Dr. Metablog

State of My Mind -- End of 2020

It's been a rough year what with the madman president and the covid pandemic. And also deaths and diseases among my close friends. I have at least ten male friends who've lost their wives after long marriages. Some have bounced back, some will never get over the grief. At the beginning of 2020, I made a joke:  "it's going to be the year of the ophthalmologist." It turned out to be the year of the thanatologist.  

Nevertheless, I can honestly say that my dominant mood is one of gratitude.

Grateful that I've lived a long life, mostly healthily, and that my children and grandchildren are thriving. I'm not rich, but I've never missed a meal for want of cash. 

When my father was my age, he was crippled with arthritis and he was widowed, living a sad solitary life. I take long walks in the mountains and have a new love in my life.

As of today, 1.1 million Americans have been vaccinated against the virus. There will be errors and disruptions and scandals, but in a few months we'll be mostly back to normal. And I believe and hope that our wonderful country will survive this accidental lunatic presidency.

Female (1933)

Here's a colorized illustration of Ruth Chatterton as Alison Drake in the "pre code" romance Female (1933).   

 

Although she's surrounded by a bunch of official looking executives, she runs the show. Miss Drake owns and manages factory that manufactures automobiles. She's in a male preserve -- it's not a cosmetic factory or something more traditionally feminine. And she loves the work and the power.

 

The film might have been called Alison Drake but no, it's Female -- and therefore claims to describe not just one individual woman but an entire gender. Does it? At best, the film is mighty confused -- and at worst, reactionary in the extreme.

 

In the first half of the film, Alison Drake is not only an extremely competent executive, but she's also sexually liberated. It's her habit to bring home attractive men, seduce them, and, if they get the least bit soppy, transfer them to the Montreal office. She's one happy --although heartless -- "cougar." Then she meets her match in the person of young handsome (before he grew that silly little mustache) George Brent, who responds to her advances by saying, "I was hired as an engineer, not as a gigolo."  All of a sudden, Miss Drake goes all weak in the knees, falls in love, and decides to marry the man. She puts him in charge of the factory and plans to stay home in order to achieve the apotheosis of femininity by having "nine children."

 

The disappointing ending seems to be pasted on rather than organic. Many a film in the Code era set out to challenge the "tune of the time" but threw in the conventional towel because of the Hays Office. Female is disappointing because it voluntarily chooses to go all squishy when it wasn't necessary.

 

Here is Ruth Chatterton on her submissive and symbolic back.

 

Pairings

"Kith and kin" is an excellent example of a "pairing" -- sometimes called a "coordinate pair." A pairing is a linguistic event in which two words join to produce a single meaning.

"Kith" has no independent existence nowadays and only exists as an element of the pair. "Kith and kin" means "family." Originally, back then, "kith" meant "known" and therefore signified "friends." "Kith and kin" was "friends and relatives." No longer; now it means "family and family." "Time and tide" is another fine pairing; "tide" meant "time" centuries before it came to refer to the moony fluctuation of the seas, although its older meaning survives in "eventide," "Yuletide," and similar words. Now "time and tide" seems to evoke the inevitability of both clock and waves -- both of them joined to wait for no man. "Kit and kaboodle" is also a lovely pairing, because "kaboodle" lacks independent existence. It may derive from "boodle' -- a thief's bundle -- with the "ka" added just for the fun of it. "Dribs and drabs" is more obscure in origin and may not be a true pairing. "Dribs" is probably a variant of "drip" but "drab" was in times past not a small amount of something or other, but an untidy or unchaste woman. It's possible that "dribs and drabs," now a rather neat pairing, is better thought of as a reduplicative like mumbo-jumbo or hoity-toity. "Nook and cranny" is a pairing in which both elements survive independently; "nook" originally a corner of a room, and "cranny" a narrow space in which a brown recluse might hide. When someone or something grows by leaps and bounds, it's hard to tell which is the leap and which the bound. The same with "hot and bothered" -- the two words simply reinforce each other. Similarly, a person might want to "pick and choose" between alternatives, but to do so requires only one action. "Flotsam and jetsam" is an amusing pairing of uncertain origin. It is often thought that flotsam lies on the surface of the water and jetsam is thrown into it, but such a definition might be merely a folk etymology derived from the words "float" and "jettison." A "hoot and a holler" both refer to shouting, but now they mean "shouting distance." "Stuff and nonsense" is obvious, but what sort of "stuff" is nonsensical? Perhaps it's the very vagueness of "stuff" that it allows it to pair up and reinforce "nonsense." "Alack and alas" is a weary but euphonious pair. "Wrack and ruin" becomes more transparent when it's remembered that wrack is a variant  form of wreck -- as "beck and call" becomes clearer when it is recalled that "beck" is a foreshortened version of "beckon." The cry in "hue and cry" is obvious; the hue is thought to derive from the OF verb huer (shout). 

Null and void, bag and baggage, prim and proper, vim and vigor, are self-explanatory.

Bits and pieces are sometimes called odds and ends. That's the long and the short of it. Jot and tittle have been thoroughly researched and explicated here.

Is "footloose and fancy-free" a pairing. Yes, I think so. An energetic and imaginative pairing. 

Inventive Remark in an Otherwise Undistinguished Dream

Once again, I was lost, this time in a strange city -- apparently, I was trying to drive from somewhere down south all the way to Vermont.  We park the car and my companion (a guy totally unknown to me, by the way) asks a traffic cop the name of the city at which we've arrived. The policeman says to my friend, "ay, ya" and my friend says to me, and I quote this lunatic absurdity absolutely verbatim, no embroidery whatsoever, 'He says we're in  ay-ya, which is West Indian for New Brunswick, New Jersey."  

"West Indian for New Brunswick, New Jersey?"  Goodness gracious, is that creative, or what? Another brilliant achievement of my dreamatorium.

Replacement Children

Friends, relatives, and stray internet pilgrims know that Dr. Metablog, aka Vivian de St. Vrain, etc. is a "replacement child" and has written about it in the blogpost Susan P. and also in brief remarks on Louis Aggasiz, Edward Gibbon, Thornton Wilder, and a guy from the old neighborhood.

Now, I'm happy to say, there's a new website devoted to the study of Replacement Children. You can access it here, and learn about Mark Twain, Frida Kahlo, Vincent van Gogh, Elvis Presley, and other famous and not-so-famous "replacements." It's worth a visit.  

Astonishing Feat of Memory and Facial Recognition

Along with everyone of my generation, I've been worrying about my deteriorating memory. There are these horrible moments. I stand in front of the open refrigerator, wondering what I'm doing there and for what I'm searching. Or I go the market and then forget to bring the groceries in from the car -- that sort of thing. Is it normal deterioration or is it pathological?

 

So I'm happy to bring some good news -- no, remarkable news from the memory front.

 

A couple of nights ago, Miss Reynolds and I watched the worst movie we've seen in many a year. It's called Johnny Guitar, a it's a "western" perpetrated in 1954. It's an unholy mess of pretentious but incoherent plot, absurd characters, goofy dialogue and atrocious acting. We watched it right to the end because it was so bad bad bad that it became amusing. The film is so beyond crappy that it has been praised as authentically American by both Godard and Truffaut.

 

About three-quarters of the way through, I said to Miss Reynolds that the actor who played the villainous "Dancin' Kid" -- his name, no joke, and he actually performs a few steps with Mercedes McCambridge, who if overacting were a crime, would have served a life sentence in a supermax facility -- that the actor, billed as "Scott Brady" looked a lot like Lawrence Tierney, a no-longer-remembered "heavy" who had starred in "Born to Kill" (1947), which we had watched a couple of months ago.

 

Let me burnish this feat. I proposed that so-called "Scott Brady" resembled Lawrence Tierney. What a remarkable and daring assertion! 

 

So after Johnny Guitar came to its ludicrous conclusion, bullets flying everywhere, I looked up so-called "Scott Brady," the "Dancin' Kid," on Wikipedia  and discovered that his birth name was Gerard Tierney and that he was indeed the younger brother of Lawrence Tierney. 

 

I got to say I spent a few minutes crowing. I mean, really, noticing the resemblance and recalling the name of an obscure actor whom we had hardly noticed months ago -- what a coup! What a feat! I could hear the hallelujahs ring throughout our valley.

 

I didn't think that Miss Reynolds was sufficiently effusive in praise of my achievement -- although she did her best -- so I went to the window, opened it and shouted into the street, very loud, these words: "In Johnny Guitar, Scott Brady is Lawrence Tierney's younger brother Gerard." No doubt putting the Governor's security detail on Code Red alert.

 

After a few minutes, I wanted to do it again, but Miss R. talked me down.

 

The next day, I bragged to my children and their spouses about my achievement. One of my daughters-in-law, CKNC, wrote back that on reading my news, she went to her front door, opened it, and shouted, "My father-in-law knew that in Johnny Guitar, the actor Scott Brady is Lawrence Tierney's younger brother Gerard."  An entirely appropriate and measured response on her part, in my opinion.

 

My point is that a guy who can identify Lawrence Tierney's brother shouldn't worry about brain decay for at least a month or two. 

 

I don't know in what part of the brain information about Lawrence Tierney is stored. Certainly not the part that doesn't let you know why you're peering into the open refrigerator.  

 

I should also point out that I've recently received confirmation of the excellence of my amygdalae:   https://www.drmetablog.com/2020/11/spider.html

 

So there's hope.

 

[December 18:  Last night we watched, on TCM of course, a movie called Passion Flower (1930), an interesting tale of love and marriage and adultery and reconciliation and compromise. Definitely pre-Code. At one point, there's a party scene.  A very young man says his good-byes.  Both Ms. R and I immediately said, "that's a familiar face. Who is he?" And I said, "his voice sounds a lot like Ray Milland's." Later that evening we look it up on Wiki. Here's the news: "first screen appearance of Ray Milland, uncredited." 

 

Another astonishing feat -- this time of voice recognition. The old guy still has it, some of the time.]