Dr. Metablog

Book Report: The End of Innocence

I don't read much fiction, but when I do, it's usually one of the 19th-century classics. However, the "international bestseller" The End of Innocence (2016) by Benedict Wells came highly recommended, so I gave it a shot. It's pretty good, not bad, not great, and certainly a novel for today and not for all time -- not even for the next decade. It's thin, simple. 

Egomaniac that I am, I was less interested in the novel itself than I was in my own reaction to it, which was, in a couple of words, both resistant and resentful. 

Why the hostility,  I ask myself?  

In the first place, it's a novel without any sense of style. Perhaps it's the translator's fault, but gosh, it's written in the prose of a bad TV journalist. And second, it's ruthlessly manipulative. The the back-cover blurb, boasts "tear jerker." And so it is, shamelessly. Jules, the first-person narrator, loses his parents in an auto accident, is sent to a boarding school that is depicted as a quasi-penitentiary, is abandoned by his two siblings, suffers from paralyzing guilt, and when he finally marries, has to watch his wife die from cancer (a sequence which is narrated in extended, unnecessary detail).  

I suppose these disasters might have been handled with enough circumspection and integrity to teach us something about the human condition. But no, only to wring a couple of tears from our reluctant eyes. And then the too easily won upbeat ending -- goodness gracious! 

Some parts, but not enough of them, rang true. The family dynamics among the siblings was complicated enough to generate some heft.

Here's a single instance, one of many, to which I objected: a late middle-age writer suffers from Alzheimer's. Our hero, Jules, puts a gun in the man's hands, then walks away and hears the report of the weapon. He never confesses that he assisted in the death, and suffers no psychological ramifications from doing so. Peculiar, especially since the dead man was his rival for the love of his soon-to-be wife. I think most people would agree that assisting in a suicide is a fraught act and that a novelist neglects his duty and cheats his readers when he fails to acknowledge and explore its effects. A major, compromising misstep by Mr.Wells.  

So there it is, in little: disappointed, exploited and cheated. Not a good feeling to take away from a novel.

But I wonder at myself. The most manipulative novelist of all times is Charles Dickens, whose writing  I revere. Dickens is on a level several orders of magnitude more tearjerkery than Wells could possibly imagine, grasp, or emulate. How can it be that I embrace Dickens and reject Wells?

Old Words New to Me

A "col" is the lowest point of a ridge between two peaks; a "barmkin" or "barnekin" is a walled courtyard; a "carr" is a fen or wetland overgrown with trees;  a "bauchling" (mostly Scots) is a reproaching or taunting in order to dare an adversary to fight; a "bastle" is a fortified farmhouse; a "cantref" (plural "cantrefi") was a medieval Welsh division or hundred of land; a "skurr" is a shed; a "warble" is a lookout mountain; a "garth" is a dike of sand and pebbles devised to catch fish; a "pele" tower is a small fortified keep or tower, such as this one: 

A "dubb" is a deep hole in a bog; a "pune" is a quasi-legal reprisal short of revenge; a "terret" is a a metal loop on a harness, guiding the reins and preventing snags. Here's a 1st century Romano-British enamel terret:

All of these beauties come from Graham Robb's The Debatable Land (2018), an exploration of the land that lay between the ancient Damnonii, Selgovae, and Votadini and remained a territory disputed by England and Scotland into early modern times.

The State of Ornithology in the Seventeenth Century

I've just read Tim Birkhead's biography of The Wonderful Mr Willoughby, The First True Ornithologist (London, 2018). Birkhead's thesis is that Francis Willoughby was not merely a bird watcher, but an innovative, diligent, and imaginative scientist, the founder of a new area of knowledge. 

Ornithology when Willoughby (1635 –1672) started to look at birds was astonishingly primitive. For example, students did not even agree that birds migrated. Perhaps, as Aristotle had suggested, they hid in holes during the winter. Perhaps they transmuted from a species that departed to a species that arrived. With no observers in southern lands and no rapid communication, it's not surprising that it was hard to imagine that birds flew south in the fall and returned in the spring. Even now, when all is revealed, migration still seems, at least to me, to be mysterious, miraculous, and wondrously improbable. 

Before the "new philosophy put all in doubt," the assumption that governed all "science" was that the natural world should be studied for evidence of divine wisdom -- a practice which blinkered understanding and limited speculation. The questions that people asked about birds were therefore not particularly challenging. They asked which ones were good to eat, which ones could be kept in cages, and which ones had medicinal value. 

The first task of new ornithology was simply to take a census. What birds live here, by what names are they called, and how should they be classified?  In the non-standardized late medieval world, most birds bore regional or demotic names, and sometimes the same name was attached two or more species of birds. It took a while before the ars-foot came to be recognized and conventionalized as the great-crested grebe and to earn the official designation Podiceps cristatus. It was the same with the such regionally-named birds as the annet, bald buzzard, the Bohemian chatterer, the copped douker, the coulterneb, the didapper, the dun-diver, the fern-owl, the flusher, the gid, the glead, the gorcock, the ox-eye, the pickmire, the puit, the puttock, the pyrag, the rock ouzel, the scarf, the skout, and the witwall?  It remained to be demonstrated that the "yarwhelp" "was in fact the East Anglian name for the bar-tailed godwit and was to be distinguished from the similar black-tailed godwit." That the sea-pie was an oystercatcher. That the elegug was a guillemot. "The sea-swallows they there (on Caldey Island) call spurs, and the razor-bills are called elegugus.... This name elelgug some attribute to the puffin, and some to the guillem[ot];  indeed they know not what they mean by this name." Nomenclature was a thicket.

Willoughby was an energetic surveyor and classifier. But as he became more familiar with bird life, he started to ask questions of genuine scientific interest. What is the function of the tomial tooth? Do all birds of the same species have the same color iris? How many birds have rictal bristles? Do birds who lay two eggs produce one male and one female? Do female birds ever have two ovaries and two oviducts? Can birds hold on to their eggs at will, or are they laid involuntarily? How do birds survive the cold of winter? Why do birds molt?

While these are not necessarily the questions of a modern ornithologist, they certainly represent a new beginning. Many thanks to Birkhead for bringing Willoughby to our attention.

How sad that the first true ornithologist died at age thirty-six. 

 

 

Blood Test

I cooled my heels for more than an hour waiting for a "blood draw." Why so long? There was no long line of people ahead of me. Was it simply that the department was understaffed? That they all went out for ice cream? Or were the blood-collectors, the vampires, gossiping and lazing about behind the curtain? 

I was miffed.

But it wasn't long before I transitioned from passive miff to active glare. Now, "glaring" is a powerful, if ineffective, way to deal with such inconveniences. I think that my powerglare was beginning to get the attention of the poor schlub sitting at the desk pretending to ignore me. 

But let me confess that there's a danger inherent in the glare, because if your lower lip quivers ever so slightly, you're no longer glaring, you're pouting. Of course I didn't want to be seen as a pouter. So I concentrated all my energy into my glare. I think I had it under control, but after a while, without making a conscious decision to do so, I escalated from glaring to seething.

The seethe is more difficult to express than the glare. You can glare with just your eyes, but you have to put your whole body into the seethe. For proper seething, you have to cross your arms and hunch over. And once you're in that posture, you can then begin to move from seething to simmering. But you must be careful not to be perceived as sulking. 

And then on to fuming. Fuming is very like seething and simmering -- the same hunched body posture -- but accompanied with heavy breathing and an occasional, intermittent through-the-teeth hiss. You've got to make sure that your hiss is a true angry hiss and not a pathetic sniffle.

From fuming it was only a short step to boiling, which came at about the 55 minute mark.

Good thing my name was called on the hour, because I was just about to blow my top.  

The Toaster

When I downsized into my present residence in 2009, a few essential items disappeared, among them a venerable but excellent toaster. I did not replace it because I was distracted by more pressing matters. I went toasterless for almost five years.  

Later, when I entered into a tentative new relationship, toasterlessness became a matter of concern. Toast was an essential item in the diet of my new lady friend. For a while, before she began to spend nights with me, she would daily transport in bag or backpack -- along with toiletries and toothbrush and changes of undergarments -- her glamorous red enamel Cuisinart toaster.  

That this arrangement was comic became immediately apparent. No one can carry a toaster from one home to another day after day without feeling the irony. 

As our relationship solidified, it became clear that something had to be done, toasterwise. And so we came to realize that it was time to progress to a stable two-toaster situation. 

The Cuisinart went back to its original home and off we went to McGuckin's Hardware. There we acquired a Proctor Silex, with which we have lived until a short while ago.  

I don't want to badmouth the Proctor Silex, but let's face it, it's a cheap lightweight contraption with too much plastic and a tendency to leak crumbs over the counter. A paucity of knobs and controls. It's an entry-level toaster, a "starter toaster." A provisional toaster that lacked the dignity that our maturing connection demanded.

So yesterday, at Peppercorn on the semi-famous Boulder Mall, we purchased a superior toaster -- a highly-recommended, weighty and substantial Breville two-slicer equipped with "Lift and Lock" and other bells and whistles (which we will no doubt some day master), the upper grill of which is inscribed with the comforting motto, "BAGELS FACE INWARDS." A toaster of heft and permanence. It's sitting proudly on the counter now.

Moreover, we purchased it with our new joint credit card.

 

Amnesia on Film: Dead Again (1991)

Usually the amnesia is the hardest bit to swallow. The amnesia in Dead Again is particularly unpalatable, because Emma Thompson shows up at a Catholic orphanage without any memory nor with any ability to speak. No explanation is ever offered for her disease, not a grain. No cracking the skull, no mysterious drugs, no trauma, nothing. Just a little all-purpose Hollywood-style amnesia to get the plot rolling.

But spontaneous amnesia slides down the esophagus rather easily compared to hypnotically-induced past-life regression, huge trenchers of which we're expected to bolt and guzzle. I couldn't do it and the film became ridiculous and ridiculously baroque, gimmicky, inhuman. A waste of Kenneth Branagh's extraordinary talent. And the music --portentous, dictatorial, distracting. 

I saw this movie when it first appeared, in 1991, and liked it. What was I thinking?  My salad days, when I was green in judgment. 

Another Film Written by Lenore J. Coffee

It's hard to say how much of The Great Lie (1939) is original to its screenwriter Lenore J. Coffee. In the first place, the film is adapted from a novel, and secondly, at least according to the story, its stars Bette Davis and Mary Astor were unhappy with the screenplay and rewrote much of it. But how much? Nevertheless, in The Great Lie, as in Sudden Fear  and Lightning Strikes Twice, two other films written by Coffee, the heart of the matter is a head-to-head struggle between two strong women. In this film it's Sandra, (Mary Astor) and Maggie (Bette Davis) who go to the mat about first, a husband, who is apparently married to both of them (don't ask!) and then, a baby boy. Maggie (Bette) winds up with both husband and child, but it's touch and go for most of the film. I wish I could say that Coffee's dialog was brilliant, but not so. It's a serviceable, competent screenplay. George Brent, playboy and drunkard, isn't nearly as desirable a husband and father as the film asks us to believe. Not much of an actor, either. 

Mary Astor won an Oscar and well-deserved it; she steals the show. It's ironic, and it may be significant, that Mary Astor herself had been involved in a child-custody case several years before this film was made.

The music (by Max Steiner) is noteworthy -- mood-appropriate variations on themes from Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto.

Hattie McDaniel does as much with the stereotypical "colored" maid as an actress could be expected to do, but her scenes are still painful and embarrassing to watch.