Dr. Metablog

E & L Chafetz Family Circle c. 1946-1952

When I was a boy in the 1940s and '50s, I was -- yearly or semi-yearly -- hauled off to gatherings of the E & L Chafetz Family Circle. "Chafetz" was the maiden name of my maternal grandmother, Sonia Green. "E" and "L" were Sonia's parents, but the names that the initials abbreviated are gone for good. At the Family Circle, twenty or thirty or sometimes even forty Chafetz siblings, cousins, and spouses would share snacks, schnapps, and gossip. No question but that, selfish and un-empathetic lad that I was, I very much resented being scrubbed and fancied up to attend these meetings -- especially on a summer Sunday afternoon when the Brooklyn Dodgers might be playing a double-header. Why would a young scamp want to miss out on Red Barber and Connie Desmond in order to hang from a subway strap for an hour and a half while the stifling IRT rattled to some obscure corner of the Bronx -- just to while away the afternoon with a bunch of old folks?

The Chafetz relatives were all immigrants from Belarus and thereabouts, born, like my grandparents, in the 1870s or 1880s. They were small people -- tiny really -- the men topping out at or 5'3" or  5'4", the women at 5'0" or somewhat less -- their stature a consequence of their impoverished "old country" childhoods. They spoke Yiddish or Russian to each other and very rudimentary English to me. They smelled peculiarly -- of chicken soup overlaid with moth balls, their "good clothes" having been retrieved from the storage closet for this annual adventure. They assembled, if I remember correctly, at the second-floor apartment over someone's store. (It seemed as though they were all keepers of small shops -- newspaper kiosks or vegetable markets or candy stores or perhaps a delicatessen or an "appetizer." One enterprising Chafetz cousin was a glazier.) They seemed to be mostly childless -- or, at least I can't remember encountering any other youths at these events.

Who were these people? Why were they so asymmetrical? Bent and twisted, most of them, their faces marred by blackheads and lumps and swellings. Their mouths were dental nightmares. Must I admit that my ten-year-old self was repelled and disgusted, unconscious that their distorted bodies were a testament to their arduous troubled lives?

Who was Uncle Joe Pessin? How was he related to me? What was his livelihood? I remember only a small dark bald man with a grating voice. Did he have a family?  And who were indistinguishable Lifscha and Leah? Were they twins or sisters or sisters-in-law? Why did Uncle Usher smell so pungently? Was he in the pickle or sauerkraut business? I know only that he had a great expanse of face and outsized shoulders and that he longed to visit his brothers and sisters in Winnipeg. 

At these gatherings, I was put on display. My mother (my father refused to attend) would take me around the room and introduce me to the various cousins and uncles and aunts. It was a torment, frankly. "This is your uncle Nahum." Uncle Nahum would shake my hand. I had nothing to say to him, but Uncle Nahum asked the question that was every uncle's question. "How are you doing? You doing well in school?"  "Yes, I'm doing well in school." And so this uncle would smile beneficently upon me. And then on to the next one. 

Because of what I perceived as their limited communication skills (though English might have been Uncle Nahum's fourth or fifth language), I definitely felt superior and condescending -- an acute embarrassment to me now. In my heart, I silently patronized these strange people.

What I didn't know, and is so obvious now, was that I was much more important to them than they were to me. That I was "doing well in school" were words that they dearly wanted to hear. It was for my generation and for me that they had braved the Cossacks, sold the farm, deserted from the Russian army, left backward Belarus or Ukraine behind, endured the miseries of steerage, slept four to a bed for years and half-acclimated themselves to a new world utterly foreign to them. For me. They had sacrificed themselves to invest in me. So that I could "do well in school," go to college, live a better life. I was their emissary to America, to the future.

What could a ten-year-old have possibly known?  It's too late to regret that I didn't learn their language and learn their stories. That world of theirs, that universe represented by E and L Chafetz --- it's all gone now, vanished, present no where else but in my failing memory. 

More Oxymora; Love's Labour's Lost

I'm detecting oxymorons in everything I read. Perhaps I'm even imagining them. Love's Labour's Lost is a "great feast of languages" and also a savory banquet of rhetorical figures. Here are some of the oxymorons (or "cross-couplers," as Puttenham called them) that I came upon in my latest re-reading of the play. Some require explanation.

"Civil war," not 'civil" as in the American Civil War but civil as in "civility" or good manners (like the "merry war" between Beatrice and Benedick). "Trencher-knight" because a trencher was generally a wooden dish, not suitable for knights -- and therefore a trencher-knight would be a low-born knight. "Living art," where the art is a portrait or a statue, and therefore not living and breathing. "Loose grace,' where "loose" means worldly rather than spiritual. "Profound simplicity." "Evil angel." "Dainty Bacchus," because Bacchus was notably disorderly. "Sweet misprision," because misprision is a dereliction of duty and therefore not sweet but sour or bitter. "Rational hind," whether hind refers to an animal or to a person of exceedingly small intellectual gifts. In addition, two near-oxymora: "merry days of desolation," "as swift as lead."  

These figures of speech are not as obvious as those in Romeo and Juliet, but they allow us to observe Shakespeare at work, experimenting with the ingredients of language, just as he was hitting his stride.

Pitfall (1948)

Pitfall is just shy of sensational. Error and evil intrude into a normal postwar American suburban family. Jay Dratler and Andre de Toth, writer and director, hit all the necessary film noir notes but without descending to cliche. The beautiful blonde, is, for once, neither a temptress nor a gold-digger, but a decent, troubled young lady; the private eye is not a lonely warrior for justice but a brutal stalker; the police are not jerks; the wronged housewife is not simple and materialistic but strong and resilient. Moreover, the plot is not predictable and its ending neither pollyanna-ish nor disastrous, but balanced, credible and inconclusive. There are no car chases. 

Lizabeth Scott, Jane Wyatt, and Raymond Burr are terrific; Dick Powell is, alas, Dick Powell. 

Shakespeare at Work: the Oxymoron

The oxymoron, a figure of speech in which there is a sharp contradiction between modifier and noun, has become a boon to humorists: "business ethics," "military intelligence," "pretty ugly," "jumbo shrimp," "Christian Science," "Utah Jazz."  But it's a figure that has a serious side as well. The oxymoron expresses very well the contradictions inherent in literary and also human life.  Life is a mingled yarn, is it not?  Both fair and foul, sometimes in the same moment; sweet sorrow. Because Shakespeare tried to convey the complexity of things, he employed oxymorons  throughout his career -- in simple straightforward formulas at the early plays, but in his maturity in innovative and sometimes startlingly beautiful ways.

The oxymoron has a long pedigree. It may go as far back as to a classical trope called the adynaton, or collection of impossibilities. There is a treasure-trove of oxymora in Alain of Lisle's thirteenth-century poem (or, more exactly, prosimetron) De Planctu Naturae in which "amor" is described as "pax odio, fraudique fides, spes juncta timor... mistus cum ratione furor,/ Naufragium dulce, pondus leve (peace in hatred, faith in fraud, hope joined to fear, madness mixed with reason, sweet shipwreck, light heaviness); there is a similar passage, from the same century, in Guillaime de Lorris extremely popular Romaunt of the Rose that begins "Love is a hateful peace and loving hate."

The oxymoron was given new life and vitality by Petrarch, whose sufferings for young Laura famously caused him to freeze in summer and burn in winter. Many sonneteers, continental and English, were indebted to Petrarch, among them Thomas Watson, a poet who flourished in the years of Shakespeare's adolescence. One of Watson's poems, which contained the lines "Love is a sour delight, a sugared grief/ A living death, and ever-dying life" lay behind young Romeo's modish and easily parodied oxymoron-rich rhetoric: "O brawling love, o loving hate,/ O heavy lightness, serious vanity,/ Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,/ Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health.... " Romeo was so besotted by his own rhetoric that Juliet couldn't resist a joke at his expense: "You kiss by the book." Romeo in 1595 owes a lot to Will in 1580.

Shakespeare knew that Romeo indulged too much of a good thing. Half a decade later, in All's Well That Ends Well, Helena imagined her perjured promiscuous lover Bertram at the French court dancing attendance on the ladies in a series of tired oxymora: "his humble ambition, proud humility,/ His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet,/ His faith, his sweet disaster."  In these lines, Helana, and Shakespeare as well, repudiated fashionable oxymoronic couplings. On the other hand, it is not love but hatred and anger that give rise to Timon's oxymorons. For him, the loathed Athenians, those "smiling smooth detested parasites, are "courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears."  

In Hamlet, Claudius's insincere but brilliantly accomplished oxymorons camouflage his sin. He has

             as 'twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious, and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole

taken Gertrude as his wife. The pairing of "auspicious" (the root meaning of which is looking to the heavens to prognosticate by the flight of birds) with "dropping" is especially wonderful.

Claudius's "delight and dole" were anticipated by Richard II's rhetorical theatricality upon his return to England:

As a long-parted mother with her child
Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting,
So, weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth.

And there's the "wholesome iniquity" of the bawdy house in Pericles -- a play in which calm comes in the form of "litigious peace."

In King Lear, a play about, among other subjects  a "precious unprized" daughter, there is a submerged but stunning oxymoron when (in Edgar's words) Gloucester is at last released from his suffering: "his flaw'd heart.../ 'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,/ Burst smilingly." "Burst smilingly" is a phrase which the younger Shakespeare could not reach; nor could any other poet before or since.

"Bisson Conspectuities"

"Bisson conspectuities" is one of my all-time favorite Shakespearean oxymorons. Although it's not as transparent as, say, "hot ice" or "living death," it's much more quirky and colorful. "Bisson conspectuities" appears in Coriolanus in one of the scenes in which Menenius banters with the Roman crowd. They attack and he parries by enumerating his own strengths and weaknesses. He concludes with an insult that flaunts his patrician education: "What harm can your bisson conspectuities glean out of this character?" (In this case, a "character" is a summary statement of a person's habits or nature, a "characterization".)

The odd word "conspectuities" is an invention of Shakespeare's. He derived it from the participial form of the Latin verb "conspicio" -- to observe, gaze, or watch. It's a nonce word, a hapax legomenon; unlike some of Shakespeare's more inspired coinages, conspectuities never domesticated into English -- the OED lists only this sole appearance. "Bisson," on the other hand, which means "blind," was not new to the language but was in fact an ancient word of Germanic origin -- and already obsolescent in 1608, although the venerable proverb "the bysom ledys the blynde" might still have been current in the provinces. In Hamlet, the deliberately archaizing First Player uses the expression "bisson rheum" for "blinding tears." 

"Bisson conspectuities" means "blind sight" or "blear vision." It's an especially striking oxymoron because its component parts are drawn from opposite ends of the word hoard -- old and new, plain and polysyllabic, Germanic and Latin, rustic and citified.

But there's a complication. The word "bisson" doesn't actually appear in the Folio; there it is "beesome." "Beesome, usually spelled besom, meant and still means, "broom." But in the context of Coriolanus, broom is meaningless; and so, beginning  with Lewis Theobald in the 1720s, editors have uniformly substituted "bisson" -- an inspired conjecture but still a guess. It's possible that Shakespeare wrote "bisson" and a scrivener or printer incorrectly read 'beesome" -- but perhaps not. An oxymoron of transcendent genius might be merely an illusion -- a creation not of Shakespeare but of editorial tradition.

"Bisson conspectuities" puts quite a burden on members of the Blackfriar's audience. It's hard to believe that Shakespeare thought his first hearers would grasp the phrase's meaning on the fly. It's easy for us to understand it now, four hundred years later, with a treasury of annotations at the foot of every page. Perhaps Shakespeare didn't care if the audience comprehended? Is it possible that he was writing just for his own delight, for his pleasure in words? For readers rather than playgoers? Or perhaps he had already divined that he was writing for enthusiasts and scholars of a latter age.

Money

I don't know much about economics and never did --it's an area of knowledge that has lived up to its reputation as a dismal, arcane science. It's not only economics -- I don't even understand money, which has become more ethereal and symbolic during the course of my lifetime.

In my first real job, at Sears, Roebuck during the now-historical 1950s, I was handed, come Friday at 4:00pm, an envelope containing a few bills and coins. Money as I understood it.

A guy had bills in his wallet and put some in the bank and blew some on CrackerJacks at Ebbets Field. 

 

 

That was before credit cards and electronic transfers and bitcoins, whatever they are. Of course I understand that money is not just currency. It's a mysterious commodity -- much prized, but  also the root of all evil. It has no value until you spend it, and then, once you spend it, you don't have it. The monetary value of things is often inversely proportionate to their utility: diamonds, pearls, paintings. To have money in the bank gives you a sense of security. Then you die. 

Most people have way too little money, but some people have more money than is necessary and more than is good for their souls. I'm enthusiastic about taxing wealth. Let's say a guy has $100,000,000. Suppose there's an annual 2% wealth tax and he has to contribute $2,000,000 a year to promote the general welfare. How is he harmed?  He now has $98,000,000. What can you do with $100M that you can't do with $98M? And moreover, how incompetent must you be if you can't make your $98M generate a few million and restore you to $100M. You can do good and still stay rich -- what a blessing!

In my opinion, many Americans think about wealth and money incorrectly. They're like the Johnny Roccos who always want "more." I was fortunate to be taught by my father, who explained to me that "no one owns anything. The most you can say is that you have a lifetime lease." He believed in this maxim even though he spent his life negotiating real estate deals. He wasn't much concerned with money and it didn't seem to harm him a bit. He had enough, and "enough is as good as a feast."

To me, wealth means very little, but standard of living means a great deal. My standard of living is very high because my town has an excellent public library and a thriving public school system. And fine mountain trails and other recreational possibilities. These amenities aren't "mine" -- they're not money in my personal bank. But they contribute immensely to my standard of living.

What would improve my standard of living? That's an easy question. I would enjoy my life more if other people lived better. If there were no homeless people panhandling on the mall or sleeping under bridges. If unregarded old folks weren't thrown into corners. If refugees were welcomed. If medical help was available to all as a birthright. Etc., etc., etc.

I would gladly pay more in taxes if my tax money was spent wisely. I'd be "better off." There would be less money in my personal pocket but more joy in my life.

My Two Alter Egos

Famous literary doppelgangers include Mr. Hyde, William Wilson, the picture in Dorian Grey's attic, Leggatt, and Golyadkin Jr. In film, there are the sisters, or twins, Kate and Patricia Bosworth, both played by Bette Davis and no doubt many more that I don't know or remember that professional movie historians could add. Doubles abound in the world of make-believe, but also occur in "real life." I've had two doppelgangers of my very own. They are not official or clinical doubles but they definitely manifest or "outer" fears that are embedded in the less accessible parts of my brain -- they're my own personal Sir Smiles. They have haunted me because they embodied the terror of what I might have been or what might have happened to me if I dropped my guard. I never spoke to either of these individuals -- only observed them at a fearful distance.

Many decades ago, when I was a graduate student, there was a rumor in circulation among my peers that 50% of the students who finished their classwork and comprehensive exams never completed their dissertations. Naturally, I was afraid that I that I might fall into that ABD black hole. In those days, I haunted Widener Library's vast reading room and there it was that I encountered my first dreaded doppelganger. He was a bespectacled gloomy fellow, not unlike me, but taller, ganglier, and, I think, homelier. The story was that he had been working on his dissertation for 17 years. After I would sit I down to work in a morning, he'd wander in, choose a place, open his briefcase, spread out his books and papers on the table, sharpen his pencils and then, after a quarter of an hour, get up and walk out and come back a few minutes later with a copy of The New York Times. He'd read the paper in a leisurely manner, then put it aside and turn to his dissertation. After a while, he would check his watch and then go out for a cup of coffee. Shortly afterward, it was lunchtime; then it was time for tea, and then came the hour to pack up and go home. Did he do an hour's work during the day; not much more, maybe less.

Of course I feared that I could turn into this fellow. I suspect that it was good for me to be presented with such a scary doppelganger. His negative example forced me to keep my nose to the grindstone. Without Sir Procrastination, who knows, I might be sitting at that library table to this day, pretending to write that damn dissertation.

My second doppelganger is equally frightening but more contemporary. He's a pathetic guy who lives right here in Boulder -- somewhere nearby, because he frequently passes my window on his way to the mall, where he hits people up for spare change. He looks alarmingly like me -- same size, same shape, roughly of my age, though grayer and balder and dirtier. I could have been him if a single one of my genes on a single chromosome had failed. There I would be, living alone in a small room stacked to the gills with newspapers and magazines, living off welfare and emerging only to shout leftist slogans at passers-by. Doppelganger #2 is a crazy defective version of myself; a secret sharer who embodies my deepest fears. 

I confess that I hate these two guys, not for themselves but because I know that I could have been them if I hadn't been lucky.