Dr. Metablog

On the Mall

On the mall, smoking, wheels (i.e. bicycles and skateboards), and pets are prohibited. Between forty and fifty signs and icons state the case very clearly. Nevertheless, the rules are often flouted.

Smokers are furtive: they can't help themselves even though they show, by their demeanor, that they are well aware that they're doing wrong. The bicyclists are apologetic. Skateboarders are oblivious, totally. The dog-owners are defiant. "No bureaucrat is going to tell me where I can walk my dog." The beggars are entitled. This morning, one disheveled youth carried a sign that read "Why lie?  I need to get fucked up." (I used occasionally to donate to our "homeless" until I was taught that meals are readily available and that the begged money goes to support alcohol and drug habits. Also I was taken aback when a man to whom I gave two quarters returned them to me, saying, "I don't take coins".)  Some of the buskers are fine musicians and earn their one or five dollar bill but I think that there is something rather sad about their forced cheer.

On the other hand, the strolling young folks, holding hands and radiantly in love, are wonderful to behold, especially when there's a toddler or two trailing them. And I also enjoy watching the strolling old folks, fifty or more years into marriage, sometimes holding hands, sometimes wheelchairing it. Dyads of all ages and kinds cheer and encourage me.

Susanne Bier: Things We Lost in the Fire (2007)

For the first twenty minutes or half-hour of Things We Lost in the Fire I thought that Susanne Bier, my current favorite director, had succeeded in transferring her wondrous Danish idiom into a big-name Hollywood production. I loved the unusual but profound relationships, especially between Brian Burke, the real-estate developer, and his childhood friend and heroin addict Jerry Sunborne. It was all far-off-the-grid, but it rang true. It's not easy to make a European movie in the American system. Nevertheless, I was disappointed when the second half of the film fell into deep cliche and became a familiar saga of addiction-recovery, complete with predictable confessions at the Narc-Anon shop. Brian's wife Audrey, played by the impossibly radiant Halle Berry, dominates the film equally as much with her acting as her beauty, but the script poses insuperable challenges -- especially when she is asked to retain her sexual innocence while snuggling in bed with Jerry. The direction is as might be expected highly accomplished, but I'm concerned that Bier's fondness for extreme close-ups, sometimes of only a single eye, has devolved into mere mannerism. The film received passable reviews but was a box-office failure, which is, unfortunately, not difficult to understand.

One's Name

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the renowned philosopher whose strict stringent strictures about language inadvertently destroyed my youthful interest in philosophy, wrote in one of his less rigorous moments that "a man's own name [should be] sacred to him. Surely it is both the most important instrument given to him and also something like a piece of jewelry hung round his neck at birth." Wittgenstein's name at birth was "Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein" -- his Jewish origins concealed behind a string of echt-German Christian names.

I've never thought that my own name was a piece of jewelry -- but if it were a jewel, it was entirely a counterfeit.

My surname is an accident. My grandfather, according to the story, was born into a family named Middlebank or perhaps Middlebrook. Because a sole male child was exempted from the draft in darkest nineteenth-century Ukraine, he was surreptitiously adopted into a childless family. As a result, the name that he brought to America in 1895 was a merely a useful fiction. And then there's my middle name, Hessel. The only Hessels I've ever been able to trace are almost uniformly Danish. My grandmother on my father's side was born Eta Hessel and it's from her that the name descended. But am I to believe that a troop of Danes wandered into eastern Ukraine sometime before 1850 and left progeny behind?  I doubt it. In any case, I don't feel any more Danish than I feel anything else. And then my praenomen was borrowed out of the book of Job. Why my atheist parents, who never ever attended religious services of any kind, would have elected for me an obscure Hebrew name will always remain a complete mystery. So the whole parcel is a fabrication, a construct, without integrity or authenticity.

What name should I have had, a name I could finger like a rich jewel about my neck. Something that would suit me?  Suggestions are welcome. I'm thinking "Rocco" for a first name (it's so appropriate), but I'll need help on the middle or middles and the family name.

Spontaneity

A close relative has accused me of lacking spontaneity. Specifically, "I doubt he ever did a spontaneous thing in his entire life."

I've been mulling over this attack and I can think of at least three spontaneous actions that I have performed.  A) Frequently, in the middle of the afternoon, without forethought or planning, I take a nap.  B) And closely related, but certainly different, sometimes, waking up in the morning, I decide, spontaneously, to lie in bed for another hour or so. And C), just yesterday, when I trundled over to the Public Library to borrow the book on ancient dead languages that I had reserved, I spontaneously pulled a second book (on Neanderthals) off the shelf. 

Now if those aren't plain and distinct instances of spontaneity I don't know what.

Moreover, I am making a long list of spontaneous actions to perform in the near future. 

Lost Books

If a person could rescue one of the many lost books of the Greeks and Romans, which would it be? I think most ordinary walking-around-Americans would nominate the lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics, about which Umberto Eco made such a fuss, and which is presumed to be a philosophical analysis of the genre of comedy.

I myself am not enamored of Aristotle's lit crit. I suspect that if the second book had survived, it would only show that Aristotle had invented a vocabulary to describe the various elements of comedy -- and as a result generations of scholars would have felt an obligation to conduct sterile and inhibiting debates about the precise interpretation of his various technical terms. So, therefore, if I were interested in comedy, rather than rescuing the second book I'd prefer to read Homer's lost Margites, famous among the ancients as a comic counterpart to the Iliad and Odyssey. It might have been fun, and we would certainly learn a lot more than we now know about the archaic Greek sense of humor. My suspicion is that we moderns would find the Margites to be a trial, a puzzle, a genuine challenge.  

Not only comedies but tragedies also have perished. Anyone who has been dazzled by the great Greeks would want to read the 60 or 70 lost plays of Aeschylus, the hundred or so that have disappeared by Sophocles as well as the 60 or so vanished plays of Euripides. No doubt our understanding of the great age of Athens and Athenian religion and art and politics would have to be thoroughly rethought. Nothing more tragic than the loss of the tragedies.

And then there is Livy's history of Rome in 142 books, of which only 35 (plus fragments and reports) survive. How much more full would be our knowledge of the last years of the republic with Livy as a guide.

But if I had to choose a single work of the ancients that has perished, I think I would opt for one of the books that were written by Livy's student and friend, the emperor Claudius. Claudius, whose first wife (and one of his better ones) Plautia Urganilla was a native speaker of Etruscan, wrote two books about the Etruscans: a general history, and a volume on the Etruscan language. It's this second book that I would most want to rescue. Claudius was the last person known to have been able to read Etruscan, a language which was becoming extinct in his lifetime.

Etruscan was an isolate -- a language with no known relatives, like Basque. It was written in an early (8th century) variety of Greek, so it can be recited, but it cannot be understood. Etruscan contributed not only its alphabet but a few words to Latin: "atrium," "histrio," "taberna," "stilus," and "cera," for example. Approximately 13,000 Etruscan inscriptions are in existence, mostly on gravestones. There are also about 300 bronze mirrors with religious or mythological scenes on one side, many with Etruscan inscriptions on the obverse. They are found in the tombs of women who, it would seem, must have been literate. There are no surviving Etruscan manuscripts but there is the Zagreb mummy. Sometime around 125 in the last pre-Christian millennium, an Egyptian technician re-used a linen Etruscan book to wrap a body. Twelve hundred legible words survive. They seem to record prayers and invocations to the gods. Not much else, except for a great linguistic mystery in the heart of civilized Europe. Alas that Claudius's books did not make it through the dark age bottleneck!