Dr. Metablog

News from my Brain

The twins and their older brother came to visit and were playing their favorite new game, "hide the goose." The goose?  a two foot tall hollow plastic replica perhaps originally a lawn ornament, now an excellent child's toy. Easy to find. After the hiding game had gone on long enough, and was just starting to become a trifle rambunctious, I tried to signal to my fellow student of Italian that the time had come for the goose to retire for the day -- but try as I might, I couldn't come up with a translation for the word goose. Later, after the lads had left, I looked in the Italian dictionary for "goose." Oca, it said. A strange, unanticipated word.  

I tried to recall the Latin word for goose. Nothing. But after several hours (and here comes the point of the story), a word suddenly floated to the surface -- anser. Let me tell you now, fans of Dr. Metablog, that I was exceedingly proud of myself. Fifty-five years or so after my last study of Latin, out popped anser. Self-celebration knew no bounds.

After I had stopped crowing about my triumph, I started to marvel at the brain -- not just my brain, but any brain. In what corner of the brain, in what concatenation of synapses, had the word anser been lurking lo these many decades. And what sort of ingenious search program needed only a few hours to ferret it out?  Glaciers have melted, rivers have changed their course, and yet anser remained unchanged, permanently embedded somewhere in my brain. It's kind of miraculous, isn't it?

So how did Italian acquire oca rather than a word descended from anser. Why not *asse, for example. My dictionary of classical Latin offers no alternative to anser, but the Italian etymological dictionary explains that the late Latin word for goose was auca, derived from a diminutive aucellus of avis (bird) and it cites as cognates old French oue and Occitan auca. No doubt demotic auca replaced the "book word" anser sometime in late antiquity.  

The result of this investigation: next time, I will be able to say, with great authority, "nascondi l'oca."

Sciascian Geography

Years ago, I read, in translation of course, a few of Leonardo Sciascia's Sicilian mysteries. Excellent books: The Day of the Owl (Il giorno della civetta -- 1961)), Equal Danger (Uguale pericolo --1973), The Challenge (Il contesto--1971). Last week I tried to read one of Sciascia's short stories in its native Italian. A good idea, but quite a struggle. Too taxing for my present fluency. Sciascia's vocabulary is enormous, mine is puny. Not to mention Sicilian expressions that would be stumpers and require footnoting even for mainland Italians.

The story I tackled is Il lungo viaggio, (The Long Voyage). Some impoverished Sicilian peasants pay a man whom we would call a coyote to smuggle them into America; he takes their entire savings, takes them on board his ship, and then after ten excruciating days sets them right back down in Sicily. A sad tale of exploitation, not, alas, irrelevant today. 

Sciascian geography: the Sicilians think they are headed for the middle Atlantic coast of North America, where they will find Nugioirsi, Nuovaiorche, and my very favorite, Brucchilin.

A Few Curious Italian Plurals

On the whole, Italian is a mighty regular language. Of course it has its irregularities, but many fewer than, say, English. Plurals, for example, are largely predictable, but with some curious exceptions. The masculine noun bue (ox or sometimes, by extension, a dolt) seems to call for the plural form *bui, but it's not so; it's buoi. Dio (god), becomes dei rather than *dii. The very ordinary word uomo (man), yields the extraordinary plural uomini -- which is strange indeed except to oldsters who remember homo, hominis from their high school Latin class. The word for wing is ala and, if Italian were law-abiding, its plural should be *ale but instead it's ali. Similarly, arma should yield *arme, but doesn't; it's armi. Eco has the plural echi, which seems normal, except that the singular is feminine and the plural masculine, so la eco but gli echi. Some words, conversely, have masculine singulars but feminine plurals: most notably, uovo (egg) which becomes uova rather than *uovi, while dito (finger) becomes the odd masculine dita. Paio (pair) is similar; its plural is paia. Il riso (a laugh) has the plural le risa. There's the same gender switch with the truly curious word for ear -- orrechio becomes orecchie. There are a few words with two slightly different plural forms, many of them words for parts of the body, such as braccio (arm) which can become bracci or braccia;  ciglio (eyebrow), which has plurals in cigli and ciglia; ginocchio (knee) which can be either ginocchi or ginocchia, and osso (bone) which can be ossi or ossa. I'm fond of muro (wall) the regular plural of which is muri (the walls of a house) but also yields the irregular plural mura, which refers to the fortifications or walls of a city. 

Chicolini on Trump

Our new president has an extraordinary ability to believe what he wants to believe, no matter the fact. He mocks a disabled reporter, we all see it with our own eyes, and yet he denies that he did so. He claims that his inauguration was the best attended in history, and then we look at the pictures, and see with our own eyes, not so. It is hard to know exactly how to interpret such effrontery, such a remarkable disregard of facts.

I fear that he is actually pulling the wool over his own eyes. He's certainly not pulling it over ours. 

He is marooned in an absurd farcical world. He is drowning in duck soup.  

Mrs. Teasdale:  Your Excellency! I thought you'd left.

Cihicolini: Oh, no, I no leave.

Mrs. Teasdale:  But I saw you with my own eyes!

Chicolini:  Well, who you gonna believe? Me or your own eyes?

Unfortunately, what in fiction is farce becomes tragedy in real life. Nonsense, assimilated as truth in the mind of a person in power, cannot be anything but incendiary. 

It Happened in Brooklyn, so they Say

If it happened in Brooklyn, it must have happened in metaphorical or mythological rather than real Brooklyn, because it's not the Brooklyn of my memory. It Happened in Brooklyn is a 1947 musical, I guess you'd have to call it, featuring still skinny Frank Sinatra and womanly Kathryn Grayson, and also Jimmie Durante, who steals the show. And also the ever-luminous Gloria Grahame in a very small role as an Army nurse in England. Brooklyn is evoked as a fairy tale land where everyone is nice to everyone and jobs and money fall from the trees -- kind of an urban big rock candy mountain. Not the case -- though nowadays Brooklyn, which used to be mocked, is every Twenty-Something's land of putative milk and theoretical honey. In truth there's nothing much that is recognizably Brooklynian -- even in geography -- to my jaded old eyes except a rather beautiful sequence of Frank Sinatra singing and "dancing" on Brooklyn Bridge. Most of the action supposedly takes place in the basement of New Utrecht High School, but in actual fact it's a Hollywood sound stage.

Sinatra, a returned soldier, thinks he's in love with Kathryn Grayson but she prefers Peter Lawford, playing the shy grandson of an English Dook. The film is worth seeing if only because Sinatra and Grayson sing, believe it or not, "La ci darem la mano" from Don Giovanni -- as far as I know Sinatra's only foray into grand opera.

If I had been the screenwriter, I would have had Gloria Grahame jump on a luxury liner and return to Brooklyn for the climactic concluding scene, rather than remaining, as she does, merely a sweet overseas memory of Frankie's. 

It Happened in Brooklyn

 

Poor Robert Mitchum (Out of the Past, Angel Face)

On successive nights, we watched Out of the Past (1947) and Angel Face (1953). Both are, as they say, "gripping" films. In my present situation, "gripping" means that even though the nominal curtain rose on these movies after 9:00 pm, and I was in bed, comfortable, with a full stomach, I was sufficiently gripped that I didn't waver or snooze or nap, even for a second. Such criteria of excellence may not seem significant to younger folk, but trust me, loyal readers, in these latter years, staying awake and engaged is a crucial critical yardstick.    

Both Out of the Past and Angel Face are superior noirs. In both films the central character is played by Robert Mitchum. I couldn't detect a the least tad of difference between the two parts he plays. You could lift his Jeff Bailey from Out of the Past and plunk him down in Angel Face as Frank Jessup and no one would notice, except that civilian Frank would lack private-eye Jeff's semi-official trench coat and fedora. In both films, Mitchum's character is expressionless and sleepy-eyed and smart but, once his testosterone kicks in, falls prey to a clever, ruthless bad bad bad girl. Both characters know that they're being framed for murder and yet can't just pack up and move to Nebraska or Mexico or somewhere sensible -- as any human being outside of the world of noir would do. You, the spectator, want to raise yourself from your soft pillow and shout at the TV and at the guys Mitchum plays, "Hey you big lug, what the heck are you doing. Use your noodle." But lunkhead Mitchum makes mistake after mistake. I hope everyone who's reading this post has seen the movies, because I don't want to spoil their pleasure in the endings, but let me just say this -- Jeff, or Frank, or Bob, please next time don't get into an automobile with a homicidal femme fatale in the last few frames of a murder mystery and expect to escape alive. And if you must  do so, at least check your so-called girlfriend's purse for a silver-handled Beretta. And under no circumstances surrender to her the keys to the vehicle. Do the driving yourself.

These films have everything one would want in a classic film noir: a relentless wicked ambitious beautiful dame who entraps an honest but naif and helpless ingenu, and also snappy dialogue, a gloomy claustrophobic atmosphere, multiple plot twists and turns, and the valueless atomistic society that Hobbes feared would follow from curtailed authority. And much yearning for cash, which is never in adequate supply. Lots of shadows and odd-angled photography. Some good, complicated characters but a few who are merely melodramatically evil. 

Mitchum's acting is much praised of late but I don't buy it: he's effective in a way but monochromatic to a fault. A better actor is Kirk Douglas, who  projects gleeful menace as a corrupt, criminal businessman. But to me both movies are carried by their female leads. Dazzling Jane Greer as Kathie Moffat is equally adept at innocence and villainy, often in the same scene, sometimes from moment to moment. At the end of the film, when she's killing people left and right, she wears a nun-like snood that only an accomplished actress could transform into a brilliant metaphor. Equally splendid is Jean Simmons as the angel-faced Diane Tremayne, who conveys innocence, ambition, obsession, and intermittent but genuine madness with the raise of an eyebrow (and the help of excellent lighting). And good girl Mona Freeman shines in a restaurant scene in which she sees right through Tremayne's beauty to the dangerous craziness beneath.  

Here's Mitchum and Greer together.