," and have (horror of horrors! even granted citizenship to former slaves. 

The South Carolina document is extraordinarily clear.  Can anyone fairly doubt that there would have been no secession and therefore no need for a Secession Ball except in defense of slavery?  The "demonstration of freedom" is nothing more than a celebration of the  freedom of one person to own another.  

Nowadays, when slavery is no longer defensible, "conservative" South Carolinians are reduced to protecting their guaranteed right to make life difficult for gays and immigrants.  And keep women in their places.  A far cry from their glorious past. 

 But they continue to nurture that nostalgia for the great old antebellum days.  

Every Directional Dyslexic's Worst Nightmare

In Pickwick Papers, Pickwick checks into the Great White Horse Inn in Ipswich, is shown to his room by a chamber-maid only to discover that he's left his watch downstairs.  He retrieves it but then cannot find his way back to his room.  He's utterly, hopelessly lost. "Rows of doors... branched off in every possible direction.  A dozen times did he softly turn the handle of some bed-room door which resembled his own, when a gruff cry from within of "Who the devil's that" caused him to steal away....  He was reduced to the verge of despair when an open door attracted his attention.  He peeped in.... There were the two beds, whose situation he perfectly remembered."  Pickwick steps inside and has removed his clothes when another person enters the room.  He conceals himself.  Bad turns to worse.  "Mr. Pickwick almost fainted with horror and dismay.  Standing before the dressing-glass was a middle-aged woman in yellow curl-papers, busily engaged in brushing her hair....    'I never met with anything so awful as this,' thought Mr. Pickwick, 'what a dreadful thing.'  Uncertain how to proceed, Pickwick 'ha-hums.'  "Gracious Heaven!" said the middle-aged lady, "what's that?"  "It's -- it's -- only a gentleman, ma'am."  "A gentleman!" said the lady, with a terrific scream.  "It's all over!" thought Mr. Pickwick." 

The expected complications ensue.  At last, Pickwick flees, carrying his clothes and dropping his shoes.  But the nightmare continues because he still can't locate his assigned chamber.  Fortunately, he runs into his servant, Mr. Samuel Weller, who escorts him back home.

Clearly, Mr. Pickwick is directionally disabled.

Am I the only directionally-challenged person for whom Pickwick's story is a horrible fear.  I've had repeated nightmares of exactly this complexion.  In fact, I've dreamed this very dream dozens, perhaps scores of times.  I check into a hotel, go for a walk in a strange city and then, for some reason, the elevator doesn't go to my floor, or the staircase comes to a sudden end, or the room numbers go from 401 to 405 when I know that my room is 403.  I wander endlessly until I wake up in a sweat, heart pounding.

And now I have to admit that I once narrowly dodged this embarrassment.  In real life.  I was staying at a bed-and-breakfast somewhere in the west of Ireland.  There was no private bathroom -- the facilities were down the hall and a half a flight downstairs.  In the middle of the night, after obeying a call of nature, attempting to return to my room, I stepped into a room that was not mine.  I was just about to get into bed with a strange party when I realized my predicament.  Fortunately, I was able to escape without waking anyone.  I found my own room (good thing there were only two to a floor) but I was in quite a state for an hour or so.   

As I'm writing this, I'm guessing that most of my readers will harrumph their feelings of superiority.  "Couldn't happen to me." My directionally dyslexic friends, however, will understand.  And they will also know why I sympathize and empathize with poor Pickwick.  

What We Watched in the Fifties: Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

I watched Rebel Without A Cause last night in a state of constant twitching puzzlement.  Why has this film become a cult classic?  How can we account for the iconic appeal of James Dean, who moves me not the least bit?  How did thirty-five-year-olds manage to pass for high school kids in 50s movies?  Why, in those ancient days, did every male seem to wear a tie and jacket round the clock?  

The movie seemed like a period piece, dug up from some archive  --  which is odd, because I was 16 and a high school student in 1955 when Rebel Without a Cause was released.  It should have spoken to me then, or now.  But didn't and doesn't, not a bit. 

The Eisenhower decade was the great age of suburban "juvenile delinquency," so-called.  What do these kids want?  They all have their expensive cars and the war is over.  The teen-agers, all of them, are utterly inarticulate.  They're also shockingly unfeeling.  When Buzz Gunderson dies in the "chickie run," he is not mourned, even for a femtosecond, and within a few hours, his girlfriend Judy has fallen in love with Buzz's rival, Jim Stark. 

Nor, in this film, is the adult generation is any more admirable -- the wives and mothers are shrews, the men grotesquely henpecked.  The film has a strong gay subtext throughout -- most apparent in the Jim Stark-Plato relationship.  I'm sure that I wouldn't have noticed it in 1955, but it kind of jumps at you nowadays. 

1950s juvenile delinquents came in two categories:  urban deprived and rich suburban alienated.  I was of neither one class nor the other.  True that we had to be constantly on our toes to keep clear of the one group, but the other (those depicted in this film) might just as well have been living on another planet.

A dangerous planet, as it turned out, for the makers of Rebel Without a Cause.  James Dean was already dead when the film was released, having been killed in an automobile accident.  Sal Mineo was murdered in 1976.  Natalie Wood, drunk, drowned in 1981.  Nick Adams died of a drug overdose in 1968.  The film's talented director, Nicholas Ray, discovered his wife, Gloria Grahame, in bed with his thirteen-year-old son, whom she later married.  Ray died prematurely of drugs and alcohol. 

Nineteenth-Century Vehicles Yet One More Time

In order to illustrate the precarious social standing of Mr. Smouch, who takes Pickwick into custody for debt, Dickens described his carriage as neither one thing or another.   

"The vehicle was not exactly a gig, neither was it a stanhope.  It was not what is currently denominated a dog-cart, neither was it a taxed-cart, nor a chaise-cart, nor a guillotined cabriolet;  and yet it had something of the character of each and every of these machines.  It was painted a bright yellow, with the shafts and wheels picked out in black, and the driver sat, in the orthodox sporting style, on cushions piled about two feet above the rail.  The horse was a bay, a well-looking animal enough;  but with something of the flash and dog-fighting air about him, nevertheless, which accorded both the vehicle and his master."

The original readers of Pickwick Papers would have known exactly what is meant by a "guillotined cabriolet."  I suspect that there's a joke there, but the joke has perished.  I certainly don't get it.  

Is there also joke in "bright yellow?"  What is the usual color of a gig or stanhope?

There might be all kinds of jokes in the following list of socially-crepuscular horsedrawn vehicles, none of which precipitate hilarity, but of which the sum amuses me greatly:  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, fourgon, four-wheeler, gig, go-cart, governess cart, hansom, herdic, jaunty car, jersey-wagon, kibitka, landau, patache, phaeton, pill-box, post-chaise, rockaway, shandrydan, shay, sociable, spider-phaeton, spring-van, stanhope, sulky, surrey, T-cart, telyezhka, tilbury, tarantass, trap, troika, victoria, vis-a-vis, wagonette, and wurt. 

Favorite Garments, A Lifetime List

Sometime in the early 1950s I was given a great gift: a hand-knitted gray-and-white Norwegian sweater. It may have been a bit too large for me, but I wore it almost every day through high school and college and for many years thereafter. True, it became a little ratty around the waist, but my mother-in-law, a skilled knitter, was able to repair it, and did so, more than once. The leather elbow patches were my own contribution, and if they were not exactly symmetrically placed, so what?  I disagreed with those who felt that the beauty of the garment was compromised by the vivid mustard stain on the right sleeve. I was still wearing the sweater in the 1980s, when my daughter begged it. Of course I gave it to her, but I now believe that she was in surreptitious league with other members of my family to get the sweater out of my hands and off my back. I've never seen her wear it.

It was in the 1970s that I received another gift of an important garment -- a Guatemalan shirt -- a camisa -- of the sort worn in Todos Santos: a multicolored embroidered --  or is it brocaded -- piece of fabric attached to a blue-and-white striped shift that hung down to mid-thigh -- very convenient for use as towel or hot cloth. I loved that shirt and wore it even to work. It's possible that some people dismissed me as an eccentric or that others presumed that I was making an anti-colonial statement, but in fact I just thought the shirt was comfortable and handsome. I remember overhearing  a student -- one of the brainless ones -- who hated college, hated literature, and hated me -- mumble under his breath (in those days I could still hear), "Well, at least he's not a dull dresser." I don't know what became of the camisa. I suspect that it was desaparecida.

Another favorite garment was a yellow leather shirt jacket which I wore until it shredded. This jacket ran into trouble on a cross-country trip when it was packed on top of the car, under a canvas. It lay too close to a dyed leather coat (not mine) and during a flash Nebraska rainstorm was thoroughly  soaked and acquired a large purple stain. I didn't mind, because the stain was in the back, but I bowed to social pressure and gave it up, which was a shame, because I didn't get more than twenty years use out of it.  And then there was that lovely orange-brown corduroy jacket that I bought at the Presbyterian thrift store for $2.00. That was real beauty.  So was the tailored denim suit coat which I have vainly tried to replace -- they just don't make them like that any more. 

Still another memorable garment: a green hooded cotton sweatshirt that, after I had worn it for a decade or so, was nicely broken in. It had lots of wear left in it, but I made the dreadful error of mentioning to  my daughter-in-law that, wearing it, I had twice been taken for a homeless person. She snatched the sweatshirt away from me and threw it into the garbage (I rescued it for rags). She then immediately went out and bought me a perfectly lovely new Carhartt hooded sweatshirt, very high quality, with a zipper and everything, which I have worn every day during the cold months for two seasons and which will, within a dozen or so years, no doubt become quite comfortable. 

 

 

Season's Greetings

In the summer of 1963, we were somewhere in southern Illinios on our first cross-country adventure (the first of many).  I was not an experienced driver and the Nash Rambler was not a superb-handling car.  We were driving a two-lane, and it was raining hard , and something happened (can't remember what) that caused me to brake much too hard. The car spun out of control, first swinging into the oncoming lane (empty, thank you very much) and then rotating into a three or four foot ditch on the right side of the road.

I was grateful to be alive but I knew that I was in a predicament.  How to get the Rambler back on the road? 

Within a minute, a small truck pulled up behind me.  A hale-fellow Elks-Lions-Rotary-Presbyterian kind of guy stepped out, assessed the situation, hitched a cable to the Rambler and winched us out of the ditch.  Took him two minutes max.  He said, "you OK?" and drove off.

Many thanks to that man.  

In 1984, I had to fly from Lebanon, New Hampshire to Salt Lake City through Boston.  We were fogged in at Lebanon and I didn't arrive at Logan until a few minutes before my next leg was about to leave.  Logan consisted then (probably still does) of half-a-dozen separate terminals linked by a bus line.  I went up to a man in a uniform and I asked him where, in the jumble, would I find Continental.  I told him that I had less than twenty minutes to board.  He said, "wait right here.  I'll get you there on time."  He was not a policeman, as I thought, but a uniformed chauffeur to some Rich Person.  After a few minutes he returned, having launched his employer.  He took me to his extra-long Cadillac limousine and speeded me to my terminal.

Many thanks to that man

And to all the other anonymous people who have helped me with life's travels and travails.  

Am I becoming sentimental?   

Modern Biography

It's been a Charles Dickens revival here.  The Dickens formula -- "make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait" -- works as well for me now as it did fifty years ago.  

I was curious to fill in the gaps in my knowledge, so I trotted over to the library and found a newish biography of Dickens.  It looked eminently respectable:  St. Martin's Press and its author a "Professor of English Studies" at the University of Stirling. 

But youch, what a travesty the new "biography" turned out to be. 

Here follow some sentences (none of which I've altered in the least) from a book which has the temerity to call itself Charles Dickens, A Literary Life.  Prepare yourself for pretention, bathos, meandering metaphors and syntactic peculiarities marinated in post-modern obfuscation.  Savor these monstrosities.  

"'Dickens,' a convenient and perhaps unavoidable label, masks a range of Dickenses, which, taken together, constitute a highly complex whole."

"In short, this book will attempt to separate out at least some of the contextual forces that flowed through Dickens's pen along with the ink at the moment when he sat down to the ostensibly solitary and private process of making that series of black marks on white paper that we call novels."

"Suffering is a crucial part of the artistic process and the artist is seen as quite different from the ordinary run of people through his possession of a creative power akin to that of God in His creation of the world."

"This aspect of his career can be explored in a number of ways, in his deep respect for his own activity as a novelist as well as in an intense concern to extract his full pound of flesh financially from publishers and also, in a sense, from the public."

"A dramatic opening and an exciting climax are desirable features of any narrative, but the desire to impose them on historical narratives may distort the flow that is an inherent aspect of historical process."

"But the facts and arguments of this chapter show that the point at which Pickwick Papers came into being was one of turbulence in publishing which carried with it, as periods of turbulence always do, possibilities of movement in a variety of directions."

"The serial violates the decorum appropriate to high art and the imagery of the passage embodies a distate of profusion which could be likened to a class-based disdain for the crowded urban environment and dislike of such new-fangled phenomena as the railway."

"Public school meant the classics and, in England, university spelled Oxford or Cambridge, 'advantages' which Dickens conspicuously lacked."

I could wisecrack about each of the above sentences, but I'm in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger frame of mind.   Why oh why do academics feel they have to write this way?  Such woeful prose and trumpeting obviousness compromise the reputations of sober scholars and teachers. 

Does the author of this book realize that he's bamboozling himself?    Does he know how ridiculous he is? 

Trains, Planes and Buses

My first railroad (not subway) trip was in 1945 -- a New York Central train from NYC to Glens Falls, New York.  I was dazzled but queasy;  it was a coal-burning engine and the smoke was both visible and smellable.  I spent my infant time looking out the window and studying the adjacent set of tracks as they combined and separated -- a most vivid memory.  I was born into a sedentary family and have no further recollection of being in a train again until 1952 when Aunt Mollie took me to Washington. We ate dinner on the train, a marvelous luxury.  in 1956, testing my adolescent independence, I voyaged to Ithaca on the old Lehigh Valley R. R. (the "Leaky V.), then in its dotage and quite seedy.  During the late 1950s,  I occasionally rode up to Utica NY on the NY Central.  The round-trip fare was an astonishingly steep $20.50, or half a week's work.  But afterwards it was almost all automobiles.  I don't know that I was on a train again until 1975-76, when I commuted weekly from Canterbury (second class with the accompaniment of Cadbury chocolates) to Charing Cross station.  Calais to Paris, 1976. I can remember also Lugano to Florence to Rome, c. 1990, and Stockholm to Copenhagen a decade later.  NYC to DC, on Amtrak, many times around the turn of the new millenium.  Not a great deal of train travel, but then, as we all know, the railroads are a glorious but dying institution, at least in the US.  Nor adventuresome either:  no Orient Express or Trans-Siberian.  Planes?  My first trip was from NYC to Ithaca, on a 12 seat Mohawk -- perhaps to this day my smallest plane and bumpiest flight.  Many, many trips from Boston to NYC (Eastern Airlines), from Logan to LaGuardia and back.  A dozen or so jumps across the water to Europe, all of them accompanied with headaches and disorientation.  My longest so far:  Denver to Port Elizabeth, South Africa.  To Hawaii and back. To San Jose, Costa Rica.  Innumerable, far too many,  domestic flights from Denver to NYC, Denver to Oakland, Denver to DC -- all highly routinized.  At first, decades ago, flying was romantic;  dinner was served;  people dressed up for the experience.  Now it's being sardined into a grudging Greyhound in the sky, with bodyscans and shoe checks to boot.  And waste:  all that time and money thrown into the sea looking for plastic explosives secreted in  my retired-teacher/ grandpa orifices.  

The word Greyhound reminds me those horrible 1950s trips (midnight to 8am) from the Port Authority on 34th and 8th to Ithaca with "rest stops" in East Stroudsburg and Scranton at 3am, with no food available except rancid sandwiches from the slot machines.  I cannot shake the memory of the awful smell of spoiled tuna, gas fumes, eructations and flatulence on those filthy cramped buses.  Nor of the degenerate displaying his private parts in the men's room in Hackettstown, New Jersey one slushy night.     

But put me in a car on a two-lane anywhere west of the Mississippi, with no particular place to go, and I'm one happy guy.  

Cherry pie in Hannibal, Missouri or breakfast at the Jesse James Cafe in Casey, Iowa.  Bliss!

My Swiss Cheese Brain

As a youth, I could memorize poetry with great ease.  Nowadays, with a toe into the water of my eighth decade, what was once a snap has become a frustration.  But inasmuch as the authorities continually remind us geezers that we need to keep the intelligence well-lubricated, I persist.  Yet it now takes two or three hard weeks to memorize a speech in one of Shakespeare's plays that, fifty years ago, I might have learned in less than an hour.

I've been trying to commit to the old brain Othello's magnificent speech about wooing Desdemona -- the one with "antres vast and deserts idle" -- about which I reported last week.   Instead of memorizing fluently and quickly, my swiss cheese brain continually generates gaps, fissures and holes.  For example, take this passage.   

This to hear would Desdemona seriously incline

But still the house affairs would draw her thence

Which ever as she could with haste dispatch

She'd come again, and with a greedy ear

Devour up my discourse.

There's no reason why this sentence shouldn't be easy enough.  I read and study it, but when I shut the book and try to recite, it comes up this way:

She'd come again and with a  greedy [empty space] 

Devour up my discourse. 

The word "ear" has evaporated, or rather fallen into the black hole of memory, or gotten stuck in the synaptic link between two nerve cells.

I peer into the book once again and take a second crack.  

She'd come again and with a greedy ear

Devour up my [empty space].    

Ear appears, discourse disappears.  And so on through the thirty-two line passages.  Nouns sink beneath the waves and then bob to the surface.  And these lacunae occur again and again. And again.

It is fascinating to me that I retain the rhythm of the pentameter line and that I always know that I am missing a two-syllable noun.  Nevertheless, the precise word will not emerge -- at least at the moment that I need it.  But it's there, coated with polysaccharides, lurking in an obscure empty space behind a neuron.  It's astonishing that the words that disappear are almost always nouns.  I have very little trouble with other parts of speech.  But then noun-loss is a recognized characteristic of your "mature" brain. 

Because it has taken so long to memorize, I have become extremely well-acquainted with the speech.  Slow motion has its advantages.  Othello tells us that Desdemona would come "with greedy ear [to] devour up [his] discourse."  It wasn't until I had gone over that sentence a hundred times that I realized that Shakespeare used "devour" to connect with the "cannibals that do each other eat" in the earlier part of the speech.  It's a purposeful comparison: while wandering and errant Othello encountered anthropophagi, domestic Desdemona, confined to house affairs, was only able to eat words.   

Clever fellow, that Will S.