Dr. Metablog

Another Amusing Dream

I hit a ball sharply to right field into the cosmos and made it safely to second base. (By "cosmos" I do not mean that I hit the ball into the universal void, but rather into a patch of cosmos i.e. cosmos bipinnatus, the common herbaceous perennial that was growingly thickly against the stadium wall, something like the ivy at Wrigley.) I was standing on second, enjoying the applause of 80,000 spectators at the old Yankee Stadium, when my daughter-in-law suddenly appeared with her two-year-old toddler in tow and handed him to me, saying, "you're in charge." She disappeared, so there I was on second holding the boy by the hand. I told him to stay put, but on the next pitch he broke for third, running as fast as his little legs could carry him. I called out to the shortstop, "Now you're in charge."  At which point I cannot recall anything further, except that I tried to follow the boy to third but I could hardly run and it felt as though I was running through mucilage.

A curious dream. Dream professionals and analysts will no doubt be attracted by the claim to significance embodied in the word "cosmos" and by the dreamer's -- that is to say my -- transparent urge to shirk responsibility.

Welders Versus Philosophers

I asked some friends how they understood Senator Marco Rubio's very blunt statement that "Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers."  I received a variety of answers.

My linguistically conservative friends asserted that we obviously need grammarians more than either philosophers or welders, because Rubio doesn't respect the difference between "less" and "fewer." I admit that "less philosophers" clanks on my sensitive inner ear; nevertheless, I don't think that it's wise to hold presidential candidates to high standards of usage. It would be enough for them to grasp the issues. No one I know is so very prescriptivist that he or she will vote for the candidate who knows the difference between less and fewer. I confess to a longing for a more perfect language from our leadership, but traditional  grammar is too much to ask, especially since it's evident that our electorate easily acclimated to the barbarisms of bushlingo.     

Others of my friends took issue with Rubio's unabashed materialism. They parsed his statement to mean "welders make more money than philosophers and therefore we should have more welders than philosophers." Welding is better than philosophizing because it makes the bucks, gathers the green. If this is what Rubio meant, then his argument is not only crass but wrong. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics proves that both graduates with a philosophy degree and professional philosophers (meaning professors of philosophy) enjoy much larger salaries on average than welders. But even if welders did outearn philosophers, Rubio's argument would still be monumentally vulgar. I don't know anyone who, if push came to shove, assigns value strictly on the basis of earnings. Do we not value men of the cloth, social workers, nurses, small farmers, G.I's, smoke-jumpers and sometimes teachers more than we value pornstars and slumlords? Einsteins more than reality TV celebrities? And as much as we respect the crafts -- electricians, plumbers, tractor and auto mechanics -- we also know that it is not the craftsmen but the philosophers who now as in the past are going to help us think our way out of our plight. Just as Locke and Hume got us out of Aristotle and the Bible and into the age of reason, and Darwin laid the foundation for all the advances of the last hundred and fifty years in biology and medicine, so we now need someone, desperately, equipped with deep learning and an insightful brain, to generate the ideas that will get the new messy electronic world, bedeviled with fundamentalists/terrorists, into some kind of intellectual order. Welders are good, especially when you want something fastened to a steel I-beam, but philosophers have their place as well. Rubio is just too downright short-sighted for most of us. We know that money ain't everything and we want our statesmen to know it as well. Rubio's assertion that welders do more valuable work than thinkers participates in bottom-line American anti-intellectualism. We're a can-do practical people; we can see what welders do. Who knows what the heck those airy liberal philosophers do at those lefty universities? Can they fix a fuse? Can they meet a payroll?

Another bunch of my friends objected that there's no reason why a person can't be both a welder and a philosopher. Why set limits on human versatility?  As it happens, I have in my own family a fellow who makes his living with his brain but who also builds his own furniture, can wire a house, and has, strange but true, taken up welding. But I think he'd be the first to admit that he's not a pro at any of these crafts. We live in a world of specialists and it's hard to be perfectly skilled at two crafts, let alone a craft plus metaphysics or epistemology or logic. I understand the longing for the philosopher-welder, but I don't think it's a realistic wish. It's utopian, prelapsarian, perhaps even Marxist. After all, it was Marx who developed the vision of post-capitalist communist society "where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, [where] society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, philosophize after dinner, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or philosopher" (German Ideology [1845]). This is Marx at his least practical. I suspect that his hunters and fishermen would return empty-handed, his herdsman would find that his cows never come home, and his part-time philosophers would boggle over some elementary error in logic or language. So no dice to the philosopher-welder, I'm afraid. Not a starter, Karl.

What I myself would want to ask Rubio is this: how does it happen that there are not enough welders?  Rubio puts his faith in the perfect workings of the free market. In theory, the market should have solved the problem of the missing welders by raising their salaries to make the job more enticing. And similarly, it should have lowered the wages of philosophers to dry up the supply. Wait a sec!!  Is it possible that the free capitalist market is not doing its job. And if I or Marco Rubio propose that we establish more community colleges and offer potential welders training in their craft at little or no cost, are we not interfering with the proper working of capitalism and the free market? Picking winners and losers, in the dread phrase.  t's centralized planning, almost socialism to do so-- certainly anathema to the wing of the party to which Rubio belongs. Riddle me that.

Bottom line:  it's helpful for Rubio to advocate for more welders. It's not helpful (nor a credit to his candidacy) to set up a false antagonism between welders and philosophers. Below the bottom line:  a democratic electorate need thoughtful voters (let us call them philosophers). Welders need to be philosopher-enough that they don't let themselves be snookered by some demagogue who himself is bookless and factless and history-less. It's a challenge to identify a thoughtful candidate when one of our major parties is offering a full slate of empty but noisy barrels.

Ferns

It's a little late in the day for me to embark on a career in pteridology. Too many ferns, too little time. There may be a backup option: intimate, private pteridophilia or even pteridomania. 

But in fact, empty enthusiasm is no substitute for knowledge. It's mortifying that after all these years of treading upon, admiring and sometimes even transplanting them, I know almost nothing about the Ophioglassales or the Marattiales, the Equisetums (although I can identify both the scouring rush and the horsetail), the Hymenophyllales, the lygodium (which climbs with a twining midrib), nor the aquatic Salviniales. And then there are the twelve thousand separate and individual species of Polypodiales. Although I could not help being aware of polypody ferns -- they're all over the place, sparkling in the understory and thriving in forest clearings -- I could not name the name of a single one save the extremely distinctive and graceful maidenhair and the undistinguished plain (and poisonous) and absolutely ineradicable bracken. 

Nor, until I read Robbin Moran's enchanting A Natural History of Ferns (Portland, OR, 2004) did I have a clear idea of how ferns reproduce. Of course I was familiar with the folklore upon which Shakespeare drew -- that the seed of the fern is invisible and confers invisibility. There's a micro-debate on the truth of this imaginative idea in an early scene of The First Part of Henry the Fourth:

Gadshill:  We steal as in a castle, cocksure; we have the receipt [i.e. recipe] of fern-seed, we walk invisible.   

To which the skeptical chamberlain replies, "Nay, by my faith, I think you are more beholding to the night than to fern-seed for your walking invisible."  

Our sometimes clever but often obtuse ancestors, knowing that all plant must have seeds, and that ferns didn't, jumped to the conclusion that fern seeds must be invisible. Well, there's a theory. It took a surprisingly long time for the truth to out. In fact ferns bear very small, sometimes even microscopic spores, visible, at best, as a fine dust. It was not until 1794 that John Lindsay noticed that the spores produced a tiny green growth, nor until 1848 that Michael Jerome Leszczyc-Suminski deployed his microscope to determine that these so-called prothalli produced male and female sexual parts, and that from the union of egg and motile sperm an embryonic plant with roots, leaves, and stems was produced.

It seems like an unnecessarily complicated way to reproduce, but let's not judge it harshly because it's worked very successfully for 345 million years, more or less.   

Of all the many ferns of past and present, the one that I would most like to see with my own eyes fell by the evolutionary wayside 225 million years ago and is unlikely to be resurrected in some vegetable Jurassic Park. They're the giant lepidodendrons of the late Carboniferous, tree-size ferns that in the form of coal are very likely providing right now the power for your and my computer.  

One oddity of some lepidodendra  was that after fertilization they took an unusual (perhaps even unique) path. The plant's root aborted while the burgeoning shoot produced both the usual stem and also a downward-growing rooting organ -- not a true root though it anchored the plant, but a root-like system called a rhizomorph. Because the plant was a monocarp --that is, a plant that grows for many years until mature, then flowers, fruits and dies -- both the upside and the downside of the plant were, so to speak, term-limited. And because the stem went both up and down, above ground and below ground, it was remarkably symmetrical along the axis of the soil. 

I wonder how a forest of lepidodendra would have appeared to a modern eye. Very exotic, I imagine. Lepidoptera differed from modern trees in many ways, but particularly in that their trunks were green with chlorophyll rather than bark-brown. I think that a grove of them would have been littered with many uprooted or rather uprhizomorphed plants. Quite a jungle, I should imagine, and quite a delicious menu for the lumbering beasts who feasted upon it. 

Enough/ More

"Enough" is a mighty peculiar looking word, but a good one nevertheless. It frequently shows up in older texts as "enow." I don't know how the original medieval velar fricative signified by "ough" evolved into so many different pronunciations: e.g. although, through, hiccough, plough, rough.

My favorite enough proverb dates back to the fifteenth century, and is as pertinent now as then: "enough is as good as a feast."  Our moralizing ancestors knew that "the avaricious scraping together that knows no bounds" was a vice, especially because it "renders us unfeeling to the wants of others." Yes to a full belly, no to the excesses of the feast.

There's an oblique modern commentary on "enough is as good as a feast" in Maxwell Anderson/John Huston's Key Largo. The dialogue is notable and familiar, especially when we call to mind that the gangster Johnny Rocco is played by Edward G. Robinson and the war hero Frank McCloud is Humphrey Bogart.   

Johnny Rocco: There's only one Johnny Rocco.

James Temple: How do you account for it?

Frank McCloud: He knows what he wants. Don't you, Rocco?

Johnny Rocco: Sure.

James Temple: What's that?

Frank McCloud: Tell him, Rocco.

Johnny Rocco: Well, I want uh ...

Frank McCloud: He wants more, don't you, Rocco?

Johnny Rocco: Yeah. That's it. More. That's right! I want more!

James Temple: Will you ever get enough?

Frank McCloud: Will you, Rocco?

Johnny Rocco: Well, I never have. No, I guess I won't.

So there it is -- a nice contrast between "enough" and "more".  And instructive, I think, in this day and age when our one-percenters seem to want more and more, and are incapable of grasping that "enough is enough."

Rose Zimbardo (1932-2015)

When I taught Shakespeare for the first time, at CCNY in the mid-60s, fresh out of graduate school, I was mightily unprepared. I set myself the challenge of teaching a new play every week for thirty weeks. So every weekend I would tackle a play that I had read but not studied and then MWF try to explain it to my unwilling cherubs. I learned a lot but I can't imagine that I was an effective instructor, struggling, as I was, to keep my academic head above water (and, by the way, deal with a colicky newborn at home).

But sometime during that first year I met Rose Zimbardo, who was teaching another section of the course, and it was from Rose that I began to learn my trade. She was a few significant years older than I, more experienced (and more imaginative as well). Rose invited me to go for lunch with her and her great friend Ed Quinn, who had recently completed, nominally with O. J. Campbell, but in fact all by himself, the still useful Shakespeare Encyclopedia. Quinn knew everything and Rose was chock full of theories about the plays, some sensible, some borderline daft, but all provocative. Lunches for me with Ed and Rose became a moveable seminar -- and it is not an exaggeration to say as valuable as another Ph. D. I was challenged, inspired. 

I lost that job (good fortune in the long run) and Rose moved on to Stony Brook. I didn't meet Ed Quinn for many years, when I encountered him at Boston hotel sometime in the 80s, and we had a moment to reminisce. I never set eyes on Rose again. But I thought about her and Ed often and I look back with fondness and gratitude for all they taught me.

Ed died a few years ago, a great loss. And now Rose.

Last year, through the miracle of the internet, I was able to exchange a few emails with Rose. I hope I properly expressed my appreciation for all she had done for me. It was my intention to visit her the next time I found myself in California (she had retired to Davis, which she professed to loathe) as part of my farewell tour.Too late, alas. 

Rose was a fine scholar, an excellent teacher, and a great lady. Rest in peace, old friend.