Dr. Metablog

'Hang there like fruit"

Last night we watched "The Man Who Cheated Himself"(1950), a B+ noir/murder mystery/police procedural with Lee J. Cobb as a detective who falls for a rich homicidal dame and gets himself into a lot of predictable hot water. In the film, Cobb has a younger brother, a straight-arrow, played by John Dall, an actor well-remembered for his leading role in Hitchcock's creepy "Rope"(1948).

 

 

That's John Dall on the right with a young Lee J. Cobb romancing Jane Wyatt in the foreground.

 

Afterward, we looked up John Dall in Wik and with mouths agape learned (verbatim quotation coming up here) that Dall "liked to be tied upside down to trees in Laurel Canyon in the middle of the night. He liked to hang upside down naked until morning. Once a week, he wanted this." Improbable, yes, but probably true, because it's beyond ordinary human imagination to invent such a thing. 

 

As far as I'm concerned and naif as I may be to "alternative sexual practices," it's one thing to fantasize about hanging naked tied to a tree upside down until dawn in Laurel Canyon (I'm sure we've all done so), but to move from theory to practice  -- now that is a challenge.

 

Serious questions: Did Dall like to hang from a branch of a tree, or did he like to be tied to the trunk of a tree? In either case, he'd require assistance -- at least two strong men, I'd imagine. Did they wait, motor running in the taxi, while he hung, or did they hang out at some all night coffee spot and then come back at dawn to untie him. And another question -- what kind of tree?  Much of Laurel Canyon is merely sage or chaparral, but there are trees on the lower riparian slopes. What's the best tree to hang from until dawn? Willows, unless they're black willows, are too flimsy, but live oak, California sycamore, and Fremont's cottonwood might be hefty enough to bear the load. Did John Dall have a favorite tree to whom he was loyal, or was he arboreally promiscuous?

 

And also -- is once a week too many, or too few, or just the right number of times to hang upside-down naked from a tree through the night?

Frequentatives Perplex Me

Frequentatives perplex me. Even on good days, I can't tell a frequentative from an iterative or what used to be called a present progressive or even from a simple present that expresses a continuing action, such as "he walks to work" -- in the sense that he walks every day or many days, not just once. So instead of struggling with definition and nomenclature, I'll confine these paragraphs to old-fashioned frequentatives formed in the traditional way -- by the addition of an "-er" or "-le" suffix.

"Wrestle" is a gold star, certified frequentative. The verb "wrest" means "to grab" or "to snatch. The verb "wrestle" implies that the grabbing or snatching does not occur in one unique instance, but continues over a stretch of time. Wrestle is therefore the frequentative of wrest. In the English language, such frequentatives were once upon a time regularly produced. No longer, apparently; more's the pity. Frequentative productivity has hit rock bottom.

Frequentatives in "-er" are not always obvious, inasmuch as the "-er-" suffix is also used for agency and for comparison. But frequentatives do follow a pattern: blab yields blabber; gleam yields glimmer; climb, clamber; float, flutter; put, putter; slide, slither.

"-le" frequentatives are more common and more varied. Consider the relation between "fond" and "fondle". '"Fond" meant something like "to be in love, to dote." Somewhere before its first appearance in print in 1796, fond acquired an -le to become "fondle" = caress.  (Fondle in its turn generated "fondlesome" -- a word which went from neologism to obsolete in an 18th century flash, and whose extinction is much to be regretted. Let's revive "fondlesome".) 

Here's a short list of intriguing -le frequentatives: crumb, crumble; drip, dribble; nose, nuzzle; prick, prickle; daze, dazzle; joust, jostle; prate, prattle; spark, sparkle; spit, spatter; stride, straddle; suck, suckle. Not all of these frequentatives are as obvious as wrest-wrestle and some cases must be confirmed with the help of a good etymological dictionary.

Frequentatives have a long history. Why can't they make a comeback? Take a verb such as "jump." Doesn't English need "jumple," a word that would accurately describe the deportment of my twin 4-year-old grandsons. They don't jump -- they jumple. Sometimes they leaple. Other useful suggestions: hit, hittle; throw, throwel; run, runnle; hop, hopple. Scream, scrimmle. The possibilities, obviously, are endless.

The time has come for a Frequentative Renaissance. 

Amnesia on Film: Unknown (2011)

Just when you think that the movie industry has run the amnesia well bone dry, along comes still another wild riff on the subject of forgetfulness. What a great disease for screenwriters! a disease that keeps on giving -- and with no end in sight.

This time, Dr. Martin Harris, ostensibly a biotechnologist but in reality a professional assassin, is involved in an automobile accident. Harris wakes up in the hospital but of course without memory. He comes to believe that he's actually the scientist he's pretending to be -- and so do the amnesia-naive among the audience. (I'm giving away the gimmick, but it doesn't matter because no one is going to see this movie ever again. No audience, therefore no spoiler.

Implausible, derivative, threadbare. No cliche left unborrowed: two separate car chases, a coma, a mysterious new girlfriend, double agents, an international assassination syndicate, a sadistic hit man, doctored photos, phony passports, suspenseful countdown to the explosion of the terrorist bomb, etc. The usual stuff.

On the other hand: Unknown is slick, expensive, well acted, well paced; well photographed,

It's a quick fix for those who enjoy "thrillers." Bad medicine for those who prefer psychological credibility. Candy for connoisseurs of the infinite variety of movie amnesia.

By the way, what's happened to Liam Neeson's nose?  It's become Durante-esque. Cyranoid,

Sleep, difficulty with

The hardest part of my day is the night. Sleep does not come easy -- has never come easy. I regularly wake at 2:00 am, and stay awake for two or three hours. I use this time to fret about the state of the Earth (precarious), the state of the nation (doomed), and whether that new black spot on my left ankle will lead to agonizing death, or perhaps (best case scenario) merely to amputation at the hip. I then sleep fitfully until dawn, the last hours of the night crowded with grotesque, humiliating nightmares, worse by a long shot than anything Gregor Samsa could possibly imagine.

Last night, up again, I experienced a moment of clarity -- a revelation, an epiphany. Here it comes:   

My mattress is just the right degree of firmness -- I sleep neither on the hard earth nor on a gunny sack of corn husks. My blankets are soft Egyptian cotton -- not leaves or newspapers. I rest my head on an authentic goose-down pillow. There are no rats scrabbling under my bed, no poisonous spiders descending from the ceiling, no lions roaring outside the door. No bedbugs or parasites or mosquitoes or scorpions. I'm dry and warm. The temperature of my bedroom is well-regulated: forced air heat in the winter, cooling breezes or air conditioning in the summer. I'm well fed, not kept awake by gnawing hunger. No noxious smells or hideous shrieks. No pains, cramps, headaches, or wounds. 

I know that my situation is luxurious and is certainly superior to all of my ancestors and to 99% of the human beings on the planet,

I am thankful that I have nothing whatever to grumble at, but I feel that I'm unappreciative. To lie awake as I do, not sleeping, is to scorn society's gifts. How my forebears would have reveled in my taken-for-granted comforts!

No question but that I should be much more grateful. 

"Lack of gratitude" will be the principal worry during tonight's insomnia. 

Slavery in Brooklyn, Oh No!

Of all human institutions, slavery must be the most loathsome and soul-distorting (although wars, genocides, massacres, pogroms, and wrongful executions are certainly contenders for worst of worst). 

It's easy to think that slavery is something ancient and foreign. Not something to concern ourselves about -- not part our life, nor my life. And yet American slavery was only eighty years into the past -- the blink of an eye -- when I was growing up in the 1940s in Flatbush. At P.S 217 or at Erasmus Hall, neither our textbooks nor our teachers made much of its recency. Slavery was not our past; not here, not in Flatbush. It was a crime of the distant South -- of Mississippi and Alabama, long ago. In the land of cotton, not the land of Coney Island and Jackie Robinson. Slavery was distant chronologically and geographically.  

What an unpleasant revelation, then, to encounter the story of Flatbush slavery in Thomas J. Campanella's painstaking and eloquent history, Brooklyn, The Once and Future City (Princeton, 2019).

The facts: "slavery was an essential element of New York life in the 17th and 18th centuries." "Only Charleston, South Carolina surpassed New York (i.e. Manhattan) in the number of enslaved residents." Campanella reports that there was "no place in New York that had more slaves per capita than Kings county, where one in three residents was in bonded servitude." One in three? In my neighborhood?  How could we not have known this?  How have we remained oblivious?

Slavery, I now learn, was especially established in "Dutch towns like New Utrecht, where 75 percent of white households owned slaves." And also "in Midwout [our Midwood] where African-Americans constituted 41 percent of the population in 1790."  

In 1790, the population of the town of Flatbush -- my Flatbush -- included 378 enslaved people, 12 free black people, and 551 white people – 75% of whom were slaveholders.The farmers of Brooklyn "formed a Southern planter class in miniature." 

And it was the farmlands of Brooklyn -- Flatbush, Flatlands, Gravesend, and New Utrecht -- that supplied Manhattan with grain and fruits and vegetables raised with slave labor. No slaves, no Brooklyn; no Brooklyn, no Big Apple.

In 1799, the New York state legislature passed the Gradual Manumission Act: all children born of slave women after July 4 were to be free though they must remain indentured to their masters until the age of twenty-five for women and 28 for men. Though it seems a weak and toothless compromise, the new laws led to the rapid decline of slavery. In 1827, one hundred and ninety-three years ago, slavery was declared illegal in New York. (Vermont, to its credit, had abolished slavery two generations before, in 1777).

Here's a Brooklyn bill of sale for "one certain neger girl called Anna" to Jan Lefferts for thirty-eight pounds. Her owner, Gilleyam Cornel, was illiterate. He signed with "his mark."

From what I've learned in the past about the history of Brooklyn, and with these revelations, it's undeniable that the haunts of my childhood (East 9 Street, P. S. 217, St. Rose of Lima, Newkirk Station), were not very long ago farmed with slave labor. It's horrible and disillusioning, but it must be acknowledged.

"I could have been a better prairie dog"

In a lifetime with pen in hand  or with fingers at the typewriter (or, latterly, at the word processor), I've written a lot of bad sentences and a handful of good ones. But last week, I composed my absolute best sentence ever. It's pure Olympic gold; a bottom-of-the-ninth walk-off bases-loaded HR; a sensational buzzer-beater. Deathless prose.

Let us pause to savor this extraordinary sentence. "I could have been a better prairie dog." 

Aficionados of Vivian de St. Vrain (fit audience, though few) will remember that this mellifluous sentence appeared just a few days ago, right here. You can appreciate it in context, if you will, but heck, the sentence stands alone.

It is beautiful in itself but one can only marvel at its delicate but meaningful irony. Moreover, (bonus) it's near-perfect iambic pentameter.

It's become, for me, a mantra of sorts. Whenever I start to bemoan my fate, or deplore my state, or bother myself over some missed opportunity or long-ago failure, I mumble, "I could have been a better prairie dog."  And I immediately regain perspective. So it's a sentence that's utile as well as dulce -- as useful as it is sweet. Classic. 

I'm absolutely confident that "I could have been a better prairie dog" will help me through episodes of middle-of-the-night self-laceration. In fact, it's working just as I write this.