Dr. Metablog

My Life with Museums -- an Introduction

In the course of my long life, I've visited hundreds of museums -- more than I can possibly count or remember. Nor just the famous and glorious ones: how many times, driving in unfamiliar locality, or wandering in a new city, have I been irresistibly lured into the local landmark?  Even in the most modest establishment, there's something new to learn and discover. Nevertheless, my focus, lifetime, has been on art museums, where even the most iconic, most reproduced painting or sculpture acquires new life when viewed in the flesh. Let's face it: copies can be useful and informative, but the real thing is the real thing -- always revelatory, and sometimes transcendent or sublime. In fact, let me confess, in the Rembrandt Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, I experienced a transient version of the so-called Stendhal Syndrome. Once and once only, but never to be forgotten.

I'm dazzled, in memory, by the vast holdings of the Borghese, the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum, the British Museum, and an early love, the under-appreciated Brooklyn Museum right there on Grand Army Plaza.  

I'm grateful to the exhibitions and the hard-working curators that introduced me to major painters I wouldn't otherwise have appreciated: Aelbert Cuyp and Jan Steen at the National Gallery, Camille Pissarro at the Jewish Museum in New York; many more. And also the specialized museums, chief among them the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, which taught me more about life in the seventeenth century than could a fleet of books. And a special favorite, the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York -- a most wonderful and comprehensive display of an ancient and modern craft. But also the many local museums that I visited during my thirty-eight cross-country migrations. Who could ever forget the Donna Reed Museum in Denison, Ohio, or the Jell-O Museum somewhere near Buffalo, New York?  Gosh, I'm still hoping that someday I will make it to the National Museum of the American Coverlet in Bedford, Pennsylvania.

And then there are the troubling museums. I wonder if I will ever have the courage to enter the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. It was disorienting enough to visit an open-air museum, somewhere in Lithuania, where a variety of preserved structures from that country's miserable past have been brought together to simulate a peasant village. It was a strange dispiriting visit. After all, my ancestors as far back as we can know lived and worked in such a sad little village. My visit was, I suppose, educational -- but also melancholy and depressing. The village seemed not so much preserved as embalmed.

Words of My Life: the List So Far

My series of posts called Words of My Life was inspired by a Federico Roncoroni's Sillabario della Memoria, viaggio sentimentale tra le parole amate. Roncoroni's book is a unique and I think original kind of autobiography -- a history (voyage, he says) of words that have been been loved by him. Words of My Life is a  homage to Roncoroni. So far I've written brief essays on the following words (and I intend to continue). Just as is the entirety of the blog, these essays constitute an autobiography in shards and fragments. Here's the list of entries thus far. Each mini-essay is just a click away.

barmagillion

boobs

boot

bottom

cishet,

hack

fango

fluff

joint

jot and tittle,

mucilage.

nostalgia

orts

outing

pairings

pandiculation

provider

ramps

roux

sleepers

slouch,

 spatchcock,

stopper.

troll

 umpire, 

whores

worship

yips

 

Sleeping: a History

I'm a terrible, terrible sleeper. It's a lifelong plight and a serious disability. Truth to tell, I'd have more success as a contestant in a tango contest, or as a heldentenor yodeling in front of thousands, or as a trapeze artist or as a sumo wrestler than I have as a sleeper.

Bad sleeping runs in my family. I suppose that I inherited the trait from my father. Growing up, we never knew where we'd find the old guy in the morning, because during the night he'd wander from room to room and from bed to chair and even onto that scratchy old green tufted sofa. For me, the hardest part of any day has always been the night -- and, believe it or not, the problem has become more severe as I grapple with old age.

My usual routine is to fall asleep prematurely (and unwisely) at 10:00 pm. Then I wake at 12:30 am, usually in a fright from a ghastly nightmare, my brain alert, but my body yearning for oblivion. Then I'm up for a while, involuntarily reprising some atrocious embarrassment or shameful failure in some earlier part of my life. Unable to find the right situation for my ancient limbs, I twirl beneath the blankets like a rotisserie chicken. I don't want to disturb my peacefully-slumbering bedmate, so I wander the residence, finally to settle in an auxiliary bed. Then my wayward brain starts to ruminate on the state of the nation, especially on the prospect of a second term for the moronic demagogue. At this point, I reluctantly surrender to necessity and take a sleeping pill (the powerful hypnotic ambien). I read or watch a basketball game on the TV, but after about 45 minutes the drug takes hold and the muscles in my eyes slacken so much that I can no longer bring the separate images of right and left eye together. Eventually I fall into "airplane sleep" -- the kind of shallow surface sleep that we all experience when we fly "economy" or "coach" (better called "steerage"). At about 6 in the morning, I wake out a second horrid dream, relieve myself, and try to snatch a couple of peaceful hours --  a hope which I regularly fail to accomplish. Eventually, "the darkness has passed/ And it's daylight at last."  I'm foggy-headed for a while but at last I regain my equilibrium until it's time for another nighttime bout with Morpheus. And that's how I pass one third of my life. 

On the cheerful side, although I'm a bad nighttime sleeper, I'm a fairly proficient daytime napper. The most wonderful and memorable sleeps of my life have been afternoon naps. When I was in my teens, back there in the Eisenhower era, it was my weekend custom to trot to the schoolyard in the morning and play three-on-three half-court basketball for a couple of hours (in those days I enjoyed an endless "second wind"). Then I'd come home for a mid-day dinner -- perhaps if the parents were feeling flush it would be a roast beef or roast pork along with a bounty of potatoes (the most soporific of vegetables). Then I'd retreat to my room, tune the old wood-cased Philco to a Dodgers game, perhaps even to a double-header, and allow myself to be soothed by the rhythmic cadences of Red Barber and Connie Desmond. A deep, profound and most satisfying nap would then ensue -- the kind of sleep where you're so far gone that you don't know if it's day or night, summer or winter when, hours later, you crack an exploratory eyelid.

Where are the sleeps of yesteryear?

In my maturity, sleep has been, as I've said, a combat zone. In these last years I've achieved weekend afternoon depth just two times. Alas and alack, it was the drugs, the sedatives for my two surgeries that did the trick. When you're anesthetized, at least as I experienced it, there's nothing -- no sound, no dream, certainly no twirling -- between the moment the anesthetic kicks in and moment it leaves. You're just not there. You're nowhere.

The ancient formula was somnus imago mortis. That is to say, sleep is the simulacrum of death. Sleep is designed to prepare us for death. There was a time that I would scoff at such a pious formula -- but not any more. I think that if death is what I experienced during anesthetized sleep, why, then, there's nothing to fear. It will be peaceful and long and very boring, but not at all stressful.

I would like my tombstone to read, "No More Insomnia, Forever."

Words of My Life -- Outing

During my lifetime, the word "outing" has mutated beyond recognition. It first entered my youthful vocabulary (as did so many other words) through the medium of baseball. An "outing" -- in the old days --meant to me only a stint on the mound. "Podres has had a good "outing" today." The more general meaning of "outing" as a short trip taken for pleasure, such as a picnic, or a jaunt in the country, only came into my  life many years later. "They enjoyed a family outing to Montauk." The fact of the matter is that my family of origin didn't go on "outings," but at some point I must have heard I heard about such journeyings from friends or read about them in novels.

These days, I rarely encounter the baseball or picknicky meanings of "outing." "Outing" has transformed into the obnoxious word that describes the odious and hostile practice of exposing the sexual identity of a person against his/her will.  From picnic to nasty, alas.

Frankly, I prefer the traditional significations and activities.

My Life in Objects XIX: Bronze Door Plate

It's my newest acquisition, purchased on ebay just a couple of days ago, but already a favorite. It's a bronze door plate, very beautiful and heavy in the hand. It's inscribed PULL. It bears no manufacturers or identifying marks but the style is mighty pure Victorian. I imagine it came from a demolished once-elegant downtown department store. What the heck do I plan to do with it?  Why, it will be attached, next summer, to the old iron gate that we mounted at the entrance to the "waterfall garden." It's whimsical, of course, because while the gate helps to define the space, it guards absolutely nothing and is easily circumvented. 

If PUSH had been available I would have purchased it too. But PULL is sufficient. A plate saying NO SOLICITORS has also been proposed -- but that addition might be just a little bit of overkill (and silliness).

My Baseball-First Vocabulary

Folks who weren't there can hardly appreciate how thoroughly the nation and neighborhood into which I was born was baseball-saturated. In the 1940s and 1950s, the heyday of the fabled Dodgers, baseball was Brooklyn and Brooklyn was the world -- of this there was, nor could be, any doubt.   

Baseball was the all-encompassing medium though which we learned about success and failure, defeat and resiliency, exhilaration and sadness, and ultimately of the knowledge of good and evil.  

Not only morality, but language itself. It's an unimpeachable fact that my early vocabulary was solidly baseball-based. It took years and sometimes decades before I discovered that many baseball words also carried an off-the-diamond significance.

Readers may scoff at this claim to the linguistic priority of baseball -- because they can't imagine or can't believe how central pitching and catching was to our experience. So "let's go to the tape."

Take, for instance, the word "pennant." During my salad years, "pennant" was a common everyday word that meant only "league championship." If you finished  first in your league, you "won the pennant." I had not the least glimmer of an idea that a "pennant" was also physical object -- a flag, it turned out, usually triangular and usually nautical. To me, a pennant was immaterial and metaphorical. When Russ Hodges famously (to those of us of a certain age) screamed, in 1951, "the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant," there was no reason for twelve-year-old me to suspect that the word had an extra-baseball existence. (Nor did I know that "league" meant anything but National or American, major or minor.)

Another such word is "battery," which to me and to my cohort of scruffy schoolyard friends meant nothing more than the duo of pitcher and catcher. "Today's battery is Newcombe and Campanella"; "they're facing the 'brother battery' of Mort and Walker Cooper." But later it came to pass that the word battery was known to the world beyond Ebbets as a source of electric power-- in those days lead-acid and now lithium. And that, in addition, "battery" had violent associations -- as in "assault and battery" -- or its military signification as an assemblage of cannons. (The word "batter" had already leapt its baseball perimeter. Thanks to my mother, I was early familiar with the tasty mixture that could be baked into cookies or bread). And "bat" was the old hickory or ash, not a flying mammal.

There are many other baseball words that migrated away from their first home. A "rubber" was a 4" wide strip of something -- was it really made of rubber?-- that lay on the mound just 60 feet and 6 inches from home plate. Later, a rubber became an eraser and then the material from which automobile tires are made and then, much much later, a condom. A "mound," of course, was first and foremost a pitcher's mound, not a geographical feature. A "dugout" was where players gathered when they weren't on the field; later it became a kind of canoe. "Stuff" -- some days a pitcher had his good stuff, but some days his sinker just didn't drop. A "stance" was a batter's pose in the box; some batters had an open stance and some a closed. "Clutch" did not denote holding tight to something or other; it meant only a "clutch hit". A "blast" was not a bomb going off; it was long four-bagger. The "count" was not degree a of knighthood; it was the state of balls and strikes on the batter.  The next batter would wait on a metaphorical "deck" long before a deck became a pack of cards or an exposed porch. A "blooper" was a "Texas leaguer"; only later did it become a flawed outtake. Strike! Three strikes and you're out. Later, a labor movement. And many more.

"Fair" and "foul" indicated where a batted ball fell to the earth in relation to the first or third base lines. Macbeth's "So foul and fair a day I have not seen" was many years into the future.