Dr. Metablog

Coulrophobia

My bedmate informed that last night, in the wee hours, I uttered the strange words, "fear of clowns."  

Thanks to her I then remembered doing so (I had forgotten). But why those words? I had no context. Was I in the throes of some sort of clownish nightmare?

Or was it merely a vocabulary exercise?  Perhaps, in my dream, I searched for the English word for "fear of clowns." I know there is such a word, and in the morning, I tried to recall it, but without success. I then tried to re-invent a word, but the best I could do was "bozophobia," which is clearly an undignified and inadequate invention. The existing and correct word, I soon discovered, is coulrophobia, a curious modern coinage, dating only to the 1990s. Coulrophobia is, for some mysterious reason, derived from the Greek word for "stilt-walker." (There's a modern Greek word for clown, κλόουν, transliterated as klóoun, which I suspect to be a recent borrowing from American English.)  

Coulrophobia can be a serious affliction. According to the Cleveland Clinic, coulrophobia can lead to hyperhidrosis. I myself am neither coulrophobic nor hyperhidrosic.  

The nighttime mystery remains. Why in the world would a semi-normal guy blurt out the words "fear of clowns" at 2 am in the morning. In the long history of human sleeping and dreaming, has such a thing ever happened before? Or will it again?

Truly, I am a fascinating individual. Especially during the night. During the waking hours, not so much.

Not Another Brooklyn Novel: The Hand that Feeds You (2015)

I was steered to A J Rich's The Hand that Feeds You by a pair of websites that listed books set in Brooklyn, but I'm sad to say that there's almost nothing of Brooklyn in the novel -- a considerable disappointment to expectant me. It's a murder mystery in which various places in and around Brooklyn are mentioned, but in fact the novel takes place in a cliched fictional city in which murders are committed, red herrings are liberally strewn, police are not very bright, and the actual perp is lo and behold revealed in the last chapter.

I'm not a great reader of crime fiction, but I found this one "suspenseful" and "gripping." Against my better judgment, I swallowed it in one gulp.

I would have liked it even more if I had any affection or even interest in dogs, because in The Hand that Feeds You, the mystery is whether it was Morgan Prager's or Billie Badgirl-Richbitch's dogs who ripped out scamming boyfriend Bennett's throat. The novel might also have been more up my alley if protagonist-narrator Prager had been able to form warmer bonds with humans than with canines. The novel concludes with Prager receiving a chaste peck from her human crush and a sensual roll in the grass with her devoted doggy. Borderline perverse, in my opinion. But what can be expected of a novel in which dangerous "pitbulls" are re-branded as "pitties."

It's odd and something of a curiosity that scenes in the novel are located in Rangeley and Oquossoc, the only towns in rural Maine with which I'm even remotely familiar.

Another Brooklyn Novel: A Meaningful Life (1971)

I had never heard of L. J. Davis until I searched out his black-comic novel, A Meaningful Life.  It's about a young man named Lowell Lake from Boise, Idaho who moves to Brooklyn (as did the author himself) and buys a decrepit mansion in a newly gentrifying section of Bedford-Stuyvesant that was eventually to be dignified and upgraded into Boerum Hill. In his endeavor to repair the building, everything that could go wrong, goes wrong -- and does so in inventive, unpredictable ways.

If it's a satire, as it's sometimes called, A Meaningful Life is not gentle, Menippean or Horatian, but, rather, far beyond the outer limits of Juvenelian. It's nasty, and sometimes falls into just plain ugly.  It reads less like a novel than as an extended turn by a stand-up monologist or comedian. Plot and character are regularly sacrificed to jokes. It has the saddest ending of any novel I can recall reading

Lowell Lake is afraid of "Negroes" and doesn't much like Puerto Ricans or Jews or gays (whom he calls "fruits," and "fags") or old people, and he, and the author, indulge themselves in brutal stereotyping. 

It's one of the bleakest books I've ever read, and, if you hold your nose, one of the funniest.

A Second Brooklyn Novel by Daniel Fuchs: Homage to Blenholt (1936)

Of the ten or so novels that I've read since I began this project, Homage to Blenholt is certainly the most regional and the most "Jewish." It is positively marinated in local color. Even in the first few paragraphs, we encounter the "dirty cobbled streets" of Williamsburg, a milkman's plodding horse, the subway and the trolley, "gutters," "seltzer," and a "stoop."  Kids play Johnnie-on-the-pony, punchball, and ringolevio. There's a pickle man and a hot corn man and a peddler selling imitation pearls. Even when characters are not kvetching outright, they speak in a thick dialect that ladles English words onto Yiddish structures and inflections. 

The thin but adequate plot concerns young Max Balkan, who yearns for a more glamorous, more powerful life. -- but every reader soon realizes that despite his ambitions he's doomed to a life of slicing pastrami behind the counter of someone else's delicatessen. Max admires Blenholt, a corrupt politician whose graft has earned him a shiny suit and an extravagant funeral, -- but in his more romantic moments he dreams of being an Alexander, a Caesar, or, his favorite role model, Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, the Scythian shepherd who rose from poverty to become the scourge of God and conqueror of Persia.

In the novel's finest phrase, poor Max's unromantic mother dismisses her son's fantasies: "Tamburlaine, Schmamburlaine." 

The bell of nostalgia rang most powerfully with the appearance of a word, well known to me but no doubt unfamiliar to most readers. The word is "Forverts." It was my task, on Sunday mornings, to buy and deliver a copy of the Jewish Daily Forward to my Yiddish-speaking grandparents, who lived around the corner on Coney Island Avenue. So with 50 cents in hand, I purchased the Times and the Eagle for my parents and for my grandparents, the "Forverts." Until Homage to Blenholt, I had not seen or heard that strange foreign word in 65 or 70 years. My thanks to Daniel Fuchs.

I should add that, like Balkan, youthful me was dazzled by Tamburlaine. Marlowe -- a young man's poet -- was my first serious literary love. He offered me romantic escapism of a high order. But I was far too unimaginative to see myself as the conqueror of the known world. For me, it was quite enough to appreciate Marlowe's exotic landscape and still unsurpassed poetry. 

Still Another Brooklyn Novel: Motherless Brooklyn (1999)

Jonathan Lethem nominally sets Motherless Brooklyn in downtown Brooklyn, but it's more accurate to say that it takes place in the world of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard. Or, to be even more precise, in the Land of Noir. It's a textbook example of superior detective fiction, with all the trappings: a clever gumshoe (who, of course, gets himself bopped on the head), a bad girl, two (count 'em two) car chases; a mysterious international crime cartel (on loan from Ian Fleming), a scary assassin, seedy all-night joints, endless stakeouts, even a police detective who's always just a step behind our guy. It's so self-consciously, unapologetically derivative -- less plagiary than homage. One character even quotes Sam Spade: "When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it." The novel is suspenseful, clever, and occasionally witty.  It kept me engaged and guessing, so I have no complaints. Of course I couldn't follow the intricacies of the betrayals and counter-betrayals, but then, I never can.

It's a Brooklyn novel in the sense that it recognizes the astonishing provinciality of the borough. Lionel Essrog, our detective, thinks of New Jersey and Connecticut as exotic territories. Most of the action is specifically located in downtown Brooklyn, which happens to be a neighborhood that I know rather well. The investigators have their office on Court Street, where I often visited my father's law offices, first at 125 Court and later on the 13th floor of a tall building at 66 Court (the floor was listed, believe it or not, as 12A, so as not to alarm the triskaidekaphobic). Also mentioned is Joralemon Street, where Dr Irving Pollack, my smooth-faced orthodontist, painfully tightened the metal braces on my teeth every other week for the entire duration of my childhood and youth.

Motherless Brooklyn seems to be designed for the big screen. In 2017 a version appeared that was written and directed by the rather brilliant actor Edward Norton, who also plays Lionel Essrog. On a whim, we rented and watched the film last night. It's an engaging film, very handsomely rendered. I watched it, I'm afraid, with a chip on my shoulder, because I came to it with the novel fresh in my mind and resented the liberties the film takes with the novel. In fact, after just a few introductory scenes, Norton left the novel behind. Instead, he crossed it with the Towne-Polanski Chinatown. It's a mistake, but not a bad one, because if your intention is to imitate a film, you might as well imitate an excellent one. Into the film, Norton imports a series of elements that are utterly foreign to the novel. There's a dictatorial character who is modeled on Noah Cross, a child of mysterious origin similar to the daughter of Evelyn Mulwray ("she's my sister and my daughter") and a contrived plot device that brings us deep into impenetrable Harlem. I'm sorry to say that Motherless Brooklyn, the film, doesn't escape the gravitational pull of Chinatown.

Another Brooklyn Novel: Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964)

I read the first fifty pages of Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn and then decided, No More. It's an ugly, brutal book, not one that's going to offer me either instruction or pleasure. I read two chapters -- the first about the murderous gang wars and the second the transsexual who dies of an overdose of benzedrine. Then I looked up the wiki article and realized that I was about to come face to face with "the novel's most notorious scene, in which a young prostitute is brutally gang-raped after a night of heavy drinking and is left for dead in a vacant lot." Sorry, not for me.

Not much about Brooklyn either in this grim novel; no local color, though the story is reputed to be set in Sunset Park or Red Hook. 

Selby crosses William Burroughs (whom I also can't read) with Jack Kerouac. Plus innovative grammar, confusing punctuation, and inventive orthography. 

Not my cup of tea. Sorry, life is too short,

More Brooklyn Novels: Summer in Williamsburg (1934)

Daniel Fuchs was known to me only as the writer of the screenplay of Criss-Cross, a noir that epitomizes "gritty."  Or perhaps grimy. I was not aware that Fuchs  began his writing career with three Brooklyn novels, the first of which is Summer in Williamsburg. It's a novel that hits home, because Fuchs was born in 1909 and grew up in exactly the same part of Brooklyn, and in the same circumstances, as did my father, who was born there in 1904. 

The novel comprises a single summer of tenement life and it's not optimistic or cheerful: "people in tenements lived in a circle without significance, one day the duplicate of the next until the end, which occurred without meaning but accidentally." Fuchs' Williamsburg is filled to the brim with anomie, petty criminals, violent teen gangs, multiple suicides, harridan wives and unfaithful husbands, ungratified sexual longings, business failures and consequent poverty. Even a fatal fire. In some Brooklyn novels, it is through books and reading that a character stumbles upon a clue to another and better world; not in this one. Fuchs' tenement world is claustrophobic and imprisoning. And yet, Fuchs occasionally offers a touch of poetic language -- sometimes even breaking the novel's "fourth wall" and intruding a bit of inventive authorial charm into the narrative. Redeeming moments, for the most part, but few and far between.

Other elements that might offer hope to a hopeless world: athletics, either participatory or spectator; religion, not a shred, even though almost all of the characters are Jewish; music; any sort of aesthetic concern. No beauty in Fuchs' Williamsburg.

I wonder how my father managed to survive his many Williamsburg summers without bitterness and with such a cheerful, optimistic demeanor.  Why was he not soured and jaded by his grim environment?  Or perhaps Williamsburg had its particular glories while Fuchs had an eye only for nastiness.

Yesterday, while reading this book, my browser took me, by chance, to a travel site that advertised a stay at a 4-star hotel in Williamsburg, "New York's coolest neighborhood." Fuchs (and my father) would have been flabbergasted.  "Coolest neighborhood."

And so, it appears, the whirligig of time continues its whimsical way. 

Art, Elephants

Here's a "painting" that is on exhibit in the lobby of the condominium in which I've lived since 2009. It's been there as long as I have been.  It is unsigned -- the "artist" hasn't been courageous enough to inscribe it. In the privacy of my aggrieved mind, I attribute it to creature-of-my-imagination whom I call Fango Nero (Italian for "black mud"). I conceive Fango Nero to be a pioneer, in employing not brush or palette knife but instead a standard Home Depot 6" paint roller. I don't blame Nero for leaving his work of art unnamed and unsigned. After all, it's a patently disgraceful, reprehensible piece of trash masquerading as art and that has no business affixed to anyone's walls. I don't know what prompted the architects or the contractors to buy this thing  and hang it in my lobby. Perhaps they fell for a scam, or perhaps they were supporting a needy uncle.

So many accomplished artists in this world and I must be afflicted with these splotches! What a waste of space!

That's what I thought, these last twelve years, until I had a sudden epiphany. 

This painting is not the work of my imaginary painter Fango Nero, or any human being. No, not at all. It's the achievement of an elephant. Some of my readers will have seen videos of elephants painting. If the professor of art or the mahout provides an artistically-inclined elephant with paint and a brush, by golly, he or she will grasp the brush handle with the ever-useful trunk and paint you something in the abstract impressionist line.

Here is a pachydermal production: 

It's quite a bit more interesting than the black and white paint roller job, is it not. I like the cheerful interplay of the two well-chosen colors and the way that the long pink lines, almost imprisoned by the green, suggest both freedom and delight. It would be a greater pleasure by far to encounter this canvas several times a day than the muddy black one.  

The bottom line: Fango bad, Dumbo good.

Novels Set in Brooklyn: Desperate Characters (1970)

Paula Fox's Desperate Characters feels to me less like a novel than a short story, or perhaps a set of short stories sutured together. It's comprised of a series of incidents that concern a married couple and like many fictions in the short story genre, resists closure or resolution. Though it's a miniature of a novel, it's still a gem.

The principal characters, Otto and Sophie, come to the end of the story just about where they started -- not miserable but not happy either. They are immigrants to an incompletely gentrified, downtown Brooklyn neighborhood. Their house -- all pocket doors, cedar floors, highly polished Victorian furniture even a Meissen cat dish -- as well as the houses of their neighbors are vulnerable to violation. Otto and Sophie, and their friends, are attacked by the sort of intrusions that are familiar from horror films -- the bite of a stray cat, a threatening phone call, a stone thrown through a window, unwanted visitors, vicious inexplicable vandalism, mysterious goings-on in the house next door. These attacks on the home are intermittent but unending; in fact, the last image in the book is of a self-inflicted wound -- an interior wall splotched and stained by the black ink of a thrown inkwell. Stasis, not progress.

Should I have been surprised that the Brooklyn novels that I have now read are so concerned with the acquisition, improvement, integrity, and preservation of the homestead?

To tell truth, I have been a bit startled -- but I should not have been. Brooklyn has always been the most mutable and fluid of cities. Outsiders -- Irish, Italians and Jews in my part of Flatbush, as well as southern Blacks searching for the warmth of other suns, West Indians, Russians, Hispanics from central and south Americas, Asians of all varieties, and nowadays midWesterners -- arrive and alter the neighborhood. For the worse, according to the prior inhabitants, and for the better, according to the new arrivals. It's a repeated and perpetual dance -- and certainly one that was a feature of my own family history.

My immigrant grandparents never had the resources even to imagine the purchase of a home. They were renters of a cold-water sixth-floor walkup in Williamsburg. Nor had they owned property in the old country, where they were even poorer. I imagine that when my parents purchased the house in which I was raised (in 1936, for $4500) they were the first in my ancestry dating back to the spear and atalatl eons ever to own a piece of real estate. 

Re-reading these Brooklyn books has reminded me how important that home on East 9 Street in heart of  Flatbush was to my parents. And why my father, in his last years, solitary, crippled by arthritis, but intransigent refused to leave it though it would have been much more sensible and convenient to live elsewhere. He was determined to die in his own precious home, and he did so.

Here's a picture of 539 East 9 Street, a big old undistinguished Victorian, taken sometime around the 1939, the year of my birth. The second and third stories were rented; we lived on the ground floor. The house, long since demolished, lives on in my memory. 

Especially in my nightmares, where at least once a month, I defend myself against the savage bows and arrows, the cavalry rifles, and wild dogs that attack the property.  And wake up in a sweaty terror.

Novels about Brooklyn: Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959)

Well, one might ask, how goes the reading-Brooklyn-novels project?  

I've been taken by surprise. Solely by the luck of the draw, just because the books were available at the public library, and without planning or intention on my part, my first three novels all had the same focus: coming-of-age-as-a-girl-in-Brooklyn. First, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (TGB) about a Irish-German girl in the period around WWI, then Another Brooklyn (AB) about a Black or African-American girl in 1970s Bushwick, and yesterday, Brown Girl, Brownstones (BG,B) by Paule Marshall, written in 1959 but neglected and then rediscovered during the 1970s. BG,B focuses on young Selina Boyce, daughter of immigrants from Barbados, who was raised in a West Indian neighborhood somewhere between Fulton Avenue and Crown Heights.

The three novels, and their three heroines, share common concerns. In all three, an intelligent young girl, a reader, tries to achieve selfhood in a challenging environment. The young girls come from families that are led by strong mothers and are compromised by weak, failing fathers. Religions (Catholicism in TGB, Nation of Islam in AB, and a dictatorial new religion led by "Father Peace," whom I take to be Father Divine, in BG,B) are unhelpful and damaging.

Today's novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones is the most detailed, informative, and moving of the trio. It's a substantial, rich, highly-detailed, and I would say old-fashioned novel about self-discovery. It used to be said that "every modern writer's first novel should be titled "my horrible adolescence.'" But BG,B is more complicated than the stereotype. It's an "immigration novel" about the conflicts between the foreign-born parents and the Brooklyn-born daughter. It's also a story of regional interest, very strong in depicting the peculiarities of Brooklyn culture.

Barbadian-Americans are depicted as an entrepreneurial class, upwardly mobile, anxious to get ahead. The first step is to acquire a brownstone and become a landlord rather than a tenant. And yet young Selina rejects her aspiring mother, whom she sees as hopelessly materialistic. She fears the success of a move to the boring suburbs -- a familiar 1950s theme.

BG,B is a novel about race, and, in my opinion, hits its stride in the last few chapters when Paule Marshall analyzes bigotry. There are a few pages that either anticipate or follow the powerful critiques of James Baldwin and Frantz Fanon. And Richard Wright. I suspect that it's such pages that helped bring deserved attention to Brown Girl, Brownstones.