Dr. Metablog

Three Advantages to Old Age

1.  No longer possible to die tragically young, with promise unfulfilled. Well, actually, promise can still be unfulfilled, but not because of early death.

2.  No longer any need to fuss with contraceptives.

3.  Read an entire magazine article while urinating. 

Life: Boon or Thorn?

The most widely-known as well as the most notorious poem of the second half of the twentieth century is Philip Larkin's "This Be the Verse."  For those of you who don't know the poem by heart, here it is in its brief and startling entirety.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in the turn

  By fools in old style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern,

  And half at one another's throats.

Man adds on misery to man.

  It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

  And don't have any kids yourself.

Pessimistic?  Jaded?  Angry?  Yes, I think it's fair to call it so. And let's also add, unsubtle with a vengeance.

Larkin is hyperbolically illogical. It can't be true that every generation is more deranged than the one that preceded it. When were the good times? A few generations ago? In the Dark Ages? In antiquity?  No, in Larkin's view, it's been all downhill, all the time. No doubt those early primates were already fucking up their kids when they came down from the trees and started to walk upright on the savannah. "There's only one piece of roasted rhinoceros left. You take it. I don't mind being hungry."

Despite its dyspepsia and illogicality, "This Be the Verse" is a curiously lovable poem. Whenever I've heard it read or recited, audiences react not with horror but with amusement. The poem's misanthropy is so absolute and its language so blunt that it can't help but provoke tittering.

The laughter arises because the poem doesn't earn its pessimism. It's too fluent and too easy -- unlike, say, King Lear, where the sublunary world is rank with incest, betrayal, and murder. After three thousand lines and five full horrific acts, Shakespeare earns the standing to conclude that life is miserable and that "humanity must perforce/ Prey on itself, like monsters of the deep." So it is in Oedipus, where the events lend credibility to the difficult apercu that it's best not to be born at all, next best to die very young.

While Shakespeare and Sophocles are philosophically serious, Larkin is merely flip. There's a monumental disproportion between his gloom and the light-verse vessel in which his gloom is contained. And so arises the off-kilter comedy.

It's a whiny poem. "Poor poor pitiful me. I had a difficult mommy." 

If "This Be the Verse" is in fact the most popular poem of the last fifty years, it supersedes Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." What a remarkable devolution! While Frost endures, Larkin abhors.

I doubt whether Larkin had "Stopping by Woods" in mind, but he certainly glosses Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem" -- the poem from which he drew his title. Stevenson's performance is charming, gentle, self-effacing, and modest. 

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die.

And laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be.

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Stevenson praises the adventurous life lived well and brought to completion. Death may end it all but it also closes the circle. There is no completion, no circles in Larkin, where natural processes are crudely truncated: "don't have any kids yourself."

"This Be the Verse" is a hilarious and wonderful piece of joking, but its victimology is unsettling. It's tempting to claim that it satirizes its own pessimism, but, I'm sorry to say, it does not. Larkin loves to wallow in his own gloom.

Here's another Victorian variation on the thema Larkiniana.

Is life a thorn?

Then count it not a whit.

Man is well done with it.

As soon as he's born,

He should all means assay

To put the plague away.

Pessimistic, yes. But Colonel Fairfax, even-handed, also entertains the possibility that life might be a boon (which, as we all know, is true at least some of the time). 

Starfish Metamorphosis

I've been reading about the peculiar metamorphosis of the starfish, Luidia sarsi, which eats shellfish and dwells in the muddy sediment of seashores from Norway to the Mediterranean. Its diaphanous larvae are bilaterally symmetrical; the adult form, with its five arms, is radially symmetrical, a most irregular circumstance. Moreover, the adult emerges from the larva in a different way than the butterfly from the caterpillar, where the structure dissolves and reforms. The starfish develops from a cluster of cells lining the internal cavity of the larva.""Here it grows and matures, an alien existence independent of the larval body structures, axis, bilateral symmetry, and form, imbued with a complete disregard for every embodiment of its larval stage."  Eventually, the starfish emerges, and, most oddly, the larva continues on its way "swimming the pelagic waters and grazing on its vegetarian diet of algae". Essentially, the starfish develops from what might be called stem cells that are carried within the larva. It's all very alien, or perhaps even Alien.

The theory presented in Frank Ryan's The Mysteries of Metamorphosis (White River Junction, 2011) is that at one time the larva and the starfish were two different creatures (from two different phyla). Somewhere in the dark backward and abyss of time, sperm from the one creature encountered an egg of the other (both creatures eject enormous amounts of reproductive material into the sea) and cross-phyletic cross-fertilization occurred and the resultant chimera prospered. 

Biologists resist the hypothesis because of the challenge it poses to the standard view of the evolutionary branching of life. I'm in no position to judge the theory's truth or falsity, but I'm attracted to the idea because it makes life forms so much more complex and unpredictable, and because it overturns conventional thinking.

A Tumbrilism Revival

When rich people betray that they don't have the least clue how ordinary people live, they might coin a "tumbrilism." The perfect tumbrilism is callous, contemptuous, supercilious, insulting, and grotesquely ignorant.

The word "tumbrilism" seems to derive from tumbril, the cart that carried victims to the guillotine during the French Revolution. The mother of all tumbrilisms is Queen Marie Antoinette, who when told that the peasants had no bread, is supposed to have replied, "qu'ils mangent de la brioche," usually translated as  "let them eat cake." This classic trumbrilism derives from Rousseau and was not assigned to Marie until a couple of generations after she took her tumble.

Here are two good Congressional tumbrilisms: a) Fred Heinemann (R-North Carolina): "When I see someone who is making anywhere from $300,000 to $750,000 a year, that's middle class." b) Congressman John Fleming (R, Louisiana): "The amount that I have to reinvest in my business and feed my family is more like $600,000 ... and so by the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over." And a gubernatorial tumbrilism: Paul LePage (R, Maine): "Maine's welfare program is cannibalizing the rest of state government. To all you able-bodied people out there: "Get off the couch and get yourself a job.'"

Here's a classic tumbrilism from the world of sports, courtesy of Jose Canseco, who once had a ball bounce off his shoulder and into the stands for a home run: "You know my life, this financial thing, is a very complicated issue. Obviously, when you make all that money, people think, 'OK, let's assume it is $35 million.' People have to understand that $35 million, you're paying the government 41 percent. That leaves you with about $17 or $18 million, not even. Then you're taking care of your whole family."

But the modern master of the tumbrilism is Mitt Romney, who, when asked about his worth, replied, "It’s between $150 and about $200 some-odd million dollars, I think that’s what the estimates are.”

Other priceless Romney tumbrilisms:

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there."

"This feels good, being back in Michigan. You know, the trees are the right height. The streets are just right. I like the fact that most of the cars I see are Detroit-made automobiles. I drive a Mustang and a Chevy pick-up truck. Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually."

"I like being able to fire people who provide services to me."

"Even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, 'Well that's heartless.' And I said, 'No, no, I'm willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It'll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.'"

Unlike the dubious provenance of "let them eat cake," these tumbrilisms, though astonishingly naive and self-satisfied, are pure and genuine. Their Mittness is well-witnessed.   

Amnesia on Film: Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

I imagine that the writers of Cowboys and Aliens had a grand old time inserting into their screenplay as many as possible of both Westerns and sci-fi/horror cliches. They did very well: there's a loner cowboy with cigarillo and fists of steel, a domineering cattleman and his feckless son, a timid barkeep, a posse on horseback tracking abducted relatives a la The Searchers, a band of Chiricuara Apaches fighting for their own survival, innocent distressed maidens, etc., etc., and at the end, a hero riding off into the sunset. On the other side of the ledger, computer graphic aliens resembling the velociraptors in Jurassic Park (except for the slimy green blood) attacking us poor mortals, multiple abductions, and o my gosh even a little boy hiding from a creepy creature in a crevice in the rock, and then our intrepid James Bond-y macho hero sneaking into the spaceship to free the captives and dynamite the mother ship, my o my what a bounty.

And to these cliches, the unsatisfied writers added a bonus -- a dollop of movie amnesia. Why not? Jake Lonergan awakes in the desert not knowing who he is, why he is wounded, and without a clue as to why he has a futuristic bracelet soldered to his wrist. Like most movie amnesiacs, he remains fully functional and unimpaired. He's not the least bit agitated by his loss of memory. But then comes a truly embarrassing, semi-racist moment. The Indians, who as everyone knows are noble and in touch with the human soul in a way that we products of western civilization can never be, treat his amnesia with a frothy brew (perhaps mescaline, but who can tell?). Memory spontaneously returns; Jake remembers that he escaped from the mother ship, knows where it has been parked, and also knows about the secret entrance. And so to work.

Later on, the released abductees are all amnesiac, but they're cured instantly (the movie is long enough) without Apache influence.

So now we can add alien abduction to the long list of precipitants of movie amnesia.

This film could have been a gas except that its makers forgot about the comedy that's inherent in the title and in the conception. Too bad. As it stands, it's a solemn, noisy, elaborate, expensive, flimsy chimera. 

At one point in the quest, the posse comes across an enormous structure that looks like a paddle-wheeler right there in the middle of the desert. "There's no river within five hundred miles that can handle that thing." But they continue along, the boat is never mentioned again and plays no part in the story -- thereby proving that even screenwriters can suffer disabling bouts of amnesia.

Vegetable Love

As a rule, I'm as fickle as the legendary varying flag, but just now I have made a firm unwavering commitment. My absolutely most favorite line of poetry -- are you ready now, readers -- is (drumroll)l: "If you really want my peaches, gotta shake my tree."

Is that poetry or what? It's teasingly inexplicit yet at the same time very, very suggestive.

I first encountered the line in a mid-1950s doo-wopper by The Clovers (later famous for "Love Potion Number Nine") called "Lovey Dovey."

Well, you're the cutest thing that I did ever see
I really love your peaches, want to shake your tree.
Lovey dovey, lovey dovey all the time
Lovey dovey, I can't get you out of my mind.

The line's subversive sexuality penetrated even our twin-bed, Eisenhower-era, Ozzie-and-Harriet world.

Peaches/trees has a complicated history. Wikipedia tracks it to a song composed by Irving Berlin in May 1914: “If you don't want my peaches/ You'd better stop shaking my tree,” but I'd be willing to bet the orchard that Irving did not invent but borrowed the line, probably from something bluesy. Berlin's peaches warn us off, but Bessie Smith's 1923 peaches are both active and abundant: "If you don't like my peaches then let my orchard be." Bessie was the kind of gal whose peaches would be given away by the basketful. Blind Lemon Jefferson's 1929 peaches, on the other hand, are proprietary: ("you swore nobody’d pick your fruit but me/ I found three kid men shaking down your peaches free"). Ah yes, we must all be faithful to just a single source of fruit.

I'd wager that the peaches have appeared in fifty or a hundred songs in the last century.

The line floats from song to song, but wherever it settles, it's always suggestive of sexual desires and needs. Even when peaches are forbidden fruit, they're also ripe and luscious oozers of juice. Shake that tree properly and they fall into right into your mouth. 

Andrew Marvell would have loved "If you really want my peaches, gotta shake my tree."  Here's his witty mid-seventeenth century version of the trope. It's in a stanza from his best poem, "The Garden."

What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

Marvell's garden is not for strolling and smelling. It's a garden in which the fruits attack the "speaker" in an active, science-fictiony way. No nibbling here. Instead, "The luscious clusters of the vine,/Upon my mouth do crush their wine." "Luscious clusters... crush" is one sensous mouth-filling phrase. And those fine fruits, "the nectarine and curious (curious =s unusual, not investigative) peach" require no shaking whatsoever. These fruits are animatronic.

Marvell's "Garden" is as good a version of pomological love as Irving Berlin's -- without even taking into account the brilliant and accomplished iambic tetrameter couplets.

Lord of the Flies; a 1950s Allegory

In my daughter's basement I found a dried-up, stained, pages-hanging-out 1959 paperback edition of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. On the cover: "Copyright 1954." "Over 4,450,000 copies in print." "Sixty-second impression." "Now Available For Students And Teachers: the Casebook Edition containing the full text of the novel, critical essays, notes, and bibliography." Lord of the Flies leaped into public prominence in the mid-1950s and quickly became a classroom staple. A quick googling found half a dozen websites designed to help high school students generate reports on the novel's "symbolism," etc.

I didn't like Lord of the Flies when I read it back then and it's become less likable-- and less worthy of respect-- over the last half-century. It's a variation on Robinson Crusoe, except that this time a score of boys land (how? and not a one of them injured!!) on an uninhabited island in the Pacific. They very quickly degenerate into savages, murder two of their own number, and are hunting down the last boy who possesses a modicum of civility when a naval officer (nauta ex machina?) arrives to take command. Lord of the Flies is a dyspeptic, dystopian novel; it's also, according to the websites, a story of the contest between civilization and barbarism and, -- guess what? -- it's barbarism by a country mile.       

Robinson Crusoe himself was no perfect model of psychological health, but Defoe's story has been admired for centuries (it's the most reprinted novel in history) at least in part because it asserts that a resourceful human being can triumph over a bad situation. Crusoe reads his Bible, keeps a calendar and a diary, domesticates sheep, develops a working agricultural system, learns pottery, carpentry and other crafts, and builds himself both a summer and a winter domicile. Lord of the Flies, on the contrary, is entirely pessimistic about human capabilities: its flat, bookless, unskilled characters devolve rapidly into war-painted, violent tribesmen. Robinson Crusoe embodied Age of Reason optimism; Lord of the Flies is a post-Nazi novel in which there is no culture, government is nothing more than incipient dictatorship, and religion equals cruel scapegoating.         

Why was it imagined that Lord of the Flies had something of value to say about about human nature?  It's a sure thing that if Golding had written a novel in which an isolated group of people behave like reborn Crusoes and work cooperatively to tame the forest and create a communal utopia, he would have been derided as a simpleton. No room in the Cold War inn or on the best-seller lists or in high school curricula for optimism! 

Golding arranges it so that the descent into barbarism appears to be not circumstantial but inevitable. He banishes from his island women and therefore any need for reciprocity in social institutions. (Violence without heterosexual sex--just what's needed in the high school classroom!). Moreover, the boys who land on the island are not a representative set of human beings: they're English public school children who've already internalized poisonous notions of hierarchy, hazing, power and class. When, at the outset, they choose a chief, they're really selecting a head boy for whom lesser creatures will "fag." Of the island's inhabitants, the only one with more brain than earwax is the physically repulsive Piggy, while the only boy whose instincts are democratic is slow, tongue-tied, and indecisive. Meanwhile, Jack, to whom Golding grants leadership abilities, is a slick soulless demagogue. The author may appear to be impartial, but in fact he's stacked the deck so that the emergence of proto-fascism appears "natural." Golding, both a student and a teacher in English public schools, seems to think that adolescents of his own circle somehow represent common humanity. His analysis of culture is therefore as shallow as a parking-lot puddle. And because it's so shallow, the novel is a treasure-trove for the kind of teaching where the identification of "symbols" substitutes for genuine thought, or emotion, or aesthetic revelation. It's a convenient opportunity -- a casebook -- for the kind of bad reading that has damaged generations of students. 

Golding's island abounds not in intelligence but in absurdities. Is it credible that three or four pre-adolescent boys armed only with sharpened sticks could a) confront a wild boar and b) actually bring down a mature sow, and that the sow would lie still, or allow herself to be held to the ground while one of the boys repeatedly stabs and eventually kills the animal with a penknife, and c) that the same boys, using no other tools than the single penknife, could quickly skin, butcher and behead the sow, and then d) cut and drive into the ground a post stout enough on which to mount that head?  Or e) that a few boys could dislodge and push a rock that is "as big as a tank." Or that f) there could exist an uninhabited Pacific atoll so small that a group of boys could systematically search every inch of it like beaters on a hunt, but yet so large that, without experiencing much in the way of rain, it could have streams and pools of fresh water and, in addition, g) an inexhaustible supply of wild pigs (indigenous? feral?). If Lord of the Flies is an allegory, then perhaps such howlers don't matter. Yet even an allegory should not cause a reader to guffaw at inappropriate moments.

Reposted: The Sculpin, Slimy or Mottled?

Knowing little of the finny tribe, I borrowed the Bradford Public Library's copy of Langdon's introductory Fishes of Vermont (2006). It's an excellent, informative, helpful guide. With Langdon's help, I can now declare that it's undeniably the brown bullhead, a species of catfish, that has been multiplying in our pond. The bullhead, a villainous omnivore, is one of the causes of the steep decline of our population of frogs. The big, plug-ugly, bebarbelled brute gobbles frog-egg globules.   

Readers of this blague will not be astonished to learn that Dr. M .has fallen deeply in love with fish names. Take the brown bullhead, for example. It's also known by such evocative and lunatic denominations as the horned pout, the mudcat, and the minister. Minister?  To whom, or under what circumstances, would a brown bullhead minister?

My favorite Vermont fish, nomenclature-wise, is the slimy sculpin, also performing under such titles as the blob, the chucklehead, the rock cusk, the stargazer, and the cockatouch. The slimy sculpin should not be confused with its near cousin, the mottled sculpin -- which can also be addressed as the slowfish or gudgeon.

 

Many of the common Vermont fishes have lost their colorful historic names. The bowfin was once called the John A. Gindle, the stonecat was the doogler, the lake trout was the togue or longue, the burbot was variously ling or lawyer (lawyer? minister? why not accountant? or dentist?), the quillback was the buffalo, and the gar was the needlenose. On the other hand, the blandly-named pond perch of olden days is trending in the reverse direction: it's now called the pumpkinseed -- a name which seems curiously vegetarian for a predatory denizen of the deep.   

If I had known that there was a fish called the cisco (known on jolly days as the tollibee and on prosaic days as the sand herring), I would long ago have promoted Galen Cisco to my all-time-great Baseball-Fish Team, adding him to such piscine luminaries as Catfish Hunter, Dizzy Trout, Chico Salmon, Sid Bream, Bobby Sturgeon, Art "Red" Herring, and Shad Roe.

No Sculpins in MLB that I can recall, but In a more poetic universe, "Slimy" Sculpin would have been a spitball pitcher, or perhaps even a team owner.

Senior Bowl

I was talking on the telephone with a fan of the Washington Nationals and for some reason neither of us could recall the name of the lanky, scraggly-bearded shaggy-haired high-salaried power-hitting right fielder who once played for the Phillies and had a hard time last season but seemed to be starting out well this year, and whose grandfather played shortstop for the Pirates fifty year or so years ago.

Inasmuch as I once had near-perfect recall of such trivia, I was frustrated by the failure of memory. But I decided that this time I wasn't going to google the Nationals' roster but instead was going to force myself to cough up that name, no matter how many polysaccharides had clogged my synaptic pathways. I set my search memory program on full blast, and after about 45 minutes, while I was scrubbing the sink, out popped the moniker. I called the Washington fan and whispered into the telephone, triumphantly, these three syllables: Jay Son Werth. 

How does the human brain do that? You can't bring up a word or phrase, and then, an hour or a day later, there it is! Tiny chemical processes or electrical impulses chase from synapse to synapse until they just happen to happen upon the neuron or neurons where "Jayson Werth" is stored? Really? Hard to fathom. However it's accomplished, it's superbly miraculous.

But o-so-slow compared to the instant recall of my golden olden days.

So now I have this idea for a TV game show, modeled after College Quiz Bowl, but called Senior Bowl. The format: when a question is asked, competitors start the clock, which can run for, let's say, a couple of days. And also start the videotape machine. Competitors go about their business and the first person with the correct answer wins the round. When the tape is carefully and dramatically edited, it's perfect reality TV for oldsters.

Announcer: "Congratulations to prizewinner Vivian de St. Vrain, who was able to correctly identify the singer of "Duke of Earl" in only 17 hours, 12 minutes, and 43 seconds!"

A major breakthrough in golden-years tv.

And by the way, I can now proclaim to all the waiting world that the name of Jayson Werth's shortstop grandfather is -- "Ducky" Schofield.

A Suppressed Event

I've been reading about the early colonization of New York city, a subject that I've not approached since my days in elementary school in the 1950s, where, in retrospect, it seemed that we went over the ground quite regularly -- Henry Hudson, the purchase of Manhattan Island, New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, and the English acquisition of the Dutch colonies. As we learned it, it was a sunny story, untroubled and inevitable -- a path leading from pleasant but primitive beginnings to its inevitable culmination in the Greatest City in the Greatest Country on earth. There were large helpings of nationalism and triumphalism -- attitudes that I've come to loathe -- along with the insistence that America was chosen among all the nations for peace and tolerance. 

It appears, however, that there are events recounted in Russell Shorto's The Island at the Center of the World (New York, 2004) that, if they had been mentioned, might have diluted our tadpole triumphalism. Kieft's War, for example, was never discussed.

Willem Kieft was one of the Dutch governors of the new colony, and he was a pioneer in genocidal racism. A small group of indians had camped at Corlaer's Hook (now the Lower East Side) and a larger group had settled near what is now Jersey City in New Jersey. The Indians (Wickquassgeck and Tappan) sought sanctuary from the Dutch against the Mohawks, to whom they had fallen behind in their tribute payments. Kieft, for reasons of his own, launched an unprovoked attack. According to a contemporary chronicler, "infants were torn from their mother's breasts, and hacked to pieces in the presence of their parents, and the pieces thrown into the fire and in the water, and other sucklings, being bound to small boards, were cut, stuck,and pierced and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone. Some were thrown into the river, and when the fathers and mothers endeavored to save them, the soldiers would not let them come on land but made both parents and children drown.... Some came to our people in the country with their hands, some with their legs cut off, and some holding their entrails in their arms....  After this exploit, the soldiers were were rewarded for their service, and Director Kieft thanked them."

Such atrocities (there were many others) were omitted from the P. S. 217 curriculum. 

When I read these stories, I feel as though I was tricked. I'm indignant and angry.

It's all part of a grand deception in which every child is indoctrinated with the idea that his own group is wiser, kinder, and better than the others.

If our great country were truly superior, we would have shown it by telling the truth, the whole truth, not a purged and sanitized half-truth.