Dr. Metablog

Sir Smile

Sir Smile is a "character," in a way of speaking, in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. He's one the play's most fully-realized figures, even though he says no words, doesn't appear on stage, and exists nowhere but in King Leontes' diseased, paranoid fantasy life-- and then only for an evanescent second. Truth to tell, Sir Smile also appears to be an emanation from a dark corner of Shakespeare's own individual imagination. 

 

When does Sir Smile make his momentary appearance?  Leontes has gone off the deep end. Without the least shred of evidence, he generates the extremely destructive fantasy that his wife Hermione has been a-bed with his best friend and fellow king, Polixenes. He's in a rage, so much so that in the course of a stunning soliloquy, he busts right through the inviolable fourth wall and addresses himself directly to the men in the audience. He looks them right in the eye. "There have been," he laments, "cuckolds ere now"

And many a man there is, even at this present,
Now while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm,
That little thinks she has been sluiced in's absence
And his pond fish'd by his next neighbor, by
Sir Smile, his neighbor.

 

Leontes' soliloquy is "to the moment." "This is not make-believe. Look to your left and right, guys -- while you're clutching your wife's elbow, enjoying the play, that sly impudent fellow standing there, Sir Smile, has been fishing in your pond, ploughing your field, sleeping in your bed. It happens to everyone. Men -- we're all victims, all of us. We're drowning in sea of betrayal. You can't trust your neighbor, you can't trust anyone. And worse -- the seducers, the enemy, don't just diddle your wife; they triumph, they grin, they fleer. They amuse themselves at your suffering. Every one of them, sitting or standing in this theatre, is now or will be a such a person."

 

Sir Smile embodies Leontes' deepest fears. He distills humiliation and jealousy into a figure who is half nightmare and half allegory. In psychological terms, he's Leontes' doppelganger or double.

 

But why does Shakespeare call him Sir Smile? Why not Lord Lewd or Viscount Vice?

 

The honorific, the "Sir" part, is easy. Shakespeare regularly employs the word almost as a nickname. Sometimes his "sir" can sometimes be affectionate -- Leontes himself calls his son Mamillius,"sir page." Similarly, Lucius is "sir boy" to Titus. There's even a "Sir King" in Cymbeline. "Sir" can also be hostile: "sir knave." And sometime it's neutral; timid Viola would rather "go with sir priest than sir knight."  Sir-ness becomes more meaningful when its use is exemplary or abstract: "Sir Valor" in Troilus and Cressida; "Sir Prudence" in The Tempest; "Sir Oracle" in The Merchant of Venice. The Sir in Sir Smile has an instructive history.

 

But why is he a smiler?  Why does Shakespeare offer us a profligate or a roue who smiles as he goes about his amorous business?  To followers of Shakespeare, there's a ready answer. It's well known that false and hypocritical smiles transfix the Shakespearean imagination. The locus for this is Hamlet, where Denmark's prince is beside himself, furious at what he has seen in the face of Claudius, who is a

 

    villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables! Meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

 

Smiling and villainy merge inextricably. Exactly as in the case of Leontes' imaginary neighbor, there's evil lurking beneath Claudius' smiley face. When Hamlet writes in his "table" -- we would say "tablet" --that "one may smile and be a villain," his characterization has the force of revelation or of a proverb or gnomic utterance.

 

But it's not only Claudius. The smile in "Sir Smile" emerges from a Shakespearean underworld. There's Richard of Gloucester, an unequalled villain, who can not only "cry 'Content' to that which grieves my heart,/ And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,/ And frame my face to all occasions" but who can also, most pertinently, "smile, and murder whiles I smile." And then there are the "smiling smooth, detested parasites" of Timon of Athens; the "villain with a smiling cheek" and the "smiling rogues" of The Merchant of Venice; "the smiling pick-thanks" --sycophants or flatterers -- of The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth as well as the assassins whom Calpurnia dreams "came smiling" to bathe their hands in Caesar's blood. Shakespeare's smiles are often linked to danger: Iago of Cassio; "Ay, smile upon her, do." Kent, in King Lear is enraged by condescending smiling Oswald: "A plague upon your epileptic visage! Smoile you my speeches, an I were a fool?"

 

Hence loathsome "Sir Smile." 

 

Fortunately, even for Shakespeare there are redeeming moments when when a smile is still a smile. Touchstone (in As You Like It) is in love. He remembers kissing his beloved's batler, "and the cow's dugs that her pretty chapt hands had milk'd; and remember[s}  the wooing of a peascod instead of her; from whom I took two cods, and giving her them again, said with weeping tears 'Wear these for my sake.'" The name of Touchstone's lovely rural mistress is "Jane Smile." No "sirs" in this Smile family, no sirree!

Baddest Girl of All

Everyone has their favorite 1940s "bad girl." Some of mine: Ann Savage in Detour (1945), Jane Greer in Out of the Past (1947), Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street (1948), Yvonne de Carlo in Criss Cross (1949), Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai (1947, and Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) but for my money the baddest of them all, the baddest of the bad, is sultry homicidal Lizabeth Scott as Jane Palmer in Too Late for Tears (1948). It's not just that she murders her first husband, shoots her second, and poisons her accomplice. Or that she sleeps with blackmailer Danny Fuller (Dan Duryea) to enlist him to her cause. Or that she betrays friend, foe and family.Or that she's manipulative, vengeful, hedonistic ("I want money") and depraved. It's that she's utterly soulless, conscienceless, and heartless. Not a tinge of fellow-feeling. She could out-Goneril Goneril, bad girl of the canonical classics.

The ending of the film is a disappointment. Instead of Jane Palmer sent to the electric chair or locked in the hoosegow for life, she's allowed to fall out of a window and die. Not fair -- I wanted retribution.

On second thought, if she had been arrested, she would have corrupted the police, compromised the judicial system, and caused the death of a handful of fellow prisoners and prison guards. Maybe it's just as well to kill her off and be done with it. 

Here's Lizabeth Scott holding a gun on her nemesis (Don DeFore). Is she bad or what?

Petruchio and Othello?

It's an unlikely pairing -- what possible connection could there be between Petruchio, a creature of farce, and Othello, distinguished general and tragic victim of the green monster. Yet there is a surprising point of contact -- two similar (but very different) reminiscences. It's not usual for Shakespeare's characters to have a "backstory," but both P and O attempt one.

Petruchio brags that a shrew can't scare him, because he's been there before. "Think you a little din can daunt mine ears?" 

He riffs on the word "din." He's inured to noise, he claims -- and how he came to be so adds a new and improbable dimension to his character.

Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
Have I not heard the sea puff'd up with winds
Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?
Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,
And heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?
Have I not in a pitched battle heard
Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets' clang?

I, for one, don't believe a word that Petruchio utters and I doubt whether Shakespeare expects us to do so. It's all bluster, the words of an accomplished bullshitter. Petruchio is a youthful fortune-hunter, full of bravado and effrontery to be sure, but except in this passage, he lacks an adventurous past or a military history. When did he hear lions roar?  While on a Roads Scholar tour of Scythia or central Africa? And where was the sea like an "angry boar?" Where was the "great ordnance" and "loud alarum?" More likely at Saturday afternoon serials than in the tented field. 

Othello's story, on the other hand, though more extravagant and fantastic, is grandly persuasive. Here's a piece of it: 

      I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field
Of hair-breadth scapes i' the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels' history:
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
It was my hint to speak,—such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.

Othello veers into the mythological yet his story comports with what we otherwise know of him.  

Petruchio's tale is an instance of "just-in-time" characterization. Shakespeare needs to display Petruchio's bravery in the face of a scolding woman -- so he produces a soldiership story. It doesn't accord with Petruchio's history, but it doesn't need to, because it serves an immediate necessary dramatic function. Othello's speech is part and parcel; Petruchio's is a loose end.

And the language! The first passage, in early The Taming of the Shrew, is perfunctory; the second, in the mature tragedy, is simply magnificent. Anyone looking for evidence of Shakespeare's progress of a poet could do worse than compare these two passages.

A Dream of "Agency"

I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that the most terrifying words in the English language were, "I want to tell you about my dream."  

Nevertheless, I persist.

Last night, I came out of a train station in Berlin (a city I've never visited in my daytime life) but instead of a valise or luggage I had only a banjo case, with a banjo inside and room for a couple of pair of socks at most. But I thought, I have cash and I can buy clothes. Then I looked in my wallet and found only a couple of one-dollar bills. I thought, now I'm in trouble. Nevertheless, I persisted, and set out for my hotel. Then it started to rain, pour actually, and I realized that I wasn't wearing proper shoes, just flimsy slippers. Next I came to understand that I had no idea where to find my hotel. 

So there I am with a banjo on my knee but nowhere to go, no cash, no proper clothes, no hotel, in an unfamiliar strange city.

But now comes the "agency" part. I announce, to no one in particular, "I don't want to be in this dream." And I woke up.

I'm very proud of myself for taking charge. A good precedent for tomorrow's nightmare.

Shtisel

The Israeli TV program Shtisel, about an ultra-orthodox, Haredi family, is soap opera, but with a hair fetish.  It's all about beards, peyot, and sheitals; one female character cries the whole night through because her wig slipped and an inch of her own natural hair was visible -- to men. Sometimes it's taxing to be empathetic to the Shtisel clan.

But even fanatics are people, and the business of the program is the same as the business of all soap operas -- getting married, staying married, and healing frayed marriages.

Shitsel sustained our interest through 24 episodes because the characters are recognizable human beings and their problems were familiar and real. What is different and foreign about the Shtisels and their Haredi compatriots is their triumphalism -- they are correct and everyone else is wrong -- and the many ways in the silly rules of doctrinaire religion constrict the characters' choices and inflict upon them unnecessary misery. Shulem, the family patriarch, enjoys funny radio shows, but he stops doing so because it's wrong. Zvi Arye is a splendid singer, but he can't join a musical group because joy in music might lead him in a secular direction. Uncle Nuchem loves classical music, especially Mahler, but he destroys his tape of the Tragic Symphony because it is worldly and therefore endangers his piety. The lead character, attractive young Akiva, is a gifted painter, but his father and his uncle and his fiancee pressure him to chuck his talents and become respectable, and pious, and a travel agent. Will he give up on his genius?  Perhaps Season 3, if it ever gets made, will tell us. I have nothing against travel agents, but Akiva's painting touches his soul. The writers of Shtisel are right to see art as a danger to orthodoxy. It's a solvent. Put religion up against art, and religion might dissolve. Which would be a very proper outcome, in my opinion.

Here's my favorite line from a week of watching:  "When you see a Jew with a dog, either he's not a Jew or the dog is not a dog."

A Serious Presidential Lie

No question but that he's a serial liar: just think of the birther thing, the attendance at the inaugural, Sharpiegate, "the best economy in the history of the world," that Hilary Clinton received 3 to 5 million illegal votes, "total exoneration," the 16,000+ lies and misstatements since 2016 that the Washington Post has catalogued. Enough falsehoods to circle the earth several times, or more likely, stretch from here to Alpha Centauri. 

Nevertheless, all these falsehoods pale in comparison to the latest revelation.  

He repeatedly boasted that he was such a baseball star at the New York Military Academy that he could have gone to the majors. Someone finally investigated. Box scores from the 1950s show that he batted .138, with 3 rbi's and scored one run. Said one baseball guy, “You don’t hit .138 for some podunk, cold-weather high school playing the worst competition you could possibly imagine" and go pro. “It’s absolutely laughable. He hit .138—he couldn’t fucking hit."  

OK, he lies about everything. But about baseball? Some things should be sacred. Off limits.

Who Knows, Who Remembers?

I don't know what is signified by DBMs or EIDE. I am boggled by hard tokens. Defragment leaves me all a-quiver. Shortcuts generally take me the long way around. Does a firewall keep them out or me in?  Kibibytes are things you would feed to a pooch. A logic gate is beyond my capacity of reasoning. My netiquette is primitive and when I have nodes I take them to the surgeon. Do I have a KVM switch?  Dunno. My firmware, frankly, is not what it used to be. My warmboot is frayed; my virtualization illusory.

I may not speak or understand the language of the present generation, but like most members of my age cohort I can identify the skate key, "the cheese stands alone," the alligator pear, a mustard plaster, "you owe your crowning glory to,/ your something something shampoo," "L-A-V-A," "and away-y-y we go," House Jameson, cod liver oil, Adrien Baillargeon the Canadian strongman, J. Scott Smart, "close but no cigar," "the call letters of the stars," Mrs. Calabash, a "rhubarb," bluing, "Well, King, this case is closed," Spider Jorgenson, Horn and Hardart, "Pow, right in the kisser."

Alas for a youthful population who imagines that the Pontiac 13 was a group of anti-government demonstrators or that Apples Kudelka was a middle European dessert. And doesn't know the difference between Sparkle Plenty and Good 'n Plenty.

Sarcasm in the News

It's not often that a figure of speech makes the headlines -- as happened this week with the rhetorical term "sarcasm." At a press conference a couple of days ago, the present occupant of the White House, Donald J. Trump, whose use of language is occasionally infelicitous, let fly with a giant whopper. He announced that the horrid new coronavirus could be cured by (gasp!) an injection of bleach. When his foolish advice  attracted scorn, he backtracked by claiming that his words were merely "sarcastic."

 

To put the blame on sarcasm is a transparent lie, of course, believed only by one person in the entire universe -- Trump himself -- although no doubt his brek-a-kek-keks of toadies will pretend that his analysis was pure genius.

 

But did he truly mean "sarcasm" -- a trope generally marked by a mocking tone of voice and "a sharp, bitter, cutting or caustic expression, a contemptuous gibe or taunt in which hostility is disguised as humor." Trump seems to define sarcasm rather more loosely: to him in means "I didn't say what I said yesterday and, besides, it's all the fault of the media." What a curious line of defense, and what a misuse of a rhetorical term! 

 

Besides, one should think twice before invoking sarcasm, because the term has a bad name among the psychologists, who consider it a "maladaptive coping mechanism for those with unresolved anger or frustration." There's a class of people who employ sarcasm because they have "certain forms of brain damage as a consequence of lesions in the right parahippocampal gyrus." I have no particular knowledge of Mr. Trump's parahippocampal gyrus, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's taken a bit of a beating these last few years.

 

Sarcasm has even been banned by Trump's great friend Kim Jong-Un. No sarcasm in North Korea -- a rare instance of a figure of speech being consigned to a firing squad.

 

Besides, Trump is already the master of a number of the tropes of traditional rhetoric. There's enellage, a sentence that ignores the usual grammatical rules and conventions; solecism and tautology, gross violations of syntax and logic; hyperbole, or exaggeration, and its less well-known cousin, adynaton, a collection or list of impossibilities; aposiopesis, the sudden end of a sentence before completion; and paraprosdokian, the unexpected truncation of a clause. But all would agree that the figure of speech that Trump deploys most regularly is prevaricatio.