Dr. Metablog

Words New to Me

Regular readers of this blague know that Dr. M. is easily taken with odd and unusual words. Well, the poor doctor has been enchanted again.  

Here follows a wordhoard excavated from Barry Cunliffe's big book on European archaeology. Perhaps some doctormetablogians know one or two of these words, but I doubt anyone knows all of them, and I confess that each one is absolutely new to me.

I'm embarrassed but it's the awful truth.

Dillisk,which sounds like a disk or circular form of dill, is in actual fact a kind of sea lettuce or creatnach, an edible algae, much consumed during the Neolithic. Carragheen, nowadays defined as "a family of linear sulfated polysaccharides" was at one time the name of a food derived from red algae -- apparently an ancient snackfood. Melitot is an alternative name for sweet clover. Vetchlings are sweet peas. An ard is a early plough -- no more than a spike that is dragged through the soil, most commonly by oxen. A lynchet -as I'm sure everyone knows, is not a minor vigilante hanging but rather a "ridge or terrace seen on the slopes of the Chalk,Oölitic, and Liassic escarpments in various parts of England, especially in Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Wiltshire, and Somerset." It's now public knowledge: Dr. M knows zilch about Oolitic escarpments. A leister is a breed of sheep. A lur is not a way to catch fish, but is an ancient bronze horn, precursor of the trumpet (though stopless).  Here are a pair of lurs. 

They look like high-end showerheads. I can't imagine what they sound like. A cist is not a cyst. It is a small stone coffin or ossuary. An orthostat is an upright stone used as a member of a larger structure (as opposed to a menhir, which usually stands alone). Cob or cobb (or sometimes clom) is a building material comprised of clay,sand, straw, water, and soil, something like clench. A nuraghe is a megalithic structure found in ancient Sardinia. Eight thousand nuraghi (mirabile dictu!) are still in existence. Here's one:  

A corbel is a stone that juts out of a wall to support a weight. If it's not stone, but wood, it's called a "tassel" or a "bragger." A currach is of course a kind of Irish boat, once constructed out of animal hides, but now out of canvas. It is much smaller than a penteconter, an ancient Greek galley which is the ancestor of the warlike trireme and the fabled quinquireme. Strakes are the planks that compose the hull of a wooden ship. Callais is a green stone used for bead-making in the early part of the Bronze Age. Skeumorphism, my very favorite of all these exciting new words, is "an element of design or structure that serves little or no purpose in the artifact fashioned from the new material but was essential to the object made from the original material." Archeologists apparently use the term in a more restricted sense, as for example in the case of a bronze vessel which retains and imitates features of an antecedent clay pot. Or, to take a wikipedian example, "decorative stone features of Greek temples such as mutules, guttae, and modillions that are derived from earlier wooden temples." What are mutules, guttae, and modillions? I don't know, but they sure do set the logo-curious mind all a-twitter.  

Some Carter Family Favorites

"Wildwood Flower," of course. The tune would have made Bach proud, the story is classic, and the diction and metaphor absolutely perfect: "You've gone and neglected your pale wildwood flower." "Single Girl, Married Girl," which I can never hear without tearing up (or coming very close -- depends on my mood). No one has ever written a lyric that is more succinct or more straightforward: "Single girl, single girl, she goes to the store and buys,/ Married girl, married girl, she rocks the cradle and cries."  "Keep on the Sunny Side," which is perfectly cheerful until it goes all faux-religious in the last verse. If, on the other hand, you're looking for heartfelt religion, there's "No Hiding Place Down Here," which was later and better realized by Dorothy Love Coates and the Gospel Harmonettes. And also the very wistful and lovely "Oh, I'm thinking tonight of my blue eyes/ Who is sailing far over the sea/ I'm thinking tonight of my blue eyes/ And I wonder if he ever thinks of me." But my favorite, nowadays, is, "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone." The lyrics are Victorian/goopy, written (by A. P.) in a highly artificial off-the-wall literary and poetical style -- but yet, when accompanied by guitar and autoharp, and song by Mother Maybelle, against all odds it comes out quintessentially beautiful. "Will You Miss Me" taps into the common fantasy of observing our own funeral. Her'e's the lyric:  Stanza 1: "When death shall close these eyelids,/ And this heart shall cease to beat,/And they lay me down to rest/ In some ?flowery ?boundary ?tree (the words are unintelligible). (2) Perhaps you'll plant a flower/ By my poor unworthy grave;/ Come and sit along beside me/ Where the roses nod and wave. (3) One sweet thought my soul shall cherish/When this fleeting life has flown/ This sweet thought will cheer when dying/ Will you miss me when I'm gone?  (4) When these lips shall never more/Press a kiss upon my brow,/ But lie cold and still in death/ Will you miss me then as now?" Chorus (after every stanza): "Will you miss me,/ Will you miss me when I'm gone?" In its lugubriousitude, "Will You Miss me" is very like the great Londonderry air, "Danny Boy."

There's something luxurious about a good gloomy wallow.  

A Brief Conversation about Computers and also about Good and Evil

Vivian de St. Vrain:  "Why is my computer always breaking down. Why does it get infected with these nasty viruses and trojan horses and stuff?"

NGP (my computer consultant):  "Because there are evil people in the world."

Lessons from Neolithic Malta

Neolithic Malta presents an exemplum and a warning. The island received its first human inhabitants, who probably arrived from Sicily, some time around 5000 BC. After about 3600 BC, trade and other links with  the outside world waned. Over the next thousand years or so, the people of Mlata built seventeen monumental stone temples unlike any elsewhere in the Mediterranean. 

 

These are the remains of one of the seventeen.   

Here's a view of another: 
There's something truly remarkable about these megalithic temples, but it's troubling that a marginal and isolated culture would make such a huge and economically unproductive investment. Indeed, starting about 2300 BC, this native Maltese culture went into precipitous decline. A major cause seems to have been the extreme deforestation and soil loss when the population increased and resources were overused. The best guess is that the Maltese experienced an economic and spiritual crisis.

They did not, alas, confront the environmental problem; instead, the evidence suggests that the people, probably led by an oppressive priestly caste, continued to make greater and greater investments in religious worship, no doubt hoping that their gods would rescue them from their predicament. "In the end their expectations were not met and crisis ensued from which it took centuries to recover" (Barry Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans, [Yale, 2008], p. 172.) The population disappeared, the culture was extinguished and Malta was deserted until the arrival of Bronze Age peoples around 2000 BC.

Let's go over this ground and make sure that we understand. The neolithic inhabitants of Malta temporarily increased their population at the expense of massive enviromental degradation, and then, as the standard of living dropped, decided that the best way to deal with the crisis was to make mammoth investments in priests and temples (rather than, say, birth control and sustainable forestry and agriculture).  

Is there a moral here.  We report, you decide. But I believe that I can hear the debate. "We've already built fifteen temples and it hasn't worked. Perhaps we should try something new, like planting trees."  "Nonesense, young radical. We must look to faith. Faith will reward us. One more temple, this one really huge. More stones over here!"   

The Pazyryk Rug

 
I've been reading about rugs. I'm ignorant, but fortunately, there are dozens of eaily-available and learned books, and I'm happy to say that our local university library is going to keep me busy until my enthusiasm flags.

Everyone interested in rugs knows that the Pazyryk carpet (which I didn't know about until a month ago) is the oldest known rug and about three thousand years older than the next contender. It was discovered in 1949 near the Mongolia-China border, in a Scythian tomb that had been flooded and frozen since about 2500 BCE. It's magnificent and it's mind-expanding. It's been a long time since something has created in me such a reverent sense of gaga-hood and wowage. 

Although older than old, it's anything but primitive. Centuries, perhaps millenia, of experimentation, learning, intelligence, craft, and effort preceded its making. First our ancestors had to domesticate sheep, which, I've learned, had to be selectively bred to become wooly rather than merely hairy. Then came the invention of spinning and weaving. And dyeing, which is a sophisticated and complicated art all of itself. Moreover, it's obvious that the Pazyryk rug did not spring whole out of someone's brain --it's the climax of a long artistic tradition. While some scholars detect Persian influences, others think it wholly a creation of the steppes. The red dye, it's recently been discovered, is Polish cochineal. How did the dye get to Mongolia?  I've not read anything about the blue, but it looks like indigo, and if it is, the process of getting wool to take indigo is extremely complicated.  

   

The detail, though faded (fifty-five hundred years of refrigeration take its toll) is worthy of the closest study: mounted horsemen, saddle blankets and trappings, even the decorated manes of the horses, are rendered, knot by knot, with great power. 

And then there are the happy moose (or possibly elk, or some ungulate that I don't know).

 

The rug now resides at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.  I intend to visit it some day, but if the museum should want to put it out on permanent loan to my living room, I would promise to treat it with the utmost respect and appreciation.     

Why We Love Macbeth: Two More Reasons

Pound for pound, Macbeth is of all Shakespeare's plays the most unrelenting and horrifying.

One of its greatest moments occurs when Macbeth, seeking additional guidance, pays a second call on the witches. "How now," he demands, "you secret, black, and midnight hags!/ What is't you do?" The witches' response to his question, though exceedingly laconic, is far scarier than anything the most computer-aided-pixelbending horror movie could produce. They simply say: "A deed without a name." Every member of the audience, and every reader, knows that the witches are up to no good, but do they know how bad it is?  No. The audience now learns that what the witches are doing is so loathsome that there's not even a  word for it in the English language (and Shakespeare, of all people, had English to spare). What could they possibly mean by "a deed without a name?" Such a deed must be superlatively evil, worse than anything that the most depraved reader or listener could possibly guess. The immensely suggestive phrase "A deed without a name" pushes the limits both of imagination and language.   

Another magnificent moment comes when Macbeth imagines that Banquo, whom he knows to have been murdered, has taken a seat at his feast. Macbeth is startled and frightened, but he is also indignant -- so indignant that his outrage becomes almost comic. He lapses into a reverie.  

Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time,
Ere human statute purged the gentle weal;
Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd
Too terrible for the ear: the times has been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools: this is more strange
Than such a murder is.

Macbeth asserts that it used to be the case, both in olden times, before Scotland became civilized, and even into recent days, that there was a natural order to things. If you killed a man ("when the brains were out"), that person had the decency to stay dead ("the man would die/ And there an end"). But now, in these degenerate times, murdered men return and "push us from our stools." Macbeth, who is under the spell of demons and who has committed atrocity after atrocity, claims to be more "natural" than the spectre of Banquo, who is "unnatural." In his eyes, killing people is the new normal, and it goes against the grain when you kill a guy and he doesn't stay killed. It's odd and lovely that Macbeth believes that he has a sincere grievance with the world, especially when he's the one who has thrown things completely out of whack. His exasperated complaint shapes itself into a weird, ironic, perverse nostalgia for better days. We almost -- but not quite -- feel for him.

My Teachers, 1944-1956

My first twelve years of formal schooling were pretty much a bust. I blame my underachieving, unserious self. I was much more interested in punchball, the Dodgers, comic books, and radio serials than in the lessons, which were unchallenging and drab. At school I learned reading, writing and 'rithmetic, for which I'm grateful, and also a little Latin. I was an autodidact, not a student, right out of the gate. I liked to read and fortunately the Avenue J branch of the Brooklyn Public Library (though only a storefront) was within walking distance; so was the McDonald Avenue branch where, during high school, I worked for 75 cents an hour shelving books. I was an omnivorous reader and although I did not have a strong understanding or much of an imagination, I had an excellent memory. Reading saved me. Reading rescued me. "If it hadn't been for reading, we'd have been entirely at the mercy of sex."

I don't blame my teachers. A few had thrown in the towel, but most of them tried their best. They were overworked, underprepared, unsupported, and in occasional cases prodigiously ignorant even of the subjects they taught. The conditions under which they worked were not propitious. At P. S. 217 classrooms were designed (!!!) for 48 students (pupils, we were called in those days) but on high-attendance days, there were always a few unenthusiastic kids lolling in improvised seats by the window. In most classes, lessons were taught; but in others, especially at Erasmus Hall High School, there was only disorder and hubbub -- and sometimes a tad of danger.   

My first grade teacher, Mrs. Callery was a diminutive gloomy woman. I remember telling my mother, "Mrs. Callery doesn't like me." My mother said, "You must be kind to her. She lost four of her boys in the war" (it was 1944). I remember that I construed "lost" to mean "misplaced" and was therefore dumbfounded by Mrs. Callery's forgetfulness. White-haired Mrs. Sherwood, in third grade, left no impression except for her extreme old age (possibly 55), but Mrs. Cares (Sarah Cares!!, great name for a teacher) was quite kind. Mrs. Finsmith in fifth was a cipher, but Mrs. Donnelly, whose white hair was dyed a radiant blue, made it her business to make life as miserable as possible for me, and succeeded. My favorite teacher in those early years was extra-strict Mrs. McNulty, who insisted that we memorize fractions, decimals, and percentages, and taught us how to format a "friendly letter." In seventh grade, we went "departmental." I remember Mr. Harry Shapiro ('the bald headed hero") who spoke of "we scientists"; Mrs. Georgia Kieselbach, an aloof music teacher who had a trained operatic mezzo; Mr. Maxwell Proshan, a pathetic incompetent, and the twin (as I remember them) art teachers, Mrs. Nellis and Mrs. Ennis. At Erasmus Hall, I had good instruction in Latin from old Miss Beulah Withee and even older Mr. Gabriel Cussen (who I now realize must have been an ex-priest) but bad lazy non-teaching from Harry Wedeck, a pretentious fake. Miss Edna Goetschius, a biology teacher, complained to me more than once that I didn't know how to stipple. Mr. Lindlar, an ineffectual physics teacher, would mysteriously disappear between classes and return reeking of alcohol. My mathematics teachers were competent (Mr. Ebersman), angry as all shit (Mrs. Altschul), or suicidal (Mrs. Bonime). An English teacher who was well-read and competent, Mrs. Harriet Felder, was an "Oxfordian" caught up in the conspiracy theory that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare. Walter Balletto, who whiled away our time teaching "Discussion English," was more interested in his own theatricality than in any instruction he might have rendered. I later learned that he lived with his mother and collected Kirsten Flagstad records, information which my 1950s self could not even begin to assimilate. I remember also an art teacher, Mrs. Schauben, who kept her protruding ears in check with a thin rubber band; perhaps we weren't supposed to notice, but I've never forgotten. The gym teachers were simple-minded jokesters, although I remember thinking even then that the martinet Mr. Eis would have been more at home in the SS than at EHHS. 

It was, in retrospect, quite a zoo. But I know that some of my coevals, who were smart enough to choose their teachers wisely and take it all seriously, managed to get themselves a decent education. I didn't; my only success was to get out alive and then move on.   

Here's a good picture of Erasmus Hall High School in the old days. A Gothic pile.

Brain Chemistry, Macbeth, Nihilism

Our understanding of the human brain is mighty slim.  As a consequence our therapies for insanity, for head injuries, and for dementia are primitive.

When John Donne was dying in 1633, his physicians tied pigeons to his feet. Present-day medicine offers remedies for Alzheimer's sufferers that are no more effective than pigeon tying. Brainwise, we linger in the dark ages (which, by the way, has now been rebranded as "late antiquity"). Or the early medieval period.

Not to say that nothing is known about the brain. There have been advances.

To bring myself up-to-date, I read The Tell-Tale Brain by V. S. Ramachandran, a book which has been making a stir in pop-science circles. Ramachandran's sensible thesis is that there are structures in the human brain that are either undeveloped or that simply don't exist in the brains of apes. To posit so is simply common sense. Human beings do things that apes don't: they study themselves in the mirror, they compose and play piano sonatas, and they think about their place in the universe.  

Ramachandran is an ingenious experimenter but he gets beyond his depth when he waxes philosophical -- which he does far too often. Here's an example of the kind of thinking that rubs me wrong.

"I get chills," says Ramachandran, "whenever I hear Macbeth's immortal soliloquy 'Out out, brief candle!/Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.'"  He says that "these  words are one of the most profound and deeply moving remarks about life that anyone has ever made!"

I don't question Ramachandran's chills, which are his own business, but I'm bothered by his unthinking Bardolatry ("immortal solilquy"; "profound";  "that anyone has ever made").  Poor Will doesn't need any more reverent cliches to be shoveled upon him. He's already buried under heaps of them.    

Bardolatry such as Ramachandran's obstructs thinking. What does it mean to say that Macbeth's soliloquy is "profound... about life?"  Let's go to the tape.

When Macbeth says these words, he's under the spell of the witches, who are "instruments of darkness."  At their suggestion, he's murdered his king, murdered his closest friend Banquo and Banquo's son Fleance, and he's "savagely slaughtered" Macduff's wife and children ("All my pretty ones...  All my pretty chickens and their dam/ At one fell swoop"). Moreover, he's committed uncatalogued atrocities innumerable: "Each new morn/ New widows howl, new orphans cry." His brain is "filled with scorpions" and just before he utters the soliloquy that gives Ramachandran the goosebumps, he learns that his wife, burdened with guilt, has done herself in. Macbeth is not in a good way. 

Macbeth is not a role-model and his philosophical ruminations are neither insightful or profound. Quite the opposite. Though Macbeth is undeniably eloquent, he's become a shallow nihilist. Life, in fact, is not "a tale told by an idiot" and in Shakespeare's late-medieval religious universe, only someone in the throes of the deepest despair, and certain that he is damned for all eternity, would think so. Macbeth has learned exactly the wrong lesson. So, apparently, has Ramachandran.

Gosh, great literature can sometimes be dangerous, can't it?

It's no secret that the universe with its billions and billions of galaxies will go on very well without us.  Shakespeare, like everyone else, knew that when looked at from the strictly scientific point of view, human beings are no more than "many a thousand grains/ That issue out of dust."  But just because we're tiny and it's enormous, we're not compelled to admire the despairing and empty philosphy to which Macbeth subscribes.

Not while there are red wheelbarrows, winter love in dark corners, and "little nameless, unremembered acts/ Of kindness and of love." 

Another Great Moment in Basketball Announcerese

It was an excellent win for Dallas. The series isn't over yet, but it's better to be up 3-2 than down 2-3.  Terry, Kidd, Chandler, Marion, and Berea all played beautifully. Dirk Nowitzki had another lovely game. 

And in the booth, Jeff Van Gundy continued to mangle the language at a yogiberra level: "Dirk Nowitzki is now a household name in every locker room in the world."     

Reposted: Bezoars

I don't like gore. I’m the kind of person who won’t recklessly channel-surf for fear that the changer gizmo will maliciously lock onto our 24/7 surgery channel, where some poor soul's innards will be on garish hi-def display, And yet, despite my squeamishness, I steeled myself and read right through Katrina Firlik's Another Day in the Frontal Lobe,  which is a young neurosurgeon’s bildungs-autobiography. Of course, I allowed myself the indulgence of zooming through some of the more gruesome parts. How much does a guy need to know about maggot infestations in the living brain?

I’m grateful to Firlik for her vivid stories, for the occasional moment of black humor and also for offering a forthright glimpse into an alternative world. Nevertheless, I'm sorry to report, Another Day is not a good book. It's too transparently a package shaped by agent and editor for short-term commercial appeal. The author is so anxious to be cute and to be loved –- she must have been one of those front-row, admiring-eyes-glued-to-the-professor straight-A pupils -- that whenever she comes up against a controversial topic, such as the irrational funding of our medical system or the egomania of surgeons or the morality of expensive, hopeless last-minute-before-dying surgical interventions, she hints at concern but then swerves and punts. She doesn't want to offend a single potential buyer.

Not a courageous writer, she is not an admirable being either: what can one say about a highly-skilled professional who turns down job after job in the American hinterland and elects to live in New Canaan, Connecticut, because, she admits, it would be impossible to find a good Japanese restaurant in the sticks?, and who in one sentence notes that her rich town has more neurosurgeons than all of sub-Sahara Africa and in another reveals that she works on spines rather than brains nowadays because spines are more lucrative.

Hey, Katrina, the next time you publish something, sacrifice some of that royalty money and write directly from your heart (even though it's one cold and stony organ). 

Readers of this blague will not be surprised to learn that Dr. M. was much intrigued by the book's medical vocabulary. Another Day serves up a feast of beautiful and exotic words: venous infarct, dura, spicule, rongeur, neuroma, glioma, glioblastoma (you don’t want one!), bone dust, debulk, pachygyria. The ugliest of all: intubated.  My personal favorite, and a word that I've now put in the running for Word of the Year: bezoar.

How could I have lived all these years without knowing the wonderful word bezoar?  Could there be a surer index of my ignorance of medicine? A bezoar, as everyone but me seems to know, is a concretion of indigestible stuff stuck somewhere in the digestive tract – hairballs, medicines, bits of food. Sometimes they can be dissolved, but on occasions they can only be removed by surgery. A bezoar was formerly thought to be a magical antidote for poisons –- so score another couple of strikes against our ignorant superstitious ancestors. The most common kind of bezoar is the phytobezoar, which is a collection of lignin, cellulose, or tannin of food fibers. Common sources are celery, grapes, raisins, prunes, and pumpkins, all of which, if you’re like me, you’ve probably unwittingly eaten without having given a thought to their bezoar-potential and therefore neglected a splendid opportunity for hypochondria.   

A bezoar caused by eating persimmons (an especially dangerous fruit, bezoarwise), earns its very own word-- diospyrobezoar -- an odd amalgam of Greek and Persian linguistic roots and a word which, just as soon as a suitable opening arises, I intend to enthusiastically insinuate into the conversation.

Act of Violence (1948)

Act of Violence (1948) says as much about the immediate post-war years (and my own first decade of life) as any film I know. In it, an ex-army-officer who survived a German POW camp has acquired a pretty wife and a sunny suburban California home, but he is guilt-ridden because while in the camp he betrayed his fellow prisoners. He's pursued by a revenge-obsessed former comrade. The film is not, for once, a melodrama.  Good and evil, innocence and experience intermingle in the main characters, and, most rewardingly, in the smaller parts. Mary Astor (otherwise Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon) turns in a brilliant performance as a tired, opportunistic but ultimately decent prostitute. In fact, women in this film (in addition to Mary Astor, Janet Leigh and Phyllis Thaxter) are for once as complex and cliche-free as the male leads (Van Heflin and the always pitch-perfect Robert Ryan).

The story-telling is flawless and economical, the mood is sombre and intense. The unsettling themes are the burden of the past, the menace of the future, trepidation at the unknown, and the expiation of guilt.  

Robert L. Richards, who wrote the spare screenplay, was fingered as a leftist and blacklisted. He lost his promising career, became a carpenter, and died, embittered, in exile. is it necessary to note that Act of Violence is a not the least bit subversive?  It's a genuinely patriotic film. Fred Zinnemann, the director, escaped from the Nazis but left both his parents behind. They were murdered in the camps. Zinnemann was therefore superbly positioned to bring to the screen an exploration of the "guilt of the survivor."