Dr. Metablog

Polanski and The Ghost Writer

The Ghost Writer, which I saw last night, is a very good "thriller." It's co-written and directed by Roman Polanski and therefore inevitably dwells upon the menace that lurks beneath quotidian events. Once again, Polanski offers us a naif  who gradually comes to realize that the world is under the control of dark, implacable, omnipresent forces of evil. In The Ghost Writer, it's the CIA -- a most convenient bugbear.  Just as soon as the unnamed ghost writer cracks the mystery, he's run down and killed in the street by a mysteriously summoned agency vehicle. Ewan McGregor is convincing as the naive ghost, Jim Broadbent is wonderfully malevolent as the string-puller behind the scenes, and Olivia Williams steals the show as the intelligent angry betrayed wife the English PM. But it's pure Polanski from start to finish.

In Shakespeare's Macbeth, the reign of the usurping tyrant is preceded and succeeded by the benign and holy kings Duncan and Malcolm. In Polanski's 1977 Macbeth (in my opinion one of the few great Shakespeare movies), there's an appended anti-Shakespearean coda: Donalbain (Malcolm's younger brother) goes off to engage the witches. Polanski suggests that evil is not anomalous to the reign of Macbeth but eternal and, so to speak, normal. The witches who control men's fates are the medieval Scotland analogues of the CIA.  

In Polanski's best film, Chinatown, J. J. Gittes is the naif who gradually comes to discover that villainous Noah Cross controls all of Los Angeles. Semi-demonic Noah takes bullet but like the witches and the CIA, he can't be killed. In the original Robert Towne screenplay, Evelyn Mulwray had escaped with her daughter/sister, but Polanski altered the ending to emphasize Noah Cross's unassailable power. 

And then there's Rosemary's Baby (witches) and The Pianist (Nazis).

Polanski's point of view cannot be a surprise to anyone who is familiar with the story of his life. 

New Horsey Words

I'm sure that everyone but I knows these excellent words, but each one is an absolute novelty to me.

A quadriga is a chariot drawn by four abreast horses. They must have been quite a trick to control. Wide chariot, I guess, or skinny horses. Quadriga racing was the nascar of the classical world. The "ga" in quadriga is from iuga, or yoke, hence the biga, a word of predictable meaning that I would probably have known if I did crossword puzzles or played scrabble. The ancient Greeks called a quadriga a tethrippon, which was their privilege. I haven't encountered the word, but I bet that there's also a triga, and if there is a triga, I imagine that it's linked, somehow or other, to troika.

A cataphract was a heavily-armed horseman.  Here's an c. 440 CE Chinese statue of a cataprhact.

 I don't believe that horses had legs so stout in those days.  I suspect that the medium (terracotta) required them. 

Schabraque appeared in my horse book as an English noun, and perhaps it is, but the only definition that I could find was in a French dictionary: nom feminin singulier: 1  ancienne couverture de cheval de cavalerie 2  femme laide ou sotte. I don't have the slightest idea how the two meanings are related, but I'm glad to know them. And the next time that I encounter une femme sotte, which isn't very often, I'm going to try to insinuate "schabraque" into the conversation.

I'll try not to use the word quiff, which is a horse's forelock, especially one hanging over the eyes, but which might easily be misunderstood by guys from my old neighborhood.

And finally, the piaffe is a dressage movement in which a horse essentially trots in place. A ridiculous word for a ridiculous performance. I don't know the origin of the word and I doubt that it's related to French piaf, which, I think I remember, is a demotic or slang word for sparrow.  

Birthday Gift Suggestions

I've been studying (or more exactly being dazzled by) the illustrations in a magnificent four-pound coffee-table extravaganza called The Horse From Cave Paintings to Modern Art. It was first published in France (Cheval dans l'art) in 2008 and came to me through the Abbeville Press on Varick Street in NYC and also through the generosity of our local public library (it's too expensive to purchase). The history of the horse in art begins with the Chauvet Cave and includes thousands of years of wonders. But I don't write merely to extol the book, however great it be. 

I call it to your attention because I have a birthday coming up soon and any number of my friends and relatives and readers of this blague have been asking me what I would like as a gift. This book has given me a few ideas. At the outset I'd like to say that I'm not really interested in the monumental paintings that fill most of the pages of the book: battle scenes, hunting scenes, royal processions. Not my cup of tea. Besides the fact that they are too large for the condo, most of them are a little on the pretentious side, and frankly. I don't think they'd work with our understated decor.

However, I'd like to suggest that friends, relatives and constant readers might want to pool their pennies and present me with one of the smaller, more discreet objects. 

My first choice:  

It's known as the Chariot of the Sun sculpture. It's bronze with a little bit of gold leaf and was found a hundred years ago in a Danish bog, where it had apparently sat for about 3500 years. It might be a little the worse for wear but I don't mind. At three feet long and two feet high it would sit nicely on the dining room table. No longer bog-bound, it presently resides in the National Museet in Copenhagen but I'm sure the museum would entertain a reasonable offer. I think you can assume that unlike the callous Danes, I would treat the sculpture right and not stick it in a swamp somewhere.

If the Chariot of the Sun is unavailable, or the Museet (the phone number for the "butikken" is 33 47 38 30) proves to be sticky to deal with, I have another suggestion. It's not as good, but good enough.

 It's Charlemagne.  A ninth-century bronze equestrian statuette. The picture is misleading because the statuette is only nine inches tall, which makes it just right for a window sill or the top of one of the stereo speakers. The rendering of the emperor himself is a little stiff, and the sword that should be in his right hand is missing, but the horse, imitating Roman models, is pretty damn good. Charlemagne and his horsey are in the Louvre just waiting for an offer. The statuette is so small that it shouldn't cost much.  

And please, friends, no tacky reproductions.

"War on Christmas"

If the profoundly Christian seventeenth-century founders of our country had a single favorite Biblical passage, it might be the one in which the Lord (speaking through His minor prophet Amos) severely condemned the empty vanity of holidays. "I hate," said the Lord, "I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies." The Lord of Hosts specifically enjoined against the attempt to placate him by sacrificing animals (a matter of topical concern in Amos' time). "Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them; neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts." Nor did He rest with these easy-to-follow injunctions, but He went on to condemn all musical tributes as well. Not for him any chants, glees or carols: "Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols." Our Puritan forefathers interpreted these lines correctly and enthusiastically; they recognized that the Lord opposed not only ritual sacrifice and music but all formal observance and rote piety. The Ancient of Days made it abundantly clear that what moved him was not empty ceremony but genuine morality. HIs solution: "let justice run down as the waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." Taking these uncompromising sentences as their guide, our founders dug in their heels against the ostentatious celebration of all holidays, especially Christmas. Instead, they did as they were enjoined: they looked into their hearts.

Would they not have been reduced to angry and impotent sobs by the grotesque consumerism -- the burnt offerings and squeaking timbrels  -- that once again this Christmas season displace justice and righteousness?  Could there be anything more loathsome either to Amos or to our devout ancestors than "Silent Night" amidst shopping-mall tinsel and gimcrackery? Or than the attempt to gin up conflict or to gain a partisan political advantage by inventing a mythical "war on Christmas"?

 

 

Further observations on the "holiday season" can be found here.

Silly Dreams

In last night's dream, I was back in college anxiously sitting a final exam in a literature course. I remember that the exam was titanically difficult and unnerving but I can recall only one specific question. "Discuss Ernest Hemingway's father's Buddhist leanings." I must say that my dreamatorium was working overtime to come up with that one. Also on the exam: I was presented with pictures and was asked to supply their literary significance. The one I remember was a photograph of a generic urban street with five unoccupied parking spaces. My answer to the question was this: "These spaces were left open when Ernest Hemingway and four of his friends left for the bar in order to get themselves soused." I remember thinking that my answer was pretty damn clever and should get me full marks. I also dreamed a short-answer quiz. In this case I can't recall the questions, but only that I gave as one of my answers the word "praestorium." I have no idea what "praestorium" means, except that it sounds like a portmanteau of the names of two ancient Roman officials (praetor and quaestor) with an attached (and redundant) noun suffix.

It's sad that fifty years after the fact I'm still dreaming about examinations. I'm thankful these recent dreams were foolish rather than nightmarish. Nevertheless, I think it's time to read up on Hemingway, a writer to whom I've clearly paid too little attention this last half-century. You never know when someone's going to ask a hard question about Hemingway or his father.

Onagers

It's absolutely astonishing that I've lived all these years in total ignorance of onagers. And would have presisted in abysmal onagerian oblivion hadn't read David Anthony's fascinating monograph, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (2007). Anthony's thesis is that "proto-Indo-European" -- from which the Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Romance, and Indic languages, among others, are descended, originated in the steppes north of the Black and Caspian seas. The inhabitants of these areas domesticated horses and invented or adopted the wheel and the wagon, which gave them the technological advantage to spread their culture and language across the steppes eastward as far as China and westward to the Atlantic. This same people also invented  the chariot -- a horse-drawn single-axle vehicle, which, manned by a warrior armed with bronze-headed javelins, was the principal engine of war for the thousand years that began about 1700 BCE and ended about 700 BCE. It's a lovely hypothesis, bristling with the evidence of hundreds of archeological digs. 

Pre-proto-Indo-European speakers ate horses long before they domesticated them and rode them before they learned to harness them to chariots and wagons. However, horses weren't the only equid in the neighborhood.  There were also onagers.

But all they could do with onagers was feast on them. The evidence lies in the thousands of midden heaps that are loaded with onager bones. Here are two onagers:

 

Onagers are half the size, or less, than the horses with which we are familiar. They are apparently untamable, like zebras, but, uniike zebras, edible. (So tasty, in fact, that fewer than a thousand of them survive in the wild.)

Anthony doesn't say so, but if there had been only onagers, and not those noble and cooperative horses, we would certainly not be speaking and writing an Indo-European language -- and, for that matter, we might still be trundling across the wide Missouri in oxcarts. 

From the Bronze Age down to the second decade of the nineteenth century, the horse was the fastest and most reliable way to travel, the quickest way to convey information, the backbone of armies, and the most conspicuous index of wealth and status.

Horses are handsome and intelligent. Onagers are ugly, awkward, and stubborn, and could never have taken part in the creation of complex civilizations. Poets have celebrated "fiery Pegasus"  for millenia; no one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever rhapsodized the onager. 

Being "Occupied"

Here in peaceful, progrressive Boulder, two commissioners' seats are coming open next election. Commissioners are important officers: they directly govern the half of our citizens who live in unincorporated areas of the county, they employ 1800 people and administer a $300 million budget, they manage all the social services, and they set policy on land use, open space, transportation, etc. They also put out fires.

Even though we're six months away from the primary, campaigning is well under way. And should be. Deciding on he right county officer is important. We're a functioning democracy.

This afternoon there was a forum to allow the six candidates to answer questions and state their views.  But just as the meeting was called to order, we were "occupied."

About fifty or sixty people filed into the room, took up places around the perimeter, interrupted the moderator and announced that they had a statement to make, which they did in a peculiar and theatrical manner. Their leader read a few words, and then the rest of the folks repeated the same phrase, in chorus. Their demands were well known: control the big banks, put an end to corporate dominance, stop the foreclosures, support the homeless, reduce pollution, prohibit fracking, end uranium mining, and prevent any GMO crops from being grown in Boulder County. 

Then they left. Just vanished.

And so we got back to work.

What was so odd is that every single one of the candidates stated positions that were at least as far to the left, and sometimes further to the left, than the Occupiers -- which makes me wonder whether these very sincere folks wouldn't be doing more good by helping us stuff the envelopes and do the lit drops and help with the GOTV. To tell the exact truth, I found it just a little offensive to be hectored so dramatically by political novices.

At very least, the "Occupiers" should give up the choral speaking, which sounds not like thoughtfulness but rather like authoritarian groupspeak. A little dictatorial.

As the political philosopher and social critic Doll Tearsheet long ago remarked, "the word occupy... was an excellent good word before it was ill sorted."

Trollope's Old Old Man

Having just read the posthumously published An Old Man's Love (1884), I believe I can now claim to have read every single one of Anthony Trollope's forty-seven novels. Who would have guessed, when I encountered The Warden and Barchester Towers back in 1958, that it would have taken fifty-three years to complete the marathon?  

I'm glad that I saved An Old Man's Love for last. It's very much a valediction to love and to life. 

William Whittlestaff, the "old man," is fifty years in age, which, to my occluded septuagenarian eyes, seems barely beyond adolescence. He falls in love with his ward, Mary Lawrie, who is a generation younger than he. She agrees to marry him, but then her first love, John Gordon, returns from Kimberley, where colonial diamonds have conveniently cured his poverty. Eventually, Whittlestaff ungraciously concedes the bride to the younger man. Self-abnegation does not come easy.

My interest focused on Mary Lawrie, who is so paralyzed by notions of duty and honor that she cannot lift a finger in her own interest. It would be wrong, in her conception (and in Trollope's), for her to imply, however slightly, that her commitment to Whittlestaff ought to be re-assessed. In fact, to avoid becoming the much-dreaded "jilt," she has to argue with herself against her own inclinations. Gordon and Whittlestaff are allowed to be active in working out their interests; Miss Lawrie remains entirely passive and therefore virtuous.

As is always the case in Trollope's novels, courting couples are not allowed to engage in forthright conversation until after matters are settled.

Even after completing the forty-seven novels, I cannot help but marvel at this strange Victorian ethic.

It's unfortunate that Trollope doesn't conclude by granting Whittlestaff an avuncular or grandparental role toward the new couple and their putative children. What would it have hurt him to have imagined a scene in which Whittlestaff, a white-haired gentleman, walks the balmy Barset woods with nine-year-old John and seven-year-old Mary Gordon?  No such event takes place, and Whittlestaff therefore retains his gloom right to the end. Charles Dickens, always warm-hearted, would have been more generous.

Amnesia on Film: Blind Horizon

For the record, Blind Horizon (2003) may be the most confusing, confused, and derivative film ever perpetrated. It's a failed memory-assassinate the president movie, a genre of which The Manchurian Candidate stands as head and font.

Blind Horizon offers one picturesque moment -- when a giant tanker truck decorated with a Confederate flag and carrying a load of gasoline spills across the highway and blows up. The truck could have driven through the monstrous holes in the plot with room to spare. In fact, it would have been more appropriate if the truck had been carrying a load of red herrings.

Once again, amnesia is whatever Hollywood says it is. In this case, the amnesiac remembers that there's going to be an attempt on the president's life, but he doesn't remember his own name, his occupation, or his fiancee -- an unlikely scenario. He has flashes of memory that are copied, almost exactly, from the Bourne series, which we must now anoint as the movie amnesia template of the future.     

Val Kilmer is wasted as the - wait, is he the would-be asssassin or is he the Federal agent trying to prevent the assassination? I never did quite figure it out. Neve Campbell is dark and mysterious and Amy Smart is blonde and perky -- that's the way women are packaged in this expensive turkey. If the writers (F. Paul Benz, Steve Tomlin) were allowed to choose between remembering this film, or amnesia, they should definitely go for the latter. 

Hypothesis: the amnesia mcguffin liberates the screenwriter from any allegiance to probability.

Newt

William Blake asks us to beware "venomous Newt" -- venomous because the skin of this lizard-like creature contains the extraordinarily dangerous poison tetrodotoxin  which it secretes through its granular skin glands. It is unwise to befriend or embrace a Newt and they should never be swallowed. Tetrodotoxin blocks sodium channels and can therefore cause heart arrhythmia or heart arrest.

Shakespeare did not love the Newt; among the ingredients in the witches' potion in Macbeth, along with the fenny snake, toe of frog, wool of bat, tongue of dog and owlet's wing is "eye of Newt."

In Timon of Athens, a list of "abhorred births" includes the "black toad and adder blue" along with the  "gilded Newt." "Gilded," for Shakespeare, could mean "gilt" but also "guilty" and sometimes even  "false."

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Second Villager claims that a witch has transformed him into the most loathsome of critters: "She turned me into a Newt." He then withdraws the charge: "I got better."

It's definitely better not to be a Newt -- or even to get too close to one. 

Landau versus Gottlieb

While in the Bay Area, I visited SF's Museum of Asian Art,  where this grotesque, beautiful piece of maximum conspicuous consumption was on display. 

It's a silver Landau made for the Maharaja of Bhavnagar around the turn of the last century.  Needless to say, I was utterly appalled by the waste and extravagance though dazzled by the workmanship.

 Afterward, I took a trip to Alameda's Pinball Museum. Here's a bank of classic 50's Gottliebs.

I played this magnificent piece of craftsmanship

and, still a master of the flipper, won three (3) free games.

I can't remember whether the silver coach was owned by this couple of dandies (also in the Asian Art Museum) or one of their cousins, 

but no one who looked like either a maharaja or maharani was playing with Gottlieb's silver balls.  I didn't spy anyone at the pinball museum who was nearly so well accoutered.