Dr. Metablog

Zeus: the Apology

If I've offended anyone, I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to; I have tremendous respect for pretty and desirable women. 10s, all of them. So let me just start by saying that many years ago, decades or centuries I can't remember exactly when, I had a thunderous crush on Io. She claims that she signaled me that she wasn't interested, but I did not stop. You know, when you're a god, they let you do it. You can do anything. It was probably a mistake to have turned her into a heifer but I think she enjoyed it then -- even if she complains about it now. Same thing with Leda; it's possible that I misinterpreted her but I honestly thought that her "no" meant "maybe" or "yes," so I turned myself into a swan and grabbed her by the pussy. Maybe I should have backed off, especially since she had already spent that same night with her husband Tyndareus, who had, as everyone knows, very small hands, if you know what I mean. It's good to be a god. And then there was Semele. I mean, she was one of my very own priestesses, and I realize now that your own priestesses ought to be off limits. But she provoked me by bathing nude in the river Asopus. And I happened to be flying by in the shape of an eagle. What happened, happened. It was definitely wrong of her to ask to look at me face to face and I regret that I incinerated her, but it wasn't my fault. Europa was also an error, but she should have known better than to come near to me when I'm in the shape of a white bull. And the same with Taygete who came to me as a doe with golden horns. I couldn't stop myself. I've always had a thing for golden horns, though I think Pindar made a bit too much of it. And then there was Dia, who happened by, so she says, when I was in the shape of a stallion. What can you expect of a stallion? Alcmene, that's another story. She was tall and beautiful, with eyes that reminded me of Aphrodite. I definitely wanted her. I had to disguise myself as her husband Amphitryon to make love to her. Maybe it was wrong to do so, but I don't think she ever figured out what actually happened, which kind of excuses me. And then there was my adventure with Antiope, where I disguised myself as a satyr; and once you're a satyr well, you know, a satyr does what a satyr does. To seduce Callisto, I had to transform myself into Artemis, which sounds a little like girl-on-girl action, but it really wasn't because it was me. Come to think of it, I can't remember exactly how we did it. And also: I blame Acrisius for shutting up his daughter Danae in a bronze tower. I took it as a deliberate provocation. I had to sneak through an air vent to impregnate Danae in the form of a shower of golden rain, which, I have to tell you, wasn't entirely satisfying and just a little bit kinky.

But what can I say?  I don't want to play the victim, because, after all, I am a god, but I had a hard childhood, what with my father castrating my grandfather and then me being suckled by the goat Amalthea. You get off to a bad start when you're suckled by a goat. 

"Wyoming"

I am totally in love with a bit of dialogue in Dog Day Afternoon (1975), the great Sidney Lumet social drama/comedy/crime film.

Sonny's plan to finance his wife Leon 's sex change operation by robbing a bank has run aground. In exchange for freeing his hostages, Sonny wants a plane to take him to a foreign country. He asks his not-so-brilliant friend/co-conspirator Sal to what country he would want to travel. Sal cogitates for a while, then suggests, "Wyoming."  After a pause, Sonny replies, "Sal, Wyoming's not a country." The exchange (by John Cazale as Sal and Al Pacino as Sonny) is delivered magnificently -- Cazale with blank-faced understated sincerity, Pacino with tempered exasperation.

"Wyoming" was not in the script (nor in the essay from which the script was drawn) but was improvised by Cazale. A moment of pure genius.

If you haven't seen the film, run -- not walk -- to your nearest TV.  

Old Age, Poetry, Ulysses

It wasn't until I reached college that I discovered poetry. My comic-book, super-hero and baseball-infused brain was until then, poetry-wise, an almost complete tabula rasa; I say "almost" because at eight or nine eight years old I had already memorized two great classics of American literature: "Casey at the Bat" and also the poem by Grantland Rice about Tinkers, Evers, and Chance. In addition, I knew the ubiquitous stercoraceous distich the first line of which is "Here I sit, broken-hearted" and a related gnomic verse that begins, "No matter how much you wiggle and dance." Then in 1956 I left Flatbush for higher education and enrolled in a course in English Literature. The rest, as they say, is history. It was love sonnets and rich luscious liquid poems by Marlowe and Keats and Hopkins that entranced me. The more intellectual poems were too taxing for my immature head. Lycidas, which I now can acknowledge to be the finest poem in the language, was utterly impenetrable for at least a decade, although I immediately responded to its music: "With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves." 

One of my teachers sagely observed that certain poets and certain poems were for youth, some for maturity, and some for old age. "You may no longer like then what you like now." Which has come to pass. As an example of poetry for the latter years, he adduced Tennyson's "Ulysses." "This poem may not mean much to you now, but it will some day, if you live long enough." I remember that I was much taken with the touchstone line "Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy" but I thought that "Ulysses" was too much about a really old guy trying to cheer himself up and I did not see it holding a place in any future that I could envision. 

Well, folks, I've now arrived at the so-called golden years, or, more properly, the endgame, or extra innings (which in some sports is called sudden death) and guess what?  "Ulysses" has returned, front and center, exactly as was predicted 50+ years ago. It's right on target. 

Tennyson's Ulysses is Homer's adventurer a generation older, kinging it in Ithaca, but bored, unchallenged, and unstimulated. "It little profits that an idle king,/ By this still hearth, among these barren crags,/ Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole/ Unequal laws unto a savage race,/ That hoard and sleep, and feed,/ And know not me."

To put it vulgarly, Ulysses plans to bust out of the home for old kings. He's been a warrior, a hero, and a roving explorer. He "cannot rest from travel." He needs to search "beyond the utmost bound of human thought." He leaves Penelope, and he resigns the government of Ithaca to his bureaucratically-minded son Telemachus. The last lines of the poem, the leave-taking, are most stirring:  

                           Come, my friends

"Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides,

And though we are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Yes, I know -- the diction is a little antiquated and artificial, the urge to get away a trifle too vehement. But nevertheless, I'm moved by the resilience, the perseverance. Though tear-inducing, the poem is anything but lachrymose. And it's accepting: "that which we are, we are."

It has lately become the fashion to interpret "Ulysses" as a poem about capitalism and imperialism. In this reading, Ulysses is just another white male, off to conquer and colonize The Alien Other. Or to see it as a poem about male privilege: he's a bad husband, abandoning the family. Or to conceive the poem as a structure of ironies, in which Ulysses doesn't realize that he undermines his own suppositions. There's a tad of truth in these arguments, as there always is, because Tennyson was caught up in a Victorian striving that he didn't fully or consciously assimilate. But frankly, I feel sorry for readers who can't hear the verve and excitement in Ulysses's expansive view of things. 

Moreover, it turns out that Tennyson was absolutely correct to proclaim that there is a time in life when "not to yield" is an act of daily heroism.

One of my teachers sagely observed that certain poets and certain poems were for youth, some for maturity, and some for old age. "You may no longer like then what you like now." Which has come to pass. As an example of poetry for the latter years, he adduced Tennyson's "Ulysses." "This poem may not mean much to you now, but it will some day, if you live long enough." I remember that I was much taken with the touchstone line "Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy" but I thought that "Ulysses" was too much about a really old guy trying to cheer himself up and I did not see it holding a place in any future that I could envision. 

Well, folks, I've now arrived at the so-called golden years, or, more properly, the endgame, or extra innings (which in some sports is called sudden death) and guess what?  "Ulysses" has returned, front and center, exactly as was predicted 50+ years ago. It's right on target. 

Tennyson's Ulysses is Homer's adventurer a generation older, kinging it in Ithaca, but bored, unchallenged, and unstimulated. "It little profits that an idle king,/ By this still hearth, among these barren crags,/ Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole/ Unequal laws unto a savage race,/ That hoard and sleep, and feed,/ And know not me."

To put it vulgarly, Ulysses plans to bust out of the home for old kings. He's been a warrior, a hero, and a roving explorer. He "cannot rest from travel." He needs to search "beyond the utmost bound of human thought." He leaves Penelope, and he resigns the government of Ithaca to his bureaucratically-minded son Telemachus. The last lines of the poem, the leave-taking, are most stirring:  

                           Come, my friends

"Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides,

And though we are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Yes, I know -- the diction is a little antiquated and artificial, the urge to get away a trifle too vehement. But nevertheless, I'm moved by the resilience, the perseverance. Though tear-inducing, the poem is anything but lachrymose. And it's accepting: "that which we are, we are."

It has lately become the fashion to interpret "Ulysses" as a poem about capitalism and imperialism. In this reading, Ulysses is just another white male, off to conquer and colonize The Alien Other. Or to see it as a poem about male privilege: he's a bad husband, abandoning the family. Or to conceive the poem as a structure of ironies, in which Ulysses doesn't realize that he undermines his own suppositions. There's a tad of truth in these arguments, as there always is, because Tennyson was caught up in a Victorian striving that he didn't fully or consciously assimilate. But frankly, I feel sorry for readers who can't hear the verve and excitement in Ulysses's expansive view of things. 

Moreover, it turns out that Tennyson was absolutely correct to proclaim that there is a time in life when "not to yield" is an act of daily heroism.

Another Paragraph Written for my Grandchildren

Dear Talia, Oliver, Ella, Lola, Luke, Caleb, Asher:

 

This is a picture of my father's grandmother (that is, my great-grandmother and therefore your great-great-great grandmother) whom I can now identify as Menucha Sheindl Perelman (born Rabinovich) who died in 1908 at the age of 75 or thereabouts. She was born in the shtetl of Radomyshyl and married Yaakov Perelman of Old Constantine in western Ukraine. Menucha is reported to have had 18 children including many twins. Seven daughters and three sons survived to adulthood. The four daughters whose names are known were Rochel Lerner, Reizel Shposhnik, Miriam, and Chaya-Beila, who married Schmul Spector (I remember now that my father had a cousin named Julian Spector). Her sons were Isaiah or Buzya my grandfather, then Chaim, and Meshulam.

My father told once told me story that seems incredible. He said that he had a grandmother in the Ukraine who came from a large family. He said that she had ten children but that all of them died in a week during a cholera epidemic. Then they had five more children. Or perhaps there were five children who died in the epidemic and then they had ten more. Both stories are hard to believe.  

What would it be like to lose five or ten children in a week? How could anyone ever recover from the grief?  How could you live?  It's possible that this story attaches to Menucha Sheindl Perelman, who lost at least eight children. But it might also be a Hessel story (i.e. my father's mother's side of the family, not his father's). 

Provenance:  I have no idea how this picture came into my possession. It's a drawing, not a photograph. A copy of a drawing, to be more precise, not the original. My father told me that it was done by an itinerant Ukrainian artist (apparently a pre-photography custom). I wish that I could say more about Menucha's costume, especially the scarf. Is it traditional garb? Or about her very dark hair, which might be a sheitel, the wig worn by the orthodox.

Is it possible -- is it truly the case that the woman pictured above bore eighteen children?  And Inasmuch as your direct ancestor Isaiah was child number sixteen, if she had said to her husband Yaakov, after birthing number fifteen, "I'm done, Yaakov, no more children" -- which would have been a perfectly understandable sentiment -- then it's obvious that none of us would exist.  

Other news of your old country ancestors:  here,  here, and here.

 

Some English Words Incorporated into Contemporary Italian

Italian has the ability to swallow English words whole, not even bothering to Italianize them. Here are a few examples drawn from a 2016 novel by Stefano Benni.

"Freezer," as in diventa rigido come un peluche lasciato nel freezer." ("It became stiff like a stuffed animal left in the freezer.")  "I cornflakes," incorporated as a plural noun. "Ha occhiali rossi da rockstar."  ("He had the red eyeglasses of a rockstar.") "Un overdose."  "La soap opera," entering Italian as a feminine singular noun, no doubt because of the "a" ending of "opera."  "Un popcorn."  "Compriamo un gadget" ("We are buying a gadget.") "Sembra un clown in pensione." ("He seemed like a retired clown"). Gli zoom fotografici." "La mia partner."  "Il controllare piu sexy del mondo." ("The world's sexiest conductor.")  "Ha iniziato con multi okay". ("He started with many okays.) "Jukebox d'epoca." "Old-fashioned (classic) jukebox."  "La famiglia era in relax." ("The family was relaxed)."

Ecc.

Small Screen Godlessness

We binge-watched the seven-hour mini-series Godless in three marathon nights.

Godless is a Western, or more exactly a fantasia on Western-movie themes and incidents. To the genre-literate, almost every plot element or character will be familiar, but shootouts and jail breaks and horse-rustling and miraculously healing bullet wounds were re-combined in ways that kept our attention. I'm proud to say that I didn't fall asleep once during the three long evenings, which is quite a compliment to the series, inasmuch as I've recently emerged as an Olympic-quality narcolept, prone to drift into sleep at the drop of a hat, even during the second overtime.  

The three most interesting features of Godless, were, in my opinion, a) the landscape, which, although it surrounds us here in Boulder, seemed particularly crisp on the hi def screen, b) the horses, which are noble beasts of their own and were respectfully depicted and admired by the cinematographer, and c) the character of MaryAgnes, played by Merit Wever, who was rather wonderful in the role and who was rewarded with a lot of the good lines. MaryAgnes is a tough young rifle-toting crack shot who plays for the other team but who you want on your side.  

I thought that Jeff Daniels who played the ruthless mass-murderer Frank Griffin overacted like crazy. If overacting were a crime, he'd be looking at a good twenty years in solitary. Plus I know it's the fashion that your deranged evil charismatic lunatic villain always has to be a bible thumper yet let's face it -- that's a cliche that has served its purpose and earned its retirement. Speaking of religion -- even aside from the title of the series and the observation that it's a godless country there's a heck of a lot of religion stuff both good and bad but mostly bad in this series. For example, much of the backstory evokes the Mountain Meadow Massacre -- one of the most dreadful acts of domestic terrorism in our nation's history -- which was perpetrated by Mormons (although Mormon participation is underplayed and instead the atrocity is attributed to a nonspecific religious fanaticism). There are frequent scenes of worship and pilgrimage as well as intermittent focus on the new church that the villagers of LaBelle are constructing and specifically on the fashioning of a substantial cross that is photographed as though it were brimming with significance. Moreover, the inhabitants of LaBelle wait six and seven-eighths episodes for the new preacher to arrive but when he finally appears he has only the most banal platitudes to deliver. Frankly, I'm not positive whether the writer of Godless thought the preacher's speech was genuinely profound or whether he couldn't give him better words, or whether he was trying to assert that the pieties of faith offered no consolation whatever to the beat-up townspeople. It would have been better if the preacher had just sung an appropriate hymn and let the LaBelleians join in so we could at least end with good music.

Godless offers a number of revisionist moments where tradition is overturned, sometimes too obviously. An instance: LaBelle is inhabited almost entirely by women and it is the women who make the decisions and take the active roles; men are passive bystanders. Quite an inversion of the usual macho practice. And also: usually in the westerns when there's the threat of intermarriage between the races, it's the dark skin who gets killed. This time the commonplace was turned on its head with the gratuitous killing of he white guy -- but I think it was a bit too pointed to name him "Whitey." And the Indians: now that we have the word "orientalism" to describe the mythologizing and falsifying of people of the east, we could apply the word "Indianism" to the romanticizing of the Paiutes, who are depicted as repositories of supernatural mystery and tribal wisdom (which is I suppose is a step up from brutal savages, but still not respectful or true). "Indianism" leads to a grotesque failure in the story when the sheriff is accompanied by a lone brave on horseback who may or may not be a ghost and who should have thudded to the cutting-room floor (along with some faux-spiritual nonsense, totally out of place, about the sheriff losing and regaining his shadow). 

The series centered on the conflict between father and adopted son -- a borrowing straight out of Red River, but this time around there's not going to be a reconciliation. The allegorically-named son Roy Goode winds up shooting his father, up close, pistol to temple. Which I liked a lot, because, first of all, I was by this time totally inured to violence, and also because the evil addled father-villain-prophet repeatedly claimed the ability to foresee his own death and "this isn't it." "You're wrong," says Goode, pulling the trigger. So much for prophecy. Immediately afterwards, the hero rides alone into the sunset -- not into a metaphorical sunset but a very real and carefully photographed sunset -- even though if he had his wits about him he would take his more-than-a-match lady friend with him. It's a unsatisfying conclusion and one that is dictated, I think, more by the zillion Saturday afternoon Westerns of my childhood than by the internal logic of the film. She loves him. But Western heroes named Goode just plain love their horses more than hearth, home and sex and they are all secretly afraid that if they marry and allow themselves to become domesticated they'll wind up like poor uxorious powerless Van Heflin in Shane.

Geological Words New to Me

Unlike most sciences, where there are numerous pseudo-Greek or pseudo-Latin coinages, geology offers all sorts picturesque and lovely words that have been in the language for years  -- and are novel to me. So "graywacke" --a muddy sandstone containing particles of quartz"; "fumarole" -- a small vent emitting jets of steam; "sinter"  -- a crust of calcium carbonate; "molfette" -- a vent emitting gases such as carbon dioxide; "coquina" -- a cemented mass of debris of shells; "clint" -- a sharp ridge; "grike" -- a fissure or crack opened by dissolving limestone; "knickpoint" -- a sharp step, up or down, in a river; "gour" -- a calcite ridge formed when water rich in carbonate flows over an irregular surface; "drumlin" -- an isolated mountain; "nunatak" -- a projecting peak in land otherwise covered by ice;  "firn"-- a mass of ice pellets compacted by the weight of snow above;  "cwm" -- a steep rock basin;  "col" -- a narrow pass; "esker" -- a winding ridge formed by retreating glaciers; "pingo" -- a cone, dome  or hump caused when freezing water expands beneath the permafrost and pushes up the earth; "yardang" -- parallel ridges of hard rock.

I'm not convinced that I could recognize any of these phenomena of my own accord. I'd probably need a professional geologist or guide. But the words themselves sure are magnificent.  And this is just a small sample of the wordhoard. 

More Genealogy Written for my Grandchildren

Dear grandchildren:

I once asked my father, your great-grandfather Emanuel Pearlman, where in the Ukraine we originated. He said that he was told that it was a village called (and here he used a very deep guttural initial consonant) Xhosantin-gebernya  -- an answer that left me not much enlightened. If he knew more -- and I don't think he did -- he didn't say. Our family did not cultivate nostalgia for the old country. Nor much curiosity either. We had no reason to yearn.

But new information about our past has recently come to me. According to a correspondence between my late cousin Marion and a distant Israeli relative, it is now clear that our family hails from the the town of StaryConstantine -- also called Starokostiantiyniv in Ukrainian and Alt Konstantine in Yiddish. It was a small city of perhaps 30,000 people at its height, founded, as far as wikipedia and I can figure, in the sixteenth century by a noble or wealthy person named Konstanty Ostrogski who built himself a castle sometime during the 1560s. Castles are built for protection in lawless places, but then, most places were lawless in late medieval Europe. Old Constantine is in northern Ukraine at the junction of the Ikopot and Sluch rivers. Here's a picture of the Old Constantine castle across from the Sluch:   

 

 

But when, you ask, did your and my ancestors settle in Old Constantine?  I remember it mentioned when I was a child that our family came to the Ukraine from "the west", which I assumed to be Germany because my grandmother Eta's maiden name was Hessel (though in fact Hessel is more commonly Danish rather than German). The Jewish community in Old Constantine dates to the sixteenth century, it is reported. "The town’s Jews suffered Cossack onslaughts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the end of the nineteenth century, more than half of the town’s population was Jewish." That's all we know.

However, in the nineteenth century, there lived in Old Constantine a husband and wife named Yaakov and Menucha Sheindl Perelman. They dwelt in a house on the corner of Ragnedinshkaya and Bolshaya Vasikovshaya streets (a house which was destroyed during the second world war). Yaakov Mikolshtein Perelman was born about 1830, lived a long life, and died in about 1920. According to the story, he resided in the one house his entire life. His wife, Menucha Sheindl came from Radomyshyl, a village not far from Old Constantine that was historically a center of Jewish settlement. (In 1797 a total of 1,424 people or 80% of the total population were Jewish). Menucha Sheindl Perelman was the daughter of a sugar and wool merchant named Solomon Rabinovich, who was so rich that "they changed houses for Passover" -- which is a custom heretofore unknown to me. Menucha died in 1908 at age 75 or thereabouts. The family, once wealthy, lost everything in the 1917 revolution and the disorder and purges that followed.  

And how are Yaakov and Menucha related to you, my grandchildren?  Well, they're your great-great-great grandparents. According to the newly discovered information, they had eighteen children "mostly twins," of whom only nine survived to adulthood. Seven daughters were born before your great-great grandfather Isaiah (also called Buzya or Buzzy) saw the light. Isaiah it is reported, was born "the year the serfs were freed," which is 1861, but I know that he was 83 when he died in 1946, so I calculate that he was born in 1863. But perhaps Isaiah didn't know his own age which wouldn't have been unusual in an era of bad record keeping. When he was thirty-five, Isaiah emigrated to America, arriving in 1896 or thereabouts.

Why did he set out for the New World?  Certainly the troubled conditions in Old Constantine were reason enough. But there's also something of a story. Isaiah married (I don't know whom) but after one night of marriage he asked for a divorce. I don't know if the divorce was granted, but I do know that very soon afterward he left town with Eta (or Yetta) Hessel, also from Old Constantine. She was 23 or 24, a decade or a dozen years younger than he. 

Why the one-day marriage?  No one knows what happened that night, but it couldn't have been good. A sexual impediment?  An arranged marriage gone bad?  Prior misdeeds come to light?  The discovery of pregnancy?  We're free to speculate, but never to know. 

However, we do know that Isaiah and his father did not see the world with the same eyes. Yaakov was religious; his son Isaiah was an atheist. We don't know Yaakov's politics, but we know that Isaiah was some sort of leftist or communist. Something of a free-thinker, after the style of Moses Mendelssohn. And perhaps Karl Marx. And we can also guess that it might have been impossible to remain in Old Constantine after the marriage contretemps. 

In New York City, Isaiah and Yetta had four children: Max, born around 1896, Solomon, born about 1898; Mollie, born in 1900; and my father Emanuel, the youngest, born on December 22, 1904.

My grandfather Isaiah also had two younger brothers. There was Chaim, who followed him to America some years later and from whose daughter Rose spring the Goldberg and Chodosh lines. And also Isaiah's youngest brother, who was named Meshulam Zusi Perelman. He did not follow his older brothers, and I don't know his history, but his family left the Ukraine and it's his Israeli granddaughter Nechama Sheindl Brukman (born Perlman) through whom these facts were recovered. Nechama Brukman died in 2008 at age 86.

It is most melancholy to read that in 1939 there were 6,743 Jews living in Old Constantine, accounting for 31 percent of the total population, and that the entire Jewish community, some no doubt our cousins, were murdered during the first years of the war.