Dr. Metablog

"See the Ball, Hit the Ball"

When Manny Ramirez visited George Washington High School, his former baseball coach, Steve Mandl, asked hm to say something to his players about the art of hittiing.  Ramirez, one of the most spectacular batters of all time (555 home runs, .585 slugging, .313 batting average), thought for a few moments and then pronounced "see the ball, hit the ball."  From which we can derive that he is not looking at a post-retirement career as a hitting coach.  He may be the idiot savant of hitting. 

Good thing the coach didn't ask him about fielding.  "See the ball, fumble the ball."

"See the ball, hit the ball" is universal  wisdom that transcends its baseball context -- like Wayne Gretzky's famous "skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is."

I've heard the masterful sentence ascribed also to Pete Rose.  But it's more far more appropriate to Manny. 

Book Report: G. Willow Wilson's The Butterfly Mosque

It's bad enough to be born into and involuntarily indoctrinated into a religion, but if a person has the good fortune to be born into a family of non-believers, why should he or she regress to dogma and doctrine and fantasies of the afterlife?

But then, I'm tone deaf and colorblind to religion.  

Nevertheless (you can trust me here, dear blog-reader), I've read more than my share of the kind of autobiography called the "conversion narrative" in which the writer describes how he or she came to locate and embrace some particular god or creed. "Conversion narratives" generally take one of two shapes. In some of them, the subject experiences a sudden blinding insight (after the style Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus); in others, the author endures a long dark night of the soul that is painfully and gradually superseded with "enlightenment" (Newman's Apologia is the archetype).

G. Willow Wilson's memoir The Butterfly Mosque (New York, 2010) describes a conversion of a sort that I've never before encountered -- it lacks not only a voice from the clouds and but also a scalding of the heart. Wilson simply sets out with a desire to convert and then hunts for an appropriate religion -- a most odd and unusual  procedure. In college, Wilson reports, she was "in the market for a philosophy." Soon after, she became a Muslim -- essentially because she wanted to be something and couldn't think of anything better.

Here's the key paragraph: "I discovered I was a monotheist....  That rules out polytheism.  I also have a problem with authority, which rules out any religion with a priesthood.... And I cannot believe that having given us these bodies, God thinks we should be virgins unless we desperately feel a need to reproduce. That rules out any religion that is against family planning or sex for fun....  Islam is antiauthoritarian, sex-positive monotheism."

It's a series of reasons so quirky that it's hard to take seriously.  If I were G. Willow's spiritual counselor, and she came to me with such a shallow argument, I would have said, "go home, young lady, take a couple of years and try to think more deeply."  

"I discovered I was a monotheist"? Mere mysticism, no more more persuasive than "I discovered I believed in only one angel." Islam has no priesthood?  Depends on how you define priest, doesn't it. No Roman-style priest who acts as an intermediary to God, but a heck of a priestly establishment nonetheless -- boatloads of imans and mullahs and ayatollahs all laying claim to special forms of knowledge. Is Islam sex-friendly?  Perhaps in theory, but in practice it's hard to find a more misogynist or homophobic operation out there in monotheismland -- and I suspect that sex is more cheerful when it's shared by equal partners.

On the whole, Islam does not meet Wilson's three criteria nearly as well as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which is monotheist to a overcooked fault, supports not a single priest (only a website), and as far as I know, expresses not the slightest antagonism to sex in any form or coloration.   

The Butterfly Mosque offers its readers some very sensitive insights into Egyptian society and especially into American-Muslim relations. It's also a fine little love story -- a young American woman finds a sweet young man in Cairo and tactfully negotiates the profound cultural barriers that might have divided them. Sometimes it seems a little like Romeo and Juliet gone all sentimental and gooey -- as though the young lady would be secretly happier if her marriage had caused a Montague-Capulet feud. It doesn't because both Omar's family and G. Willow's parents are urbane, sophisticated, open, loving, practical and non-ideological  and offer no resistance whatsoever to the exogamous marriage. And Wilson is honest enough to admit it.

I worry about the stability of this conversion.  When a new religion is embraced for such superficial reasons, it can be shucked equally as easily.  It wouldn't surprise me if G. Willow returns, some day, to the steady rationality of her parents. Let's hope so.

The Most Obscene Word in the English Language

The foulest, most obscene word in the English language, at least as far as sound is concerned, is, by all odds, "kumquat."  It's hard to say whether it's the "kum" or the "quat" that is more reprehensible, but the two together, o my goodness gracious! "Kum" is linked to Fr. "con" and ME (Middle English) "queynte" as well as to the common colloquialism for sexual climax. "Quat" recalls Shakespeare's "quatch buttock" and also "quatch" in its exceedingly vulgar modern urban signification. Readers attentive to language will also hear in "quat" an echo of Robert Browning's famous "twat." (PG-13 rated note: Having encountered in an anonymous 1660 poem the couplet "They talk'd of his having a Cardinall's Hat; /They'd send him as soon an Old Nun's Twat," Browning took "twat" to refer to article of clothing and so composed the following: "Then owls and bats/ Cowls and twats/ Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods/ Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry."  It would appear that Browning was insufficiently alert to obscenity.)

"Kumquat" should properly be used in formulations such as "why don't you shove it up your kumquat?" or "eat my kumquat," or "your mother is a kumquat." 

If only Kobe Bryant hadn't called the referee a "fucking f-gg-t" but had called him a "fucking kumquat" instead. He would not been fined $100,000 and he would have enjoyed a far more satisfactory vituperative experience. 

Incidentally, one of the most popular varieties of kumquat is the "fukushu." Honest.  

How to Harvest Me

Yesterday I renewed my expired driver's license. I was worried about the eye exam because of the cataracts, but I passed easily. Believe me, the bar for visual acuity is not set very high.

On my previous license, "hair" was "brown";  this time, it's "gray."

The clerk asked, "Are you willing to be an organ donor?"  "Sure," I answered, "but I don't know whether  anyone would want my organs."

Surely no one would want my myopic, be-cataracted eyes. Nor my ears (although they would be  supplemented with an expensive set of hearing aids at no extra charge). My heart?  Well, if it came with a "Use at Own Risk" label and a whole library of erratic ECG printouts. Certainly not my spine, which was a "second" or "factory reject" right from the womb. I would not recommend it even at a severe markdown. My liver -- I think I can recommend my liver. It's barely been used and should command a premium. My prostate -- now there's a bargain in the making. A prostate is supposed to be the size of a walnut, but mine is more like a potato, perhaps a Yukon Gold -- and yet as far as I know it is cancer free. It could be chopped up and transplanted into three or four men.

My best organ, if it's an organ, is definitely my knees, both right and left.  I'm at the age where knee-replacement is commonplace, but I have the knees of a twenty-five year old: flexible, functioning, pain-free, even if somewhat prone to hyperextension. Some linebacker who's abused his own would be overjoyed to extend his career with a perfectly wonderful set of knees. Or a basketball player, preferably someone who wants to regain his "hops." Maybe, in someone else's body, my knees could finally win the trophies and renown that they deserve.

Lola's Language at Eighteen Months

Her language consists mostly of nouns: "baby" -- both herself and her beloved doll; "wawa" (water);  "mommy";  "daddy"; "ayi" (Chinese for aunt);  "didi" (Chinese jiějie, older sister); "paopao" (Chinese, grandmother); "pock" (pocket); "book"; "ball": "eye"; "nose" etc.  Her words are occasionally less specified than they will soon become; for example, "duck" seems to mean "bird." At the zoo, she identified an emu as a duck. Similarly, "gogo" (Chinese for dog), means mammal, even including the zoo's llama. "Up" can mean either up or down; it seems to signify a change of position. "No" occasionallly means "yes"; she seems to conceive it as a response to a question. There is, however, no ambiguity to her very definitive "mine."

When she slid down the slide in the park, her audience exclaimed "whee."  Lola responded, "I do whee," understanding "whee" to be the name of the action rather than an exclamation of pleasure. 

A Very Distressing Memory

There's been a re-birth of nativism in the "give me your tired, your poor" land that I love. The right-wingers, who need someone to hate, have decided that anti-Hispanic and anti-Muslim noise-making is just what our beleaguered country needs right now.

All of which brought to mind a painful memory. Sometime in the 1970s, I was sitting in a coffee room at the U. -- a rare event for me -- and a group of people were recalling happy moments from their various childhoods. One of the participants was a grey-haired woman perhaps 15 years older than I. She was a secretary or administrative assistant at not mine but some other department. She was a kindly, competent, unpretentious woman with whom I occasionally exhanged a few words of greeting or business.

 I can't remember exactly what the other participants ibn the discussion remembered from their early days -- probably hunting trips with dad, hitting the winning single in a softball game, a romp with the family dog -- but I will never forget what Masako recalled: "When I was in the internment camp in Utah, one day Marian Anderson came to sing for us."

 

Certified Dialogue Transcribed Verbatim from Real Life

Telephone conversation with an eighty-two year old cousin. 

"Evreryone down here, all they ever talk about is their pains, their doctors, their diets, their diseases.  Now I have something to talk about.  For years I went to this doctor, maybe forty years, he's almost as old as I am  Every time I go into see him, with a sore knee or pains in the chest or whatever, he'd look at it, and he'd say, 'what can you expect at your age?  You're lucky to be alive.'  I'd go in with a sore throat.  He'd say, 'Can you swallow. So what it hurts. You're too old to worry.' If I had a headache, he'd say, 'whatever happens, happens.  You're old, enjoy the day.' Finally he retired. He took a job as a dance instructor on a cruise ship. I'm not kidding. He leads exercises or something. So I went to a younger doctor. He listens to me breathe, pokes around a bit, puts me in the hospital, and now I have three stents." 

What We Read in the Forties: The Story of Ferdinand

Yesterday's NYTimes reports that it's the 75th anniversary of the first publication of The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf.  This brief novel about a pacific bull was the first book that I knew and loved. It was The Book of my first few years on earth and I've probably read it, to myself and to my children, twenty times more than I've read King Lear and Hamlet combined. I've never tested myself, but I might be able to recite it from beginning to end with only an occasional prompt. I believe that several leaves from my 1942 codex are still the the family archives (and by archives, I mean those plastic boxes in the basement),

I did not know that "Ferdimam" (as the kids call it) was thought by many to be a subversive, unpatriotic allegory and that it had been banned by Franco and burned by Hitler. As a child, it never occured to me that Ferdinand was a pacifist -- I thought he was sensible.Why be killed in a bullfight when you can sit and smell the flowers?

It was the book's language that engaged me, especially the one sentence that was my first taste of pure, immortal, transcendent poetry: "Flags were flying, bands were playing... and all the lovely ladies had flowers in their hair."  Not even Shakespeare ever composed a more glorious succession of iambs.