Dr. Metablog

Book Report: "Some Hours" by Edward St. Aubyn

I've now read the first three of the quintet of the much-praised Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn, and that's all I'm going to read. It's been a long time since I've encountered anything so nasty.  Is there a word for a place in which every single individual is evil, snobbish, vindictive, petty, and cruel. Kakatopia, perhaps. In St. Aubyn's world, Iago would have been an innocent. True enough that he was jealous, obsessed, manipulative and murderous, but I doubt that even Iago would have anally penetrated his five-year-old son.

And moreover: if I were a handsome, rich young woman (or a plain poor one) and my date asked me to get down on all fours and eat some squashed figs off the patio floor without benefit of fork or knife, I would run away screaming, slam the door, and let a few years lapse before resuming social activity. So, I hope, would everywoman. In the world of St. Aubyn's fiction, reader, she marries him, and the couple live miserably ever after.

The dilemma that's posed by these novels is that in addition to being richly kakatopic, they're also amusing, clever, and arch, with dialogue that might have been written by a jaded Oscar Wilde. So I laughed -- but whenever I laughed I felt dirty and complicit.

So no more St. Aubyn for me. These novels transcend satire and transmute into ugly spewing. Not for me, thanks.

Bringing Ourselves Up to Date on the Subject of Abkhazian Consonants

Abkhazian has fifty-eight consonants. By contrast, English, a language which is not consonant-poor, has twenty-three: the ones for which there are the alphabetic letters such as b, d, f, etc. plus sh, ch, dz, ng, the occasional trilled r, and the two sounds that are indicated by th (voiced in 'soothe' and unvoiced in 'sooth'). Twenty-three consonants can make an infinite number of words; fifty-eight consonants are more than a mouthful. How can the human speech apparatus produce so many distinguishable sounds?  "By utilizing all points of articulation from the lips back to the larynx," says an Abhakazian linguist, and "by associating with plain consonants such secondary features as labialization, palatalisation, and pharyngalisation." More simply, everywhere that tongue, lips, teeth, palate, or throat can either stop the flow of air or allow air to pass through must be put into play. Moreover, If I understand correctly, a sound made by vibrating, for instance, the area of the uvular might occur in both labialized (i.e. rounded lips) and unlabialized variants.

I'm guessing that Abkhazian would be formidably difficult to understand, especially for those who are acquainted only with Indo-European languages. 

Abkhazian is one of the indigenous North West Caucasian languages, distantly related to Circassian and the now extinct Ubykh. It may be descended from Hattic, which may have been spoken in the empire of the Hittites. There are something like a million Abkhazian speakers, half in Abkhazia itself, a country that borders the Black Sea to the northwest of Georgia, and half in Turkey and other locations in the Abkhazian diaspora. Written language came only in the mid-nineteenth century to the wild Caucasus. Abkhazians have been described as 20% Muslim, 80% Christian, and 100% pagan, their religion "a peculiar mosaic of fragments of religious beliefs" in which "Christian ceremonies, Muslim rites, and pagan observances are so closely interwoven that it seems impossible to separate them."

Though the Abkhazian consonant system is daunting, it's a relief to learn that the language uses only one vowel - ah - and also that both the extinct Ubykh and a still existing dialect of Abkhazian named Bzyp (pronunciation??) employed "a minimum of eighty consonants." Is eighty the record?

Amnesia on Film: Clean Slate (1994)

I imagine that the "pitch" went something like this:

"Ok, we have the star, Dana Carvey, who's hot right now. He's a funny man. He's going to play a detective who watches The Maltese Falcon on the tv and thinks he's Humphrey Bogart. And there's a coin that's worth seven million dollars and a bunch of guys are after it. But here's the gimmick. Carvey has amnesia and he doesn't know that he has the coin. And then the real kicker -- not only does he have amnesia, but he has a kind of amnesia that starts over every time he goes to sleep, so he doesn't even know what he did yesterday.. Ain't that terrific?"

Well, it must have been terrific, because someone decided to put some money into the film, and someone managed to persuade James Earl Jones and Michael Gambon to take supporting roles in this bird-brained turkey.

Did anyone say, "Does amnesia work that way? Is there a kind of amnesia that begins again every morning."

If they did, I know what the answer would have been. "Who cares? This is not real amnesia, it's movie amnesia"  --which is, once again, the most malleable of maladies.

So here's a new genre, the amnesiac-gumshoe farce. A small, unpromising genre.

It's an unfunny movie that hovers between D (for dumb) minus and F (phony). I doubt anyone's ever heard of it, except for hardcore amnesia fans. And even they were disappointed. 

La Traviata "Updated"

I prefer to hear rather than to see grand opera. The cd and the radio are my preferred media. Stay at home, sit in a comfortable chair, listen carefully, be ravished.

When you go to the opera, you re-discover that the plot is all silliness, the characters incomprehensible, and the intermissions interminable. 

Nevertheless, there I was, yesterday, at the Met's HD screening of Verdi's La Traviata, the most melodic and romantic of operas. The orchestra and the singing were, as expected, glorious. But the staging was all strained novelty and misguided cleverness.

Can there be an opera less in need of cross-dressing and a gay subtext that La Traviata?  Why would anyone want to clothe both the male and female choristers in severe, gray, men's business suits?  If the story is all about boy-girl romance and sexual intensity and sexual pleasure, why not encourage the men and gaily-dressed women to dance and flirt and try to get together after the downright way of generation?

Opera, when I take the trouble to see it, should be as pleasing to my eye as it is rewarding to my ear. 

But this time, officers of the Metropolitan Opera, I was forced to shut my eyes, and just listen. It was just like staying at home, except that the chair was less comfortable. 

Addendum:  today I read an interview in the April 26 NYRB with the tenor Jonas Kaufmann. Here's an excerpt:

"You see, the conductor believes that the audience is only coming to hear the orchestra and is not interested in the story, the sets, the singers. The director believes it's an all visual thing. So there is this constant fight over what each person believes is the most  important part. I've seen semi-staged or concert performances of operas that were more thrilling than staged ones. Why? Because it's better to have nothing than to have something so disturbing that it distracts you from enjoying the music and that doesn't allow the music to create its magic."

Exactly my point.

 

Where Sonia Slept

In 1904, at the age of 20, my grandmother Sonia Chafetz Uzilewski (later Green) disembarked at Ellis Island. Because of her age, and because she lived within an immigrant community, she never acquired much English, and as a result my conversations with her were strictly utilitarian. I was curious about the old country (White Russia, now Belarus) but she spoke little about it and what she did say was difficult for me to construe. Two pieces of information about her childhood have stayed with me: first, that in the old country, they brought the cow into the house in the winter "to keep warm" and secondly, that, as a girl, she "slept over the fireplace."

I was puzzled. All I could imagine was a house like my own pleasant childhood home, but with a cow on the carpet and a young lady perched precariously on the narrow mantle over the fireplace (if we had had a fireplace, which we didn't). Frankly, I couldn't make much sense out of her story. 

It wasn't until I happened to find myself in benighted Lithuania in 2003 that I figured out the cow-in-the-living-room puzzle. I visited one of those large open-air museums which are not uncommon in eastern Europe, in which traditional peasant dwellings, along with churches, mills, foundries, etc. have been  rescued and sprinkled around a landscape. At such sites, a very common form of low-end dwelling consists of a barn or animal shelter on the dirt ground floor, with a wooden second floor for human habitation erected just above. I believe that when grandma said that they brought the cow into the house, she meant that they stabled the cow down below, and that some of the heat from the animal disseminated into the living quarters -- as would, incidentally, some of its pungent effluvia.

So one problem was solved, but the mantle-sleeping remained a mystery. However, just this past week the New Yorker featured an essay on traditional Russian cooking in which there was a paragraph on a long-ago-and-far-away kind of stove. Here's the pertinent section.

"A traditional Russian kitchen starts with a pech, a huge brick oven with many winding vents designed to retain the heat from a wood fire. A pech was once the centerpiece of traditional peasant homes; it took up about a quarter of the available living space. It heated and ventilated the house, it dried food; children and the elderly slept on ledges built into it."

"Children and the elderly slept on ledges built into it." Mystery solved!

Sonia told me that she slept over the fire, which I interpreted as a fireplace. But I was wrong. She slept over the stove. For all I know, she might even have used the world pech, which I couldn't possibly have translated or understood.

Now I know, that like other children at the very bottom of the nineteenth-century Russian social ladder, she slept on a ledge built into a pech, with the cow lowing just a few feet below her. 

Need I mention once again how glad I am that she decided to pull up stakes and head for new world.

More on Sonia Green: here.

What Lola Remembered from Last Summer

It was a long, luxurious summer, with gardens and apple cider and swimming and berry-picking and walks in the woods and cousins and all sorts of games.

All much enjoyed by Lola, who is now approaching two and a half years old.

"So, Lola, what do your remember about last summer in Vermont?"

Lola, after a pensive moment: "Sheep and horses poop on the grass."

Amnesia on Film: Somewhere in the Night (1946)

Somewhere in the Night is an early Joseph Mankiewicz film noir with amnesia at its center. George Taylor, an injured ex-Marine played monochromatically by John Hodiak, returns from the South Pacific not knowing who he is are what he was --  except that he has a clue that he was on the shady side of the law. There's an involuted, convoluted and confusing plot that pushes all the noirish buttons: a chanteuse with a heart of gold and also a dame who's nothing but trouble, a missing briefcase stuffed with 2 million bucks, a funny farm where a witness to murder is imprisoned, a cynical police lieutenant, and even a polysyllabic European gangster who derives from both Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. Everything is recycled, and so is the amnesia. George Taylor might  just as well have been a returning veteran with a perfect memory, or been a gumshoe, or a shamus and the film would have been just as good (or just as bad). It's surprising that when the money is recovered and the villains are punished, George gets the girl but, contrary to precedent, doesn't recover his memory. The film simply forgets his affliction and leaves him hanging. Perhaps it's romantic -- after all, if you win the love of the lady, what does memory matter?  Or perhaps the amnesia is so trivial, so perfunctory, so much a gimmick, that it can be shunted aside. 

Although not a good flim, it's partially redeemed by Richard Conte's turn as a smarmy nightclub owner, Sheldon Leonard's two minutes as a dumb cuckold, and Harry Morgan's thirty seconds as a bath attendant. Those guys are genuine pros.

More on movie amnesia: Spellbound, Random Harvest, Shattered, Blind Horizon The Bourne Identity The Crooked Way

Book Report: Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding

I'm sure that I once before read a book called The Art of Fielding, perhaps in the 1960s, but it wasn't a baseball novel; it was a old-fashioned critical monograph about Henry Fielding, the author of Shamela, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Amelia, and Jonathan Wild. (For what it's worth, Chad Harbach, who contributed this year's The Art of Fielding, though a skillful plotter, doesn't have the range or the release or the depth to play in Henry F's league.)

I generally stay away from big-selling first novels. I prefer to let them marinate for a decade or two, check out their staying power, before I make an eight-hour commitment (not counting naps) to a 400-pager. It's an economy of my own: there are too many great old things that I haven't gotten around to yet. But I must say that Harbach's Fielding, highly recommended by friends, kept me engaged right down to the last sentence. Plot, plot, plot, is the formula, and there were enough surprises and twists in the story to keep even a skeptic like myself turning pages enthusiastically. It's a hybrid novel, a genre-crosser, with baseball books and academic novels (and a touch of Death in Venice) in its bloodline. 

What's best, beside the surprises in the plotting? The characters, most of whom defy or challenge stereotypes, what a blessing. What's worst? The style: not a memorable sentence or turn of phrase in the entire bland (ninth-grade vocabulary, straight-ahead syntax) book. Most disappointing: the killing off of an important character just when his situation becomes interesting and troubling. Harbach, in my opinion, punts just  when he should have pulled the goalie and swung for the fences.