Dr. Metablog

Fun with Aspirin

I like to think that I have a sense of humor, but I just don't get this one-liner by Rick Santorum's Daddy Warbucks, Foster Friess. "And this contraceptive thing, my gosh, it's so--it's such--inexpensive, you know, back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly." So what's funny here? If the "gals" keep an aspirin between their knees, they can't have sex and therefore can't get pregnant? Is that it? Is that The Joke?

First of all, let's all chip in to send FF a copy of the Kama Sutra (or even an elementary how to do it manual), where he can find some exotic and some extremely obvious positions in which women can get pregnant and still keep their knees together.

But why aspirin? Why Bayer aspirin? What do I not understand? Why an aspirin between the knees rather than, say, a bible?  Or a book by Newt Gingrich? Or a copy of the The Joy of Sex.

Foster Friess says all this aspirin fun took place "back in my day." I would like to say that FF is a year younger than I, and that I a) never heard the joke (if it's a joke) back then, and b) never heard tell of a single woman who used knee-aspirin as a contraceptive. 

I did some internet research on the aspirin-contraceptive connection and discovered that there's a story going around in high schools that taking three aspirin and drinking a Coke before intercourse will prevent conception. Advice to young people: do not bank on it.

Will the Santorum administration, immediately upon taking office in 2013, ban aspirin?   

Amnesia on Film: Spellbound (1945)

In Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), man suffers traumatic shock, man loses memory, man relives experience and regains memory. It's garden-variety Hollywood amnesia, hortus hollywoodiensis. The amnesia is neither credible nor possible, but it doesn't matter, because it's the world of film, where the most malleable of mental afflictions takes whatever form is convenient for the writer or director or the presiding mogul.

John Ballantine, played by handsome young Gregory Peck is the amnesiac and the questions the movie poses are, when will he recover his memory, how much help he will require from luscious psychoanalyst Ingrid Bergman, and how many times he can he whine "I can't remember" and still get the girl. Bergman has a more complex problem: how to be a smart and also a real woman (always a problem in Hitchcock's wonderful world of misogyny). She makes use of that old dodge, a pair of glasses; when they're off, she's feminine, but when she dons them, she's intelligent. When did Hollywood decided that eyeglasses were a symbol for brains?

But if she has brains, why is she attracted to a man who doesn't know who he is but is convinced that he might be a murderer. It's as though the film itself doesn't take amnesia seriously and treats it as a plot-device rather than the distressing disorder that it would be to an actual sufferer.    

It's a silly but engaging movie, perhaps too much of an advertisement for psychoanalysis -- which it endorses without a shred of skepticism. I suspect that the psychoanalytic themes, which haven't fared at all well these seventy years, will eventually doom the movie to oblivion.

There are some tense echt-Hitchcock moments when it appears that the amnesiac might be dangerous, but Peck and Bergman are just too pretty to be killer and victim. 

De Sternuente, or, Of Sneezing

I enjoy fighting off a sneeze. It takes practice and concentration. When the sneeze urge emerges, without warning, the battle is joined. On the side of the sneeze -- dust or some other foreign particles passing through the nasal hairs, reaching  the nasal mucosa, releasing a flood of histamines which irritate the nerve cells and signal the brain to stimulate the trigeminal network and activate the pharyngeal and tracheal muscles, producing a noisy, 100-mile-an-hour blast of microbes and snot. On the side of restraint -- nothing but enormous personal discipline and the desire not to surrender to animal nature. There are some, who are less committed to mind-over-body, who employ the fingertips to pinch the end of the nose, or, alternatively, who press a knuckle against the philtrum, the infranasal depression which Shakespeare, curiously, called "the valley" -- but frankly, when it comes to resisting sternutation, digital success is only half a loaf. It's far more rewarding to think one's way to a rare victory in the lifelong sneezomachia. Not to sneeze is a triumph of the will.

Which is not to assert that a good sneeze gives no pleasure, if a person would give oneself over to it. It's simply that the sneeze, especially one of the window-rattling variety, is entirely anarchic and inartistic, which might be why there is so slight a sneeze literature. Although hard to believe, it's a fact that Puck is the only character in all of Shakespeare's plays who deigns to mention the sneeze, but he weakens its disruptive force by employing the archaism "neeze." The best-known literary sneeze (or, at least, the only one that now comes to mind) occurs in Pope's Rape of the Lock, when Belinda, ravished by Sir Plume's "glittering forfex," throws snuff in the baron's nose. Immediately "with starting tears each eye o'erflows,/ And the high dome re-echoes to his nose."

Snuff artificially stimulates sneezing, which may or may not be be why Michael, Tsar of all the Russians, proposed amputating the noses of snuffers. Michael's contemporary, Pope Urban VIII, merely threatened excommunication. Some say that the practice of saying "God bless you" to sneezers originated with Pope Gregory the Great, and has to do with the superstition that the soul leaves the sneezing body, perhaps nasally.

Why is it that no one ever says "God bless you" to farters, who are as much in need of divine intervention as sneezers. Society demands that farting, though shameful (and belching, though comic), should be controlled; sneezing is, except for the most determined among us, uncontrollable.  

Remembering

Remembering, in a melancholy mood early this winter morning, some of the friends and relations who left the room far too early: Arthur Oberg, Bernice Kliman, Bob Nero, Bob Pois, Curtis Barnes, David Gaillard, David Novarr, Ed Nolan, Eleanor Gottlieb, Eugene Pearlman, Gary Stahl, George Chodorow, Herb Eldridge, Honi Haber, Howard Smokler, Ila Warner, Jane Comstock, Jonathon "Skip" Chase, Myrna Mikelberg Brown, Nancy Hill, Phyllis Eva Goss Murray, Peter Dutch, Peter Tasch, Renate Wood, Rob McIntosh, Rubin Rabinovitz, Sarah Obermeier, Shirley Johnston, Stephen Evans, Virgil Grillo. And now Lee Coffee.

Good Old Days

As a boy, I naturally assumed that Riis Park was named for Harold (Peewee). Later, I learned that Jacob Riis was a well-known reformer whose 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, a chronicle of life in New York's slums, shocked  Gilded Age complacency. Nowadays, Riis is known more for his pioneering photography than for his writing.  Here are three of his images: 

The young lady on the left is known to history simply as "Katie." When Riis asked her what she did, she replied, "I scrubs." She was a laundress. She was nine years old.

I've now read a adulatory life of Jacob Riis by Tom Buk-Swienty. I learned that one of the worst New York slums, Mulberry Bend, had a population density of 2,047 per acre. Fifty per cent of Mulberry Bend's children died before their fifth birthday. Every year, about 100 Manhattan infants were found dead in the streets. In addition, another 500 children were abandoned by their parents. I also learned that in 1883, when Cornelius Vanderbilt moved into his new chateau on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street, he threw a housewarming ball for 1200 guests. "$155,730 was spent on costumes alone."

Idiot or Hypocrite? Your Choice.

Today it's Santorum, who has staked out positions to the right of the Pope, where there isn't all that much room. Yesterday it was Gingrich. Before that, in their turn, Perry, Cain, Bachmann.  Each month brings a new anti-Romney and just as inevitably, his/her decline.

The extremists who control the Republican party want a candidate who is strictly, or extremely, or "severely" conservative and who can still appear sane enough to be elected.

But it can't be done.  It's a hunt that's doomed to come up empty.

The "base," whether fundamentalist or libertarian or drown-the-government-in-the-bathtub, has established a series of tests which make it impossible for their candidate to be both sane and sincere. There can be no such animal.

The candidate must reject evolution and profess to believe in some variety of creationism.

He must believe, or profess to believe, that global warming is a hoax -- a conspiracy theory devised by geologists and meteorologists and climate historians. The candidate must be profoundly anti-science and anti-rational.

He must believe in some variety of "trickle-down economics," even though several rounds of tax cuts have benefited the rich at the expense of everyone else. (It hasn't been trickle down, it's been gush up.) He must believe that any attempt to remedy the situation is "class warfare." And he must also believe that it's no problem that the richer are getting out-of-control richer and the poor are becoming poorer and more numerous.

He must believe that the mortgage crisis and the recession was caused by quasi-government entities like Fannie and Freddie and not by the speculations and peculations of de-regulated banks and brokers.

He must believe that the solution to the problem of illegal immigration is to build a larger, taller wall, even though for every wall there's a ladder and that there's not a leaf of lettuce that would be harvested or a roof patched in all of America without undocumented labor.

He must believe that gay people are gay by choice and aren't entitled to equal status under the law. How do they know? The bible tells them so. 

They must profess to believe that the invasion of Iraq, the worst foreign policy blunder in our history, was a good idea.

And they must believe that Barack Obama fronts a socialist-secular conspiracy, other members of which are the press, the universities, and the "elite," who want more than anything else to take away their guns. 

Does this sorry bunch of Republican candidates believe all this nonsense, or do they pander to the base? Are they idiots or are they liars?  Fools or knaves? We report, you decide.

Why We Love Sports

I have to admit that I'm thoroughly taken with the Jeremy Lin story. It's so wonderfully, ridiculously improbable. Asian-American guy, Harvard!! economics grad, plays OK with the Erie Bayhawks and the Reno Bighorns but is released by two not-so-strong NBA teams. A last-resort number 4 point guard on the Knicks, sleeping on a couch in his brother's apartment, he comes off the bench to lead the worst team in the league to five straight wins, drops 38 on Kobe and the Lakers, etc. etc. Tyson Chandler, grumpy all season long, is now smiling. It's not just Frank Merriwell; it's everyone's secret dream. And a morality play to boot-- keep trying, persevere, trust your own abilities, take advantage of the opportunities. An inspiration and a message in the same package. 

It can't last. JLin can't keep on averaging 27/8. The Knicks will eventually lose (though let's hope not tonight against shakey Toronto). One of those top point-guard defenders, such as Avery Bradley, is going to eat him alive one of these days. But he's the real deal and if he stays healthy, remains coachable, works on his three and on his left hand, he could have a great, historic career.

Meanwhile, it's absolutely fascinating. Ama're returns tonight; that should be easy. The test will come when Carmelo's groin heals. Can Lin and Anthony work and play well together? I'll be watching.

And congratulations to Tommie Amaker, Lin's Harvard coach; he's got to be one heck of a proud guy.

Another person who's mighty happy: David Stern, who's been struggling to get a toehold for the NBA in the world's largest untapped market.

Mannahatta

Eric Sanderson's Mannahatta (New York: Abrams, 2009) reconstructs Manhattan as it would have appeared to Henry Hudson when he sailed the Half-Moon into the harbor in 1609. The glory of the book lies in its illustrations.  Here's a conjectural reconstruction of old Manhattan island:

And here's a clever juxtaposition of ancient and modern:

In 1609, the island of Manhattan was home to between 400 and 1000 Lenape Indians. They lived on fish, shellfish (leaving behind extensive middens), deer and other wildlife, on fruits and berries. They practiced some small-scale farming of corn, squash, and beans. Sanderson estimates that the Lenape had lived on Manhattan for 10,000 years, or 400 generations.

Why so few people? The land was fertile, the seas abundant, the weather not particularly harsh. While the Lenape sat still in Manhattan, advanced civilizations were created by the Mayans, the Aztecs and the Incas. Along the banks of the Mississippi, the city of Cahokia rose and fell. And yet the Lenape never domesticated a single animal beside the dog and left behind no pottery, weaving, or metals. They remained stuck in the paleolithic. Why, I wonder. Perhaps things were too good.

On the other hand, the Lenape lived in harmony with the island for a very long time. What are the odds that our present civilization, which has totally transformed Manhattan in 400 short years, or just 16 generations, will last one tenth as long? 

 

February 24:  Still curious about the want of population growth or technological development among the Lenape, I read C. A. Weslager's The Delaware Indians, A History (1972) (Lenapes were called by their Anglo name, Delaware, for many years). Wenslager does not suggest that the Lenape ever achieved larger populations. Nor does he point to any archeological evidence of cultural achievement. Still, I'm mildly suspicious that there may be more to the story.  We know that Verrazzano contacted the Lenapes 90 years before Hudson sailed into the harbor, and no one knows what diseases he might have introduced.

My Mysterious Uncle Max

Who knows what crimes or dark deeds my black-sheep Uncle Max had committed that made made him such a pariah in our o-so-respectable family, but they must have been something awful. Although he was my father's older brother, his name was never mentioned except with embarrassment or distaste.

Inasmuch as I'm now the "patriarch," it's time to get the family stuff on the record for the benefit of the kids, the grandkids, and the extended mishpucha. So here's all I know about my mysterious uncle. Spoiler alert: it doesn't add up to villainy.

Max was the oldest of the four (Sol, Mollie, and Mannie succeeded him). He would have been born about 1895, just about the time the family escaped the Ukraine for the Lower East Side. He studied at Albany State Teachers College for a while, but I don't think he earned a degree. He lived in Paris during the 1920s and perhaps 1930s. He was invited to but did not attend my parents' wedding. He was divorced (a source of immeasurable shame in those years). My mother said, "Uncle Max is very selfish." There was something shady about the way he made his living, but I don't know the details, except that, for a while, he ghost-wrote doctoral dissertations. He lived with a woman to whom he wasn't married. He died of a heart attack during the 1950s. 

I met him three times. Once, he came to a family gathering, My father wouldn't speak to him. Another time he paid a weekday afternoon call to our East 9 Street home. I found him in the kitchen talking with my mother: "This is your Uncle Max." And then, when I was thirteen, he called and asked if he could take me to the finals of the NCAA basketball tournament at Madison Square Garden. After a lot of discussion and negotiation, I was allowed to meet him at the arena. Max was a small man, hard of hearing, and very ordinary.  He tried hard to be congenial. He told me that he had taken "Robert" as a middle name. Frankly, he seemed no more menacing or odd than any other of my uncle-ry or than other men of his generation. What else do I remember of that evening?  During the game, an errant pass hit off a player's head and bounced into the basket.

I never saw Max again.

And yet my father once confessed to me that he told Max that "if he ever did that again, I'd kill him." My father, mildest of men, threatened someone with violent death?  Because he did what?  Dad wouldn't say.

Here's a spooky story, and I'm going to tell it exactly the way it happened, no embroidery or exaggeration. On the night of my father's funeral, my brothers and I and our wives gathered around the formica kitchen table in the old house. Uncle Max's name came up. I said, "I know the name of the woman who he lived with." "What is it?"  "It's Sarah Clyne, spelled with a C and a Y." There was a Manhattan telephone book (five inches thick and at least two thousand pages). I picked up the book and it fell open. I put my finger on a name. The name was Sarah Clyne. "I said, did you see what happened?  I just opened the book at random and my finger fell on the name Sarah Clyne, Max's lady. It seems like a sign that I should call her."

But I didn't.

Here's the only picture of Max of which I have knowledge. He's with "little grandma." The picture is taken in front of 334 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.

Winter Garden News

Next summer's vegetable seeds have arrived in the mail. Hard choices; the gardening will is infinite and the execution confined; which is to say that there just isn't enough room to grow all the varieties we'd want. But in addition to the old reliables, we try to make room for some exotics and antiques. This year:   two kinds of heirloom tomatoes. Rose (an Amish favorite), and Black Giant. Pasillo Bajio (an intense black hot pepper, for the pepper-lovers in the family). Ma-Zu Purple Chinese Eggplant, supposedly a favorite of Taiwanese gardeners. Black Beauty Zucchini. Suyo Long Cucumbers ("very mild and sweet"). Romanesco Italia Broccoli ("spiralling apple-green heads"). Ching Chong Bok Choy, an early, cold-weather kind. Russian Red (some call it Ragged Jack) kale. Two kinds of beets: Albino, a Dutch variety, and Crapaudine, unfortunately named, but supposedly the oldest beet still in cultivation. And also carrots, so easy to grow in our rich sandy soil, both a new variety (Cosmic Purple) and an old one (Jaune Obtuse du Doubs, a French carrot which dates to 1894).

It's going to be a good summer. We're in the midst of a January snowstorm right now, but I can imagine myself tilling in a load of manure, raking up, and setting out the stakes and twine. It's going to be a good summer.

Shakespeare's Breasts

There's an event in Shakespeare's Cymbeline that both intrigues and baffles me -- perhaps because I have so pedestrian an imagination. Iachimo wagers that he can seduce Imogen, but he's forcibly rebuffed by the young princess. Unwilling to lose his bet, he resorts to a nasty subterfuge and smuggles himself into Imogen's bedroom while she's asleep. Iachimo's plan is to memorize some "natural notes about her body" so that he can claim to have "pick'd the lock and ta'en/The treasure of her Honour." Scoundrel that he is, he  lifts up her blanket and peeps under her nightclothes. There he discovers "on her left Brest/ A mole, Cinque-spotted: Like the Crimson drops/ I'th' bottome of a Cowslippe." Armed with this intimacy, he prepares to confront Imogen's beloved Posthumus Leonatus and win the wager. It's a troublesome bit of business, and performers must decide whether to present the scene chastely, or erotically, or pruriently.

But there's also a problem of credibility that most moderns might overlook, but which troubles me. The first Imogen, the Imogen of 1610, was not a young woman but a pre-adolescent male actor. When Iachimo studied him/her closely enough to see the five-spotted mole, he saw no female breast at all. He pretended that he saw it and persuaded the audience that he had done so. Talk about efferontery. Talk about "suspension of disbelief."

How was the scene played? How did Shakespeare convince the playgoers that the absence of a breast equals the presence of a breast?  And how did he do so without causing some of the cruder members of the audience to ruin the scene by guffawing or tittering.

It would seem that the playwright would try to hide or disguise the fact that his female characters were not female and that Imogen was a beardless, breastless boy. But in this scene, Shakespeare is anything but apologetic. In fact, he thrusts theatrical trickery right in the face of the audience. "I can make you believe anything," he seems to say. And why, indeed, should we boggle at a boy with breasts, when in the same scene, Imogen sleeps, even though she's not really sleeping. And Iachimo soliloquizes aloud and everyone in the audience conspires to pretend that Imogen doesn't know that he's there and wouldn't be awakened by his voice. So why not also agree to suspend our disbelief in the boy's female traits.

Perhaps it's my own downright mid-Westerm positivism, but the breastedness of the boy seems to me to present a different order of illusion than the belief in say, a highly-conventionalized device like the soliloquy. But Shakespeare does not compromise. Iachimo stares at an empty space, and says, that's a breast right there. And he looks at it not fleetingly or glancingly, but with great particularity. Look, there's a mole. There are five spots on it. Trust me. 

The breasts, it must be conceded, are literary rather than real. Those crimson drops and the attendant cowslip are out of pastoral poetry, not out of observation. It would be tempting to claim that Cymbeline was written for the page rather than the stage If we didn't know better. Simon Forman, mountebank and astrologer, attended a performance of Cymbeline at the Globe in 1611 and reported that Iachimo "vewed her [i.e.Imogen] in her bed and the markes of her body." He saw "her"; he did not see a boy pretending to be "her" and he didn't make any fuss about her bosom. Case closed, perhaps.

Imogen's are not Shakespeare's only imaginary breasts. Lady Macbeth's breasts, though psychologically crucial, are less problematical because they are alluded to rather than unveiled. They're functional. "I have given Sucke, and know/ How tender 'tis to loue the Babe that milkes me,/ I would, while it was smyling in my Face,/ Haue pluckt my Nipple from his Bonelesse Gummes,/ And dasht the Braines out, had I so sworne." For me, it's easier to believe that the actor that played vicious Lady M. is a boy than to believe that the character ever either bore or loved an infant (there's no other mention of her manchild in the play). Nevertheless, Shakespeare had no compunctions about calling attention to the boy actor's absent nipples and even more so, his unlikely lactatory prowess. Lady Macbeth's breasts must be the least welcoming in literature, but they're not incredible.

An even more remarkable instance of nursing brings Cleopatra to her end. Cleopatra kills herself when she applies the asp to his/her non-existent breast. "Peace, peace:/ Dost thou not see my Baby at my breast/ That suckes the Nurse asleepe?" Cleopatra's quintessential mothering engenders a dimension of feminity that she has denied until the moment of death. In this case, the intensity of  Cleopatra's language overwhelms any possible skepticism about her womanliness. Cleopatra's breasts are credible. More than credible -- unquestionable and undeniable.

They are a Shakespearean miracle.