Dr. Metablog

Why are Dog Owners Such Scofflaws?

Why are dog owners such horrid scofflaws?  According to our local police-lady, there are fifty-three signs distributed around the downtown mall that either say, in clear language, No Pets, or else picture a dog bisected with a diagonal line. But it's impossible to take a walk without encountering two or three or half a dozen people obliviously or defiantly parading Rover or Spot.

I think it's reasonable to assume that the owners can read, or if "No Pets" is too difficult to construe, that they could interpret the icons. It's possible that they're just unobservant, and don't notice the signs, but I suspect not. The signs are hard to miss.

I suspect that the dog people just assume that they're above the law. They love their pooch, love its barking, love its scat, love the way it playfully lunges at small children, and they can't imagine that anyone in the world would take exception to their prerogative.  

It's the same on the mountain trails. Just because the sign says, All Dogs Must Be On Leash, doesn't mean that the law applies to Me.

I once said to a dog owner who was walking his big dogs off-leash, "You know that you're breaking the law." He barked at me: "Get a life." Another time a bulldog attacked me on the street, and I was warding him off with my briefcase when the owner called him back. I said, "Dogs are supposed to be on leash." He said, "What are you, the dog warden?" A friend was knocked off her bicycle by a large, aggressive dog. The owner, who should have knelt on ground glass in apology, said only, "He doesn't like bicycles."

And many other such stories, but you get my point.

"Look at Me."

On our pleasant, prosperous downtown mall, we have entertainers and buskers of many stripes --everyone  from fire-eaters, magicians, and left-behind 50s folkie guitarists to Zip Code Man. Some are excellent (the occasional string quartet or visiting bluegrass band) and some are horrible (the bam-bam-bam drummers and the pathetic didgedoorists.

We also have a contortionist, whom I personally find difficult to watch.

To me, the contortionist is not so much an entertainer as he is an allegory of the human condition. He's what they used to call in earlier centuries an emblem.

While other performers try to attract an audience by subtlety and guile, our contortionist merely shouts, "Look at me. Everybody, look at me" -- which I take as a metaphor or icon or emblem. When he calls out, "Look at me," he's simply doing what the rest of us want to do but don't have the courage to do: call attention to ourselves, ask for praise. We're all saying, "Look at me," but, becaused we're civilized and mannerly beings, we strive to do so by being indirect or ironic or clever.  Not the contortionist. He's honest about himself and about the true, elemental state of mankind. He shouts, "Look at me" -- and then he ties himself into knots.

Wrapped in Caul Fat? Don't Tell Me!

Our peaceful town, not long ago provincial and off-the-track, has now become molto trendy. Only a generation ago, we were bland, undistinguished, white-bread; and now we're America's happiest city, America's slimmest city, America's healthiest city, and, just recently, America's foodiest city.

I'm not the slimmest, nor the happiest, nor the healthiest, so It's embarrassing for me to live where I fall so far below the standard. When I'm melancholy, I feel as though I'm a traitor to the common good. And I confess that never even heard the word "foody" until I read that we were now "foodiest." 

I don't usually frequent the expensive new restaurants -- they're too exotic for my mac-and-cheese palate. But I was taken to one of our fanciest new places recently and listened in at a conversation between patrons and waiter at the next table. I transcribe it exactly as it occurred. Honest to Pete.

Patron A:  "I think I'll start with the julienned watermelon radish. Is that served with tzitziki?"-

Waiter:  "Just a dollop." 

Patron B:  "I'll have the hedgehog mushrooms with panko crumbs. Are your bulgogi sliders marinated or grilled?"

Waiter:  "Marinated, then lightly grilled. Then dusted with sudachi zest."

Patron: A:  "I think I'll also have the clear gel of agar and turnip puree with chestnut crumbs. Are your chestnut crumbs domestic or foreign?"

Waiter:  "I believe they're Italian."

Patron B:  "I see that you have coconut tofu cream. Do you serve that separately, or with the grapefruit curd marscapone?"

Waiter:  "I believe that the chef likes to combine it with the date marmalade and harissa."

Patron A:  "For a main dish, I'll have the lamb en crepinette. To Patron B (aside whispering):  "Roasted in caul fat."

Patron B (aside, annoyed):  "I know that. (To the waiter):  I think I'll go with the squid ink and hot sesame oil soup."

Waiter:  "Excellent choice, madam."

Patron B:  "And then the braised rabbit with lobster knuckles and pil-pil dill. Is your pil-pil wild or domestic?'

Waiter:  "Wild, certainly."

Patron B:  "And along with that, I'd like a side of pickled ramps and fermented garlic, with a poached duck egg."

Patron A: "Waiter, may I change my mind. I think I'd prefer the singed octopus in almond puree. Or maybe the snails with liquified parsley, or just something simple, like sea urchin served over discs of scallop with a hamachi and farro salad."

Patron B: "I think I'll change my order as well. I think I'll go with the espelettes in pistachio yogurt sauce. Or the veal sweetbreads with sheepmilk dumplings. Or the okroshka with quail eggs."

The conversation went on like this for ever and ever, and I began to feel myself out of place, so I left and went up to Marie's in North Boulder and ordered a hamburger en bun with raw oignon and an old favorite of mine, pomme frites francaises avec sauce de tomate. It was mighty satisfying.

Seventeen Hours of Downton Abbey

I've now sometimes zoomed but sometimes plodded through seventeen hours of Downton Abbey. The series is lovely to look at but also at various times lugubrious, false, and shamelessly gimmicky -- but apparently I'm easily seduced. Let me confess: I fell for it, mostly, but always against my better judgment. Let's face it, the primitive parts of my brain simply overwhelmed my higher critical faculties. I laughed and cried, even when I knew that I was being cheated and manipulated. 

My favorite parts: Mr. Pamuk and his Nelson Rockefeller departure ("he came, and went)," which took me totally by surprise, as did Anna's and Lady Grantham's resourceful disposal of the corpse. Lady Sybil as a nurse, in part because she was doing useful work for the first time in her pampered life, and in part because she looked so fetching in the uniform. My favorite performers -- Maggie Smith, reprising her role in Gosford Park (a much superior great house fiction), and Mr Carson's eyebrows, perpetually raised in shock at modern shenanigans. 

The series is pure, undiluted soap. It is also, as they used to say in Variety, a "costumer." Query -- would I have spent seventeen hours watching a television program set in a mansion in Dubuque, Iowa, in 2012 in which a soldier returns paralyzed from the wars and miraculously regains his mobility, where terrible culinary disasters occur because the cook almost goes blind, where granny shows her goodwill by losing a flower show, in which the family is traumatized when a daughter runs off with the chauffeur, or where a presumably innocent servant is sentenced to death for the murder of his wayward wife. I don't think so. I would have said, "cornball soap opera" and clicked back to the NBA. Or to the advertisements for zirconite jewelry. And yet I went on. And on. And continued on even after Downton Abbey not only jumped the shark but vaulted the great white whale, Moby Dick himself, when it introduced into the plot a bout of supposed amnesia. Amnesia! Is there anything soapier?

Or perhaps my reluctant fascination proves that the traditional formulas retain their power. Here's a formula of comedy: "artificial difficulties overcome." In Downton Abbey, Lady Mary and Matthew are destined for one another, and every viewer knows it, even as steaming piles of artificial difficulties are strewn and heaped in their path. Shakespeare could slice through the impediments in two hours traffic on the stage, but here it's seventeen anguished hours until heir and heiress finally figure it out. And here's another formula of comedy: always bring it to conclusion with a feast and a dance. They did, and, sucker that I am, I was elated. Even though I saw the scam coming a mile down the o-so-picturesque road  

Libraries in My Life

I can't remember a time when I wasn't at home in a library. Although very much a schoolyard urchin, passionate about baseball, trading cards and punchball (or any kind of game played with a spaldeen), I rarely failed my weekly trip to the storefront Avenue J branch of the BPL, where there were cases upon half-height cases of juvenile and later "young adult" books. I read like a hungry larva, without direction or discrimination. A few years later, when I reached Erasmus Hall, my after-school employment was to shelve books at 75 cents an hour at the BPL branch at McDonald Avenue (accumulating the $900 which paid my full first-year tuition at Cornell). I not only mastered the Dewey Decimal System but also absorbed everything that the library had to offer in the 612.6 area of knowledge. At college, I was dazzled by McGraw, my first real library. In my senior year, I was granted a stack pass, and therefore was able to waste many hours not only in aimless browsing, but also lolling in long by-passed and superseded libraries-within-the-library. I doubt that those most pleasant out-of-the-way nineteenth-century nooks and corners survived modernization, more's the pity. Later, in Cambridge, it was first Widener (where genuine incunabula sat unprotected on the shelves), then Houghton, my first experience with rare books, which, I discovered, are to be savored not only with the eyes, but with the fingertips and the nose. Thence to Colorado, where, without the resources of a major library, I dutifully read STC books on microfilm -- which made me queasy, or on microfiche -- which produced genuine nausea. In 1976-77, I spent one day a week at the British Library, studying sometimes in the old circular reading room, where on downpour days buckets were distributed around the room to deal with the leaks, and at other times in the North Library, where I read big hunks of the perpetually exciting Thomason Tracts. In the early 80s, I was able to enjoy the Huntington in San Marino, where the highlight of the day was lunchtime among the exotic cacti and succulents. Later, at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, I found not only an unequalled trove of books and mss., but also camaraderie with similarly-obsessed specialists. There was always someone who could answer the obscurest of questions, and there were even a few times when I was able to return the favor. At a cafeteria lunch, once, I asked (faux-naively) "what do we do with the orts?" and everyone at the table knew exactly what I meant -- orts the word that Shakespeare used in Troilus and Cressida to refer to the uneaten portions of a meal. 

Now I've come full circle and the Boulder Public is my three-times-a-week destination. Not great holdings, but through the miracle of an efficient interlibrary loan system, and supplemented by googlebooks and other electronic resources, I can find enough to satisfy my unsteady, dilettante brain. 

Youth and Age -- Tennyson's Ulysses

It wasn't until I reached college that discovered poetry. My comic-book super-hero and baseball-infused brain was until then, poetry-wise, an almost complete tabula rasa. I say "almost" because at eight or nine eight years old I had memorized two great classics of American literature: "Casey at the Bat" and also the poem by Grantland Rice about Tinkers, Evers, and Chance. In additon, I knew the ubiquitous stercoraceous distich the first line of which is "Here I sit, broken-hearted" and a related gnomic verse that begins, "No matter how much you wiggle and dance." Then in 1956 I left Flatbush for higher education and took a course in English Literature. The rest, as they say, is history. It was sonnets and love poems of any kind, and rich luscious liquid poems by Marlowe and Keats and Hopkins that entranced me. The more intellectual poems were too taxing for my immature head. Lycidas, which I now know to be the best poem in the language, was utterly impenetrable for at least a decade, although I admit that I immediately responded to its music: "With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves." 

One of my teachers sagely observed that certain poets and certain poems were for youth, some for maturity, and some for old age. "You may no longer like then what you like now." Which has come to pass. And as an example of poetry for the latter years, he adduced Tennyson's "Ulysses." "This poem may not mean much to you now, but it will some day, if you live long enough." I remember that I was much taken with the touchstone line "Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy" but I thought that "Ulysses" was far too much about a really old guy trying to cheer himself up and I did not see it holding a place in any future I could envision. 

Well, folks, I've now arrived at the so-called golden years, or, more properly, the endgame, or extra innings (which in some sports is called sudden death) and guess what? "Ulysses" has returned, front and center, exactly as was predicted 50+ years ago. It's right on target. 

Tennyson's Ulysses is Homer's adventurer a generation older, kinging it in Ithaca, but bored, unchallenged, and unstimulated. "It little profits that an idle king,/ By this still hearth, among these barren crags,/ Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole/ Unequal laws unto a savage race,/ That hoard and sleep, and feed,/ And know not me."

To put it vulgarly, Ulysses plans to bust out of the old folks home. He's been a warrior, a hero, and a roving explorer. He "cannot rest from travel." He needs to search "beyond the utmost bound of human thought." He leaves Penelope, and he leaves the government of Ithaca to his bureaucratically-minded  son Telemachus. The last lines of the poem, the leave-taking, are most stirring:  

                           Come, my friends

"Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides,

And though we are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Yes, I know -- the diction is a little antiquated and artificial, the urge to get away a trifle too vehement. But nevertheless I'm moved by the resilience, the perserverance. Though tear-inducing, the poem is anything but lachrymose. And it's accepting: "that which we are, we are."

It's lately become the fashion to interpret "Ulysses" as a poem about capitalism and imperialism. In this reading, Ulysses is just another white male, off to conquer and colonialize The Alien Other. Or to see it as a poem about male priviliege: he's a bad husband, abandoning the family. Or to conceive the poem as a structure of ironies, in which Ulysses doesn't realize that he undermines his own suppositions. There's a tad of truth in these arguments, as there always is, because Tennyson was caught up in a Victorian striving that he didn't fully or consciously assimilate. But frankly, I feel sorry for readers who can't hear the verve and excitement in Ulysses's expansive view of things. 

Moreover, it turns out that Tennyson was absolutely correct to proclaim that there is a time in life when "not to yield" is an act of daily heroism.