Dr. Metablog

More on Muff and Spot

I enjoy good relations with animal -- respectful, sometimes even affectionate. I remember with great fondness the many purring, playful cats and kittens of my youth. I was once very taken with a calf named September and, I confess, almost in love with the matriarch of a small herd of Morgans, a lovely lady named Gillian. The twin Nigerian dwarf goats, Orville and Wilbur, were, I think, special friends. But for some reason I've never taken to dogs, even though I know the story about dog/human co-evolution. Doggy dogs are moderately acceptable, but the various special breeds of dogs, dog-show dogs, seem to me to be freaks and monstrosities. We should have left them as wolves and not meddled.

Of all the various teratological breeds my least favorites are the ones who have been hybridized into snoutlessness. Dogs deserve and need a snout.

I was once attacked by a snoutless ugly bulldog; its owner, who, incidentally, had quite a snout himself, instead of apologizing profusely, made the utterly unjustified claim that I had provoked the attack. The incident reinforced my prejudice against bulldogs. It's not just that bulldogs are aggressive; let's make no bones about it, it's that for some inexplicable perverse reason they've been bred to be hideous. A travesty of a dog.  

Nevertheless, I was startled to read the following paragraph in Richard C. Francis' new book on domestication of animals (Domesticated, Evolution in a Man-Made World, 2015):

The squashed face carries a heavy cost in and of itself. It starts with breathing problems. The shortened snout causes the soft palate to bunch up in front of the trachea in a way that impedes airflow. Since panting is the primary way for dogs to cool, bulldogs are also vulnerable to death by overheating. The mouth of a bulldog is also too small to accommodate its teeth, so they are crowded and grow at odd angles, trapping food debris. Gum disease is rampant. A bulldog's eyes don't seat properly In the skull and can pop out, even from straining at a leash. Often the eyelids cannot close completely, resulting in irritations and infection. The excessive skin folds often become infected. Perhaps most telling, the bulldog's head has become too large to pass through the birth canal; most births require Caesarean section.

Big mistake, the bulldog. We humans should have learned to leave well enough alone.

Old Folks Show How it's Done

There are two memorable moments in Kent Haruf's competent, enjoyable and posthumous novel, Our Souls at Night (2015). The first is the proposal that Addie Moore make to Louis Waters that starts it all off. Addie and Louis are long spouseless and in their seventies, solitary. Addie calls on Louis and says, without much preparation, "I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me." The second takes place after Addie and Louis have become a couple and the local Holt, Colorado Nosey Parkers are beginning to gossip. The lovers decide to confront the talkatives directly. "They stood at the corner of Second and Main in the bright noon sun waiting for the light to change and looked straight back at the people they met and greeted them and nodded and she had her arm entwined with his and then they walked across the street to the Holt Café where he opened the door for her followed her inside. They stood waiting to be seated. People inside looked at them. They knew about half of those sitting in the café, or at least knew who they were. The girl came and said, is it the two of you?  It is, Louis said. We'd like one of those tables out in the middle."  The forthrightness, the honesty in both of these scenes is rather wonderful. And so it's sad that eventually the puritanism of the Colorado plains wins out and the novel becomes a trifle ScarletLetter-y. But good for the septuagenarians, I say, who show a lot more grit and juice than their townsfolk and family. 

Words of My Life -- Boobs

When I was a boy, a boob was simpleton, a nincompoop, what Shakespeare calls a mooncalf and what in an earlier life I might have called a schmuck or a schmendrick. "Boobs" was an everyday expression; so common and pervasive that The Three Stooges might just as easily have been called the The Three Boobs. There were other related uses of the word; "booby hatch" -- a semi-humorous appellation for what used to be called an insane asylum, and also the "boob-tube" -- though whether the boob in that doublet denoted the machine itself or the schmendricks who stared at it was never clear to me. But at some point in my linguistic career the word "boob" re-emerged with a new primary signification. It now seems to have become the most common word for the female breast.

I do not like it when a breast is called a boob. It is disrespectful. A breast is soft and nurturing but also erotic and enticing. A boob is neither; it is a denatured object, stripped of its warm associations and joined instead to foolishness and boobery. "Boob" is a deliberately unsexual and undignified term. It is also, as Shakespeare says in a different context, "base, vulgar and popular."

And available. If a person should happen to google the word "boob," perhaps searching for information of an etymological kind, the first, second, third and perhaps hundredth entry that he or she will encounter are for "boob selfies." A "boob selfie," for readers equally as naïve as me, is a photograph which a woman takes of her boobs and posts on the internet.

Jane Austen did not do this. Neither did George Eliot. I can't demonstrate that the word "boob' is responsible for such a decadent display of immodesty, but I do note that phrases such as "breast selfies" or "bosom selfies" are inconceivable. 

Nor did suicidal Cleopatra, when bringing the venomous asp to her breast, say "Peace, peace/ Dost thou not see my baby at my boob/ That sucks the nurse asleep."

Other words of my life: slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage.

"Oil the Women"

A friend recalls seeing a film, many years ago (1950s or 60s), in which a character speaks the wonderful line, "0il the women." My friend cannot remember the name of the movie or much about it, except that it was a desert "sword and sandal" job in which a sheik or pasha or emir or something else very "Orientalist," preparing for a lubricious but acceptable-to-the-League-of-Decency orgy, utters the fabulous phrase.

I can't identify the film and the words don't google. Does anyone out there in blaguelandia know where such an inspired bit of dialogue occurred. Who said it?  And more importantly, what genius wrote it?  

In the absence of real information, I'm free to create my own scenario. It's got to be a 1950s film in now-faded Technicolor, and really cheesy. It's not a real desert but a sound stage with minimal sand and and a few plastic rocks. The inferior lighting allows you to see shadows on the stained backcloth that passes for a vista. The costumes are off the rack and every once in a while there's a visible zipper. A microphone appears briefly and intermittently at the top of the screen. The part of the sheik is played not by Steve Cochran but by one of his less-accomplished imitators. The dialogue is in pseudo-archaic phony-middle-Eastern-accented English.

News comes of a victory in battle and the bejeweled and beturbaned emir, whose heavy eyebrows dance above his too-heavily-kohled eyes, turns to his muscular bodyguards and shouts, "bring out the food, bring out the drink, oil the women."

Anyway, that's the way I imagine it. But it's also possible that the line comes from a parody of such a film. Could it be tucked away somewhere in a Marx brothers movie? Or somewhere in one of Mel Brooks' historical skits. It's Monte Pythonish but alas before their time. 

Please help, friends of Vivian de St. Vrain. Who oiled what women?

Liberal Water on Mars??

Egregious Rush Limbaugh, who ranks number three on my list of the people who, in the course of my lifetime, have done the most damage to the United States of America (Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia are one and two and Dick Nixon only slithers in at number 6) speaks a language that is extraordinarily difficult to parse. His sentences are shapeless, wayward, and undiagrammable, equally indifferent to the conventions of language and the rules of logic. When you're fact-free there's no compelling reason not to be grammar-free as well. 

Now there's a new and appalling example of Limbaugh's resistance to reality. NASA recently announced that the planet Mars must once have had flowing water and might still have underground water. Limbaugh, if I read his tangled language aright, not only rejects the discovery but claims that water on Mars is evidence a "left-wing agenda"  at work. Wow, we are tempted to exclaim. Double wow. Paranoia run amok. 

How can Limbaugh present such a counter-factual notion with a straight face?  In order to coherently present his "thoughts" on this subject, I will now extract and re-assemble some of his phrases from the linguistic rats' nest in which they are embedded. Here's his chain of "thought" reduced to its essence. First of all, global warming is a myth. Secondly, NASA has been "corrupted by the current regime" and has falsified climate data. Inasmuch as NASA is a mendacious organization, its discoveries about flowing water must therefore also be false. And because NASA is subject to a leftist regime, its claims must be not only false but "a technique to advance the leftist agenda." A watery Mars is therefore a "leftist' Mars. And so the circle is almost complete. Limbaugh knows he's correct but hasn't quite figured out how it all works:  "I don't know what it is, I would assume it would be something to do with global warming."  So round and round we go. 

While Limbaugh's logic is roundabout, his perspective cramped and his evidence, how shall I say, perhaps a bit on the skimpy side -- all assertion and no fact --  I feel that I must agree with his conclusion. Yes indeed, the discovery of ancient flowing water on Mars is definitely "leftist"-- and is leftist in at least two different ways.

Let us try to connect the subterranean dots inside the Limbaughian skull. What is it that is so paranoia-inducing and threatening about Martian water? Well, water on Mars might indicate life on Mars. If there is life on Mars, then there might be life elsewhere in the universe. If life elsewhere in the universe, then the creation story in Genesis is certainly incomplete and probably false. No creation myth, no biblical absolutism. Moreover, if there is life elsewhere, there are probably intelligent beings who are highly likely not to worship our earthly gods and are probably not -- horror of horrors --  subscribe to Baptist fundamentalism. Water on Mars therefore challenges his local and provincial Truth. Limbaugh is therefore correct to see Martian water as 'leftist" in its implications.

Watery Mars is yet another blow to conservative "thought." It's just like evolution or the big bang -- in actuality like any truth that comes to be discovered either by hard science or social science or by the unbiased study of history. Truth and fact are anathema to radical conservative Limbaughians. Of course they are repelled and confused by scientific discoveries.  Martian water is still another manifestation of the continual drip drip drip of facts that challenge their provincial world view and animate their paranoia. 

My Grace

I'm devoutly secular, just as I was raised. Moreover, almost all of my friends are equally unreligious: either retired Catholics or atheist Jews or freethinkers or lapsed UU's or never-wases. I was therefore taken aback and a bit unsettled last week when at a friend and neighbor's dinner party, just as the guests were starting to dig in, we all paused for a moment and held hands while the head of the household thanked the Lord for providing. It was a brief and inoffensive grace but still startling because so unfamiliar. I had momentarily stepped into another world.  

And then I thought, if I were preparing to deliver a "grace" before a meal, what would I say?  Who would I thank?  For I readily confess that I feel great gratitude every time that I lift a loaded fork to my hungry, salivating mouth.  

To begin, I wouldn't thank any god or gods, because I don't see the least evidence or sign of the supernatural around the table. No god of the beets or the chicken or the lasagna.

Instead, I would thank, sincerely and reverently, all the people, present and past, who have in fact made a real and palpable contribution to the meal. Let us think for a moment about the slice of bread. While I could not detect the real presence of anything transcendent, yet the bread was immanent with the labor of the farmer. And the trucker who delivered the fertilizer and the trucker who took the wheat to market. And the guys at the John Deere factory in Moline who made the tractor that harvested all the seven grains in my particular slice. And the baker. Road builders. And for that matter, now that I think about it, how about our intelligent Neolithic ancestors who first spotted the einkorn or emmer and decided that it was a plant worth domesticating. Moreover, the butter that I lavished on the bread did not arrive by flights of angels but through its own particular chain of development and distribution. And then the wine, the "merry cheerer of the heart" which wouldn't have cheered anyone's heart if someone hadn't mastered the technology not only of wine-making, but also of glass bottles. And I would also like to thank the furniture makers -- the designers, the carpenters, the turners -- because there would be no sitting at the table without their help. And therefore foresters and the manufacturers and inventors of chain saws. I could go on and on, but I think the sitters-down at my board would take my point. A moment's reflection reminds us that when we collect ourselves for dinner, we profit from the efforts and endeavors of not dozens but millions of people. Diachronic and synchronic, now and then.

It is to all of them that I offer my thanks, my gratia, my grace. And in doing so I acknowledge my continuing connection to all members of our wonderful, horrible species.