
March 15, 2023 in Autobiography, Current Affairs, Sports | Permalink | Comments (0)
We were invited for dinner at the place to which a number of my "senior" friends have retreated. The experience was cordial and civilized, but somehow troubling. I know one thing: I don't want to wind up there. I'm staying put as long as I possibly can.
Too many old folks. I want to live where there are people of all ages and varieties. Babies and toddlers and tweens and teen-agers and young adults. More activity, fewer canes and walkers.
The place, though handsome and well-appointed, seemed to me to be inhospitable. Supervisors at every door. We had to check in at a fancy kiosk where some sort of electronic device took our official data and printed out a visitor badge, which I pocketed. It felt much too "policed."
The dining room was hushed and mannerly. The food was institutional-plus, but nevertheless institutional. I much prefer my own cooking; I've made a fetish of self-sufficiency all these years and I'd like to continue so. I like to stir my own pot.
The apartments are splendid, but the long narrow corridors between apartments are oppressive. Too reminiscent of hospitals. Or jails.
My principal objection: friends who have moved there become subsumed into the society of the place. They participate in the home's "activities." It's good and healthy for them, I suppose, but my friends become lost to me. Swallowed in a kindly maw. It's scary, to those of us who don't want to be swallowed.
I'll stay here on Walnut Street as long as I can. As in the traditional resolve, I plan to leave "feet-first." But we shall see.
March 10, 2023 in Autobiography | Permalink | Comments (1)
Is there another common English word that exhibits such varied meanings as "boot?" Or one that has shown such continual transformation during my years on the planet?
Like much of my early vocabulary, "boot" entered my life through the medium of radio baseball . In my mind's ear, I can hear the voice of Red Barber announcing that "umpire Babe Pinelli has just given the boot to Leo Durocher." "Given the boot" does not make the claim that Durocher was presented with footwear; it means that he was kicked out of the game as if with a metaphorically-booted foot.
Nor was it only obstreperous managers who were "booted." "There's a two-hopper to third, but Cox boots it" -- meaning that he bobbled it, even though the ball never touched his foot. In baseball, curiously, you can boot a ball with your hand, which is, logically speaking, as nonsensical as gloving it with your foot.
As everyone knows, a boot primarily protects the area from the shin down to the toes. But there's a second common meaning to "boot": "something extra," as in the phrase "to boot." "He's a great pitcher -- and a good hitter to boot." The shoe-ish meaning comes through old French from a Germanic source; the profit or use or something-extra meaning derives from an unrelated OE (Old English) word; moreover, in latter stages of its development "boot" has also been influenced by its phonological neighbors booty, and, I suspect, butt.
In order to gain some historical perspective, let us consider the ways in which Shakespeare makes use of the word boot. "To boot" meaning "in addition" is employed frequently, as, for example, when Henry IV swears "by my scepter and my soul to boot," or when Macduff says to Malcolm that "I would not be the villain that thou think'st/ For the whole space that's in the tyrant's grasp/ And the rich east to boot." A less familiar use occurs in The Winter's Tale, when Hermione, accused of adultery, concedes that "it shall scarce boot me/ To say 'not guilty.'" Her "boot" means that it will not be to her advantage or profit to assert her innocence. This signification can shade over into gain or even into a coin itself, as for example when Camillo passes money to Autolycus, saying,"hold thee, there's some boot." Contemplating his gain, Autolycus muses, "What an exchange had this been without boot! What a boot is here with this exchange." Just as boot is gain, so bootless means without gain or helpless, as when Henry V explains that he will be powerless to restrain a rampage: "We may as bootless spend our vain command/ Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil." Shakespeare gets some punning mileage out of the multiple meanings of "boot." Glendower boasts that "[T]hree times hath Henry Bolingbroke made head/ Against my power; thrice from the banks of Wye/ And sandy-bottom'd Severn have I sent him/ Bootless home and weather-beaten back. "Bootless" means helpless; but sardonic Hotspur, never noted for an sophisticated sense of humor, cannot resist the obvious: "Home without boots. And in foul weather too."
So a boot can be a shoe, an advantage, an addition, a reward, a help. But look what's happened to the poor helpless word in more recent times. "Boot Hill" is a cowboy frontier cemetery. Across the waters, a "boot" is the trunk of an automobile. The infamous "Denver boot" is a wheel clamp that immobilizes a vehicle. In the army, a boot is a recruit or rookie: "boot camp."
But then, along came the computer, where one "boots" or restarts one's machine. This use, I'm told, originated with the phrase, to "pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps" -- i.e. do something difficult at one's own initiative, just as a computer starts itself. There's also the warmboot, which sounds little too much like the old torture device, the Spanish boot and which can also be called a softboot (but not by me).
In Shakespeare's day, boot was not always distinguished from "booty" as in the case of the Archbishop of Canterbury's famous bees, which "like soldiers, armed in their stings,/ Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds,/ Which pillage they with merry march bring home." Booty as pillage survives to this day, but is, I think, obsolescent. Nowadays, booty is more likely to be used in the phrase "booty call" which means (and here I'm relying on the invaluable Urban Dictionary) a "telephone call made to request a sexual encounter." Who would ever have devised or imagined such an innovation? Does this booty derive from "shake your booty," meaning to move your butt or bottom in a sexually suggestive way? Not a meaning known to Shakespeare, or at least, not one memorialized in the surviving records.
Other words of my life: slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire.
March 08, 2023 in Autobiography, Language, Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (0)
Am I just plain nuts to think that I live in a safe and secure world? All the evidence says "perpetual vigilance" and "it can happen here" and "keep a close watch?
Let's look at the situation.
Our state has a violent history. In the far past: at Sand Creek in 1864, several hundred Cheyenne and Arapahos were brutally murdered. In 1914, a century or so ago, the Pinkertons, paid by the Rockefellers, killed no-one-knows-how-many miners when they shot randomly into the Ludlow tent colony.
More recently, killing has become the work not of army or paid professionals but of heavily armed civilians. In 1999 there was the horrible Columbine High School massacre in which twelve were killed and twenty-one wounded. Just thirteen years later came the mass killing inside a Century 16 theater in Aurora, just a few miles south of where I live, in which twelve people were killed and another seventy injured. Then in 2015 there was a shooting a a Planned Parenthood clinic in which three were assassinated and nine others wounded. In March of 2021, just two years ago, in the Table Mesa King Soopers, a "gunman" killed ten -- customers, employees, a police officer. And last year, we had the nightclub shooting in Colorado Springs where five were murdered and twenty-five others wounded.
I didn't happen to be in any of these places, but I might have been. Although I wasn't at the Columbine school, I was at that very moment in a different classroom in Denver; I didn't go to the movies to see the Dark Knight, but I do go to theaters. It wasn't "my" King Soopers that was terrorized, but nevertheless I've bought stuff at that very store many times when I've happened to be in south Boulder; I wasn't at the Colorado springs bar but I've certainly patronized bars. In any one of these cases, It could just as easily have been me shot dead or maimed. I've been one lucky fellow, but people much like me have been so fortunate.
Two days ago, a vicious prank phone call set off a scramble and shelter-in-place warnings at two-block away Boulder High School. BHS is where AGP and our three children spent many a year. This scare turned out to be a case of "swatting" -- a disgusting new practice in which a nasty sociopath calls an institution to see if he can get a reaction from a SWAT team. Deliberate malice. Such false alarms are not mass killings, but they're still hair-raising, anxiety-provoking, and potentially dangerous events.
It's coming close to home, isn't it. Luck of the draw, so to speak, that I'm still whole.
When I was a teacher, I was never in real danger but I had some deranged students. I remember once that a particularly odd young lady asked to make an appointment for a conference. Wary of her, I proposed that instead of her coming to my office that we meet in the public cafeteria. l can't remember what she wanted to talk about, but I recall vividly that at one point she asked, "do you think I have a gun in my purse?" I replied "I don't know whether you do or not, but I do know that this meeting is now over." I stood up and walked away, half convinced that I was about to be shot in the back. But I wasn't.
It's a violent world; no one has ever been truly safe. But all we can do is go blithely about our business, hoping to be spared. I shouldn't complain; we're not in a war zone; it's not like Ukraine, where at any moment Russian drones and shells and missiles can drop from the sky.
March 01, 2023 in Autobiography, Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)
I cannot think of a word that has undergone greater change during the course of my lifetime than the plain monosyllable "hack."
"Hack" entered my language, like much of my early vocabulary, through the medium of baseball. "He took a good hack at that fastball;" "he's up there hacking away." A hack was a hard swing, not necessarily a successful one. [There was also Stan Hack, the great Chicago Cub third baseman whose career was just coming to an end as I was becoming conscious.] In the days of my youth, "hack" was also slang for taxicab and a cab driver was a "hackie." I don't believe I've heard that particular use of the word in decades except in 1940s movies. In seventh-grade "shop" class at PS 217, Mr. Kaminsky introduced me to the "hacksaw." The hack in hacksaw derives from a medieval word meaning "cut into pieces," but the taxi hack has an entirely dissimilar origin. It comes from hackney, a breed of horse and later the carriage itself that the horse drew -- the name of which then migrated to our big yellow taxi. When did I first hear the expression, a "hacking cough"? And why hacking? Perhaps because the noise of a cough is similar to the sound of the short sharp blows when one hacks through a forest or the jungle with a machete. Maybe that's how it originated-- but I'm not entirely convinced.
Hack has another older meaning -- mediocre or failing, or not good at one's trade, as in a "hack writer," or a "political hack." This usage is probably a shortened version of "hackneyed," meaning trite or overused. When you waste time, you're just "hacking around." In such cases,"hack" denoted incompetence.
Nowadays "hack" has come up in the world. To hack into a computer implies not laziness but skill. In this usage, "hack" is also malicious. Hackers may be smart but they're also dangerous; they can cause crashes when they illegally intrude to alter a program.
The most common contemporary use of "hack," if I'm reading the data correctly, occurs in the recent coinage "lifehack." which is defined as "a strategy or technique adopted in order to manage one's time and daily activities in a more efficient way." I can't be the only person whose junk mail folder is regularly inundated with recommended lifehacks, most of which seem mighty silly or simplistic.
And then there's an even more specialized use. Here's one that's new to me: "scientists announced that they had genetically hacked tobacco plants to photosynthesize more efficiently." This usage seems to retain something of the older meaning of cut or slash although it is a stretch to envision a genome being attacked by a sword or a snickersnee.
Goodness gracious, it's a long road from waving at a spitball with the old hickory to inserting bits of DNA in the tobacco genome. But here we are.
Other words of my life: slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire.
February 18, 2023 in Autobiography, Language | Permalink | Comments (1)
In this one, I was lying in restless sleep in my own bed, when a figure, a man, came at me. He tried to get under my covers, and I cried out, "You can't get into bed with me. I'm a married woman!" Very theatrical -- and strange enough, but the details are even more peculiar. Of course I'm not a woman -- I'm an octogenarian man -- but not in the dream. Secondly the man who was trying to attack me, though identifiably male, had the face of a stereotypical witch -- long crooked nose, verrucose almost echinulate skin, etc. In addition, my bedmate, who in real life is a woman, was, in the dream, male. That's a heck of a lot of gender confusion for one dream fragment.
What is most memorable, however, is my plaintive cry -- "you can't get into my bed. I'm a married woman." How to interpret this sentence? I can invent any number of bizarre "'Freudian" theories, but in fact I have no idea, except for the opinion that I've expressed before on this blog, that I'm a mighty dull, conventional fellow from 7am to 11pm, but from 11pm until morning, I'm crazy imaginative, unconventional, and possibly even interesting.
February 15, 2023 in Autobiography | Permalink | Comments (0)
In the course of my lifetime, the telephone has gone from relatively rare to ubiquitous, from wall to pocket, and from rotary dial to cell. From no intelligence whatsoever to smart and then to very smart. Revolutionary changes.
When I was growing up in Flatbush, our family was prosperous enough to have a telephone (not everyone did), but the device was only employed for local calls, never for "long distance." Non-local calls were prohibitively expensive and were only for deaths. To be called to the phone by long-distance was ominous.
Before the innovation of seven-digit dialing, we were Windsor 6-2077. Sometime after WWII, our exchange was altered from WI 6 to GEdney 6. To me, this was an early indication that the world was unstable and would be filled with ups and downs. One day we were a Windsor, a royal house, and the next day we were a Gedney, a brand of dill pickle.
Every telephone in existence looked exactly like this one. The idea that they would ever look otherwise was inconceivable.
For a month of so in the late 1950s, I had a job operating an old-fashioned switchboard at the Sears warehouse on Utica Avenue -- definitely my most satisfying telephone-related experience, lifetime. Ah that lovely click when the plug fully entered its receptacle! A delight! The one I sat at looked almost exactly like this:
In my short time at the console, I became quite a proficient operator, only cutting off important calls a handful of times. It's hard to believe that such an antiquated-looking machine was still in use when I was a lad.
We must also recall the almost extinct telephone booth -- often out of order, because someone wielded a crowbar to make off with nickels and dimes. And smelly. Plus, one never had the right change when needing it most. I do not mourn the passing of the phone booth.
When we moved to Vermont in 1968, the Topsham Telephone Company had not yet switched to seven digit dialing. Our home number was high-prestige 21, but we were jealous of the family whose number was 9. Ours was a four-party line -- also a thing of the past. I wonder whether my grandchildren have ever heard the phrase "party-line." Or "rotary dial," for that matter.
When AT&T was deregulated and the market was thrown open to innovation, there came a great explosion of telephone styles. Phones blossomed into many odd colors and configurations. For a while, we owned one of these:
The Simpson phone was not my initiative but that of one of the younger members of the family.
But more change was in the works. The prediction that there would be pocket phones in the future seemed fantastical science fiction-y. All phones had to be connected with wires -- otherwise how could the sound get out of the wall and into the handset. I scoffed.
Nowadays, everyone carries a cell phone. But it's not just a phone -- it's a computer. It does everything -- perhaps too much. There is substance to the frequently heard complaint that some individuals, especially young 'uns, relate more readily to their cell than to the person sitting next to them. It's a paradox: with more potential communication comes more loneliness. I myself must admit that there's a fascination to the cell phone that is disarming. I'm trying not be allow myself to be addicted. But there is something wonderful about a machine that lets you not only speak with but to actually see your daughter, who is a thousand miles away. Not a trick that a rotary phone could perform.
Not to be an alarmist or a Luddite, there's a serious downside to the cell. It seems as though the machine might be reorganizing youthful brains-- with unknown consequences,
Scenes like this one have become scarily familiar:
February 08, 2023 in Autobiography, History, Science | Permalink | Comments (2)
This will be a very short essay, because automobiles have never been a big part of my life. Unlike many of my friends, I've never been one to have a romantic relationship with a vehicle.
My parents did not own an automobile and neither of them ever learned to drive. I was a most provincial city boy, happy with my bicycle and my subway token and wanting no more. I did not learn to drive a car until after I was married and left Brooklyn behind. Nevertheless, over the course of a lifetime I've owned a number of cars. The first one was identical to the Nash Rambler depicted in this stock photo:
The Nash was the car I drove to California and back in the summer of 1963 (the first time I was west of New York). I've since owned an Oldsmobile '88, a Renault Dauphine (a dog), an underpowered Dodge station wagon, an uncomfortable but sturdy Corolla, a Saab, a Camry, and a Volvo that lasted for twenty-one years and which I only surrendered because it was hard on my aching back. I've driven perhaps a hundred other automobiles and an occasional truck, mostly rented, but I've never felt anything like affection for a single one of them-- they take you from one place to another and I'm grateful for the mobility. I'm a cautious driver, but I've made some bad mistakes behind the wheel and I am lucky to have gone through life without being mangled or killed, so far.
I confess that at various times in my life I've experienced the glamor of the open road. I'm a happy fellow when I'm driving a two-lane at dawn or twilight in southern Missouri or rural South Dakota. I have a soft spot for Iowa's Jesse James Cafe and for the Crete Diner in Oneonta, New York. A stop at Grandma's Cafe in some faded downtown is to me a peak experience, however weak the coffee or gluey the cherry pie. I treasure those glorious small-town attractions: among many others, the corn cob palace, Carhenge, the Donna Reed Museum in Denison, Iowa, the Jell-o Museum, the Purple Martin Tower in Griggsville, Illinois, the world's largest ball of twine in Cawker, City, Kansas.
I don't drive long distances any more. In fact, in the last twenty years I've probably spent more time on the John Deere "Lawn Tractor" than in any other vehicle. Maximum of five miles per hour, my kind of speed. It may not be glamorous but it gets the job done. I've "buried" the machine a couple of times, but it's still in one piece and still working.
January 24, 2023 in Autobiography, Travel | Permalink | Comments (1)
It's shocking, is it not, that 50% of American marriages end in divorce. "Fifty per cent" is not just a statistic; it's a reality that stands for tons of personal distress and suffering and remorse. Alas, the rate of divorce for second marriages is even higher -- 60%; for third marriages, according to many sources, as much as 75%. The fact that the percentage rises with age and experience at first seems counter-intuitive. Shouldn't second and subsequent marriages be happier, more peaceful? Don't people learn and improve with experience? Should they not know themselves better and therefore choose a mate more wisely? Now that they are veterans, shouldn't they have grasped the art of marriage ? Learned how to solve problems? Learned to make a stronger and more sensible commitment to each other? After all, they've voluntarily and optimistically decided to take another crack at marriage. Why not bend every effort to succeed?
But the numbers don't lie. Many of the people who have been divorced one time, say sociologists who study marriage and the family, bring negative attitudes to the next. Instead of assuming that marriage is a lifelong commitment, they regard it as a flexible arrangement that can be abandoned if things get tough. They've already survived one or two divorces and are therefore less fazed by the prospect of another. And inasmuch as the taboo against divorce has already been shattered, such social inhibitions that remain are the more readily overcome.
There are even simpler explanation for the failure of subsequent marriages: some people are marriageable by nature and some are marriageable-skittish. The population of the marriageable-skittish increases as the natively marriageable leave the pool. Who remains to be married among the population setting out on second or third marriages? Only those people who are not intrinsically inclined to prosper in long term relationships. As the pool shrinks to the less and less marriageable, the percentage of failures inevitably rises.
Divorce and the rates of divorce have been well studied. But what about second marriages of people who are not divorced but widowed? It's curious that there seems to be no interest in how widows and widowers (w-ws) fare when they contract subsequent marriages. Are second marriages of the w-ws more or less likely to succeed? Apparently, it's not a pressing problem for sociologists. Or perhaps it's too hard to procure the data. Just who are the remarried (or "re-partnered") w-ws's? Many "remarried" widows and widowers don't bother to inform either church or state of their new situation. They may have financial or tax reasons to avoid scrutiny. They may be separately domiciled. They're not talking but they're there. Hard to find and hard to study.
My suspicion, drawn from anecdotal evidence and just looking around at people of my own age cohort, is that the divorce rate among remarried w-ws is very very low. Why? Well, for one thing, because w-ws are people who are among the marriageable by nature. They've stayed together, stayed married until death did them part. Because they succeeded at maintaining a long marriage, they very likely entered a later marriage expecting to do so again. In addition, w-ws are likely to be older and weathered. Because they're not scarred by a painful divorce, they are more likely to be sound of heart rather than wary and wounded.
Re-partnered w-ws have outlived many of the tensions of more youthful marriages. They're probably not obsessed or consumed by their careers or by worldly success. For better or worse, their successes and failures have been long established, long completed. If they're old enough to be retired, they may have the leisure to talk intimately with one another.
One of the principal causes of divorce, we're told, is tension around child-rearing, an activity in which philosophical differences between the parents can cause all kinds of difficulties and tensions and squabbles. But most w-ws aren't going to have more children, and the ones that they have are likely to be grown and gone.
Nor will there going to problems with in-laws, because the in-laws are all dead.
And older w-ws, if they're fortunate, don't have the financial problems of earlier decades: no sudden unemployment, no need to move to a larger, more expensive house, no college tuitions. If they're not formally remarried, they most likely keep their resources separate and therefore don't need to negotiate about how money is to be spent.
Older folk don't have to deal with contraceptives. While sex is probably less urgent and imperious than in earlier decades, it might be more consoling, especially because older partners should have a better grasp of their own needs and how they might be fulfilled. And they are probably more accepting of themselves and of their bodies.
It goes almost without saying that w-ws have experienced the deaths of their previous spouse and therefore share a most important mutual experience. A bond, a link. An important mutual consolation, one among the many experiences that older w-ws bring to the table. They know from living many years on the planet that various things that seemed important years ago turned out not to matter at all.
And most important of all: older w-ws have learned over the course of many decades not only how to love but how to cherish and to respect a wife or husband.
January 22, 2023 in Autobiography | Permalink | Comments (0)
This year's list is incomplete. During the Vermont summer, I neglected to keep good records. My porous brain can't bring to mind all I read in June, July, August, and September. In addition, it's a list of books only, so no periodicals (New Yorker, New York Review of Books), Northern Forests) or newspapers.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, The Last Gift; Daniel Fuchs, Williamsburg Summer; L. J. Davis; A Meaningful Life; Marc David Baer, The Ottomans, Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn; J.M. Quigley, Lolita in the Afterlife; Daniel Fuchs, Homage to Blenholt; A J Rich, The Hand that Feeds You; Alfred Kazin, Walker in the City; Jonathan Lethem, Fortress of Solitude; Colm Toibin, Brooklyn; Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies; Emily Gould, Friendship; James Agee, Brooklyn Is; Jenny Offill, Department of Speculation; Ursula Parrott, Ex-Wife; Kyle Harper, Plagues Upon the Earth; Adelle Waldman, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.; James McBride, The Color of Water; Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach; R. D. Rosen, Tough Luck; David Crystal, The Story of English; Seth Lerer, Inventing English; Paul Auster, Sunset Park; Richard Fortey, Fossils; Jay Neugeboren, Big Man; Magocsi and Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews and Ukrainians; Henry James, Portrait of a Lady; Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl; Jay Neugeboren, Imagining Robert; James Huneker, The New Cosmopolis; Roland Ennos, The Age of Wood; Emily Bingham, My Old Kentucky Home; Marie Favereau, The Horde; John Dunn, The Glitter in the Green; Mike Unwin, Around the World in 80 Birds; Douglas Boyd, Plagues and Pandemics; David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind; Riley Black, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs; William Shakespeare, The Second Part of King Henry the IV; Pekka Hamaleinen, Comanche Empire; Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood; Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending; William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair; An Italian Impressionist in France, Giuseppe De Nittis; Richard Powell, The Philadelphians; Pekka Hamaleinen, Indigenous Continent; David Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel and Language; Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch; Jeffrey Lovich, Turtles of the World; Andy Borowitz, Profiles in Ignorance; Tim Birkhead, Birds and Us; Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time; David Schiffman, Why Sharks Matter.
December 30, 2022 in Autobiography, Books, Books about Brooklyn | Permalink | Comments (1)
You can take the boy out of Brooklyn, but you can't take the Brooklyn out of the boy. (Traditional)
The more you hold a baby in the first year, the less you have to hold it later on. (Dr. Catherine Lodyjenski, pediatrician.)
Don't skate to where the puck is; skate to where it's going to be. (Wayne Gretzky)
Adolescence is not for sissies. (EHP)
You can't coach seven feet. (Origin unknown)
Enough is as good as a feast. (Traditional)
Enough is as good as a feast, and sometimes better. (EHP)
"Both" is always an option. (KM)
Everyone has a plan until I punch him in the mouth. (Mike Tyson)
Don't look back; someone might be gaining on you. (Satchel Paige)
If you lose your man, go directly to the basket. (Emanuel P.)
The only people who idealize the past are those who know nothing about it. (EHP)
The longer something has been believed by mankind, the less likely it is to be true. (EHP)
No one know what's going on between two people, even if you're one of them. (EHP)
What's sauce for the goose is not necessarily sauce for the gander. (EHP)
The secret of life is to turn routines into rituals. (Origin unknown)
Nothing ever happens until it happens. (EHP)
Babies rewire the parental brain. (EHP)
Everything made of wood was once a tree. (Origin unknown)
Your father is an enigma who takes a lifetime to decipher. (Origin unknown)
Never omit an opportunity to do a favor for a friend, and never be embarrassed to accept a favor from a friend. (Emanuel P.)
Religion: my prince of peace can beat up your prince of peace. (LERM)
No one owns anything; the most you can say is that you have a lifetime lease. (Emanuel P.)
You should be at least as polite to a wife or husband as to a person you meet on the street. (EHP)
Old age is not for sissies. (Bette Davis)
You can't make old friends. (EHP)
You're immortal until the moment you die. (EHP)
There are no chocolate ice cream cones in the next world. (LERM)
December 05, 2022 in Autobiography, Wisdom | Permalink | Comments (2)
I've arrived at the age in which even a momentary lapse of memory is worrisome. Have I at last begun the ineluctable descent into senility?
But then there's the contrary. When I happen to dredge up some bit of buried knowledge, I experience a rush of triumph. I feel it as evidence that I've put off the inevitable for another couple of weeks -- perhaps even months. And I preen and strut shamelessly. I become unbearable.
At the Phillips, yesterday, we came upon a painting by Giuseppe De Nittis called "Spring" (there's a pretty poor reproduction of it above). I glanced at the picture, and in a flash, without hesitation, announced, "that's a trullo in the left distance." And I was correct -- my assertion confirmed by the scholarly description on the accompanying wall plaque.
What is a trullo? It's a building, obviously, a kind of drystone architecture, common in Apulia, usually whitewashed and with a conical roof, often constructed as a temporary shelter for shepherds and other agricultural workers and occasionally for long term occupancy.
But how does a Flatbush yoot recognize and immediately name a trullo at first glance? I could be coy and say something like, "Oh, who doesn't know about trulli?" and leave my friends baffled and dazzled by my prodigious memory.
But of course that would not be the full story.
Some seven or eight years ago, as turisti, we visited an Italian village called Alberobello in Apulia in southern Italy. Here's a picture:
November 27, 2022 in Autobiography, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)
When I was a Brooklyn schoolyard "yoot" (sixth or seventh grade I reckon), I impulsively bragged to a group of fellow ragamuffins, "I'll bet a buck that the Dodgers win the pennant." What prompted me to make so uncharacteristically bold a claim? Way out on a limb, I was. One of the guys in the gang immediately jumped: "I'll take that bet." So there I was, stuck. I backed off a bit: "I meant half a dollar." Against my better judgment, it was set down as a bet, even though he and I never actually locked pinkies on the deal. Then the Dodgers lost; so did I. My antagonist badgered me continually for his money. Eventually I paid him off with a 1950 Franklin half-dollar (a mint example of which is now selling on Amazon for $3751 -- you can look it up!). Even more painful, I must confess, is that the character who beat me was the loathsome kid about whom many years ago I wrote an entire blog post called My First Racist. You can look that up also.
I am sure that that half-dollar disaster was my first and only venture into the world of chance and hazard. My lifetime losings therefore: 50¢ (which of course was worth a lot more in 1950 than it is now). I had been burnt once, and once was enough to teach me a lesson.
I'm not a risk-taker. I don't play cards, not even gin rummy for matchsticks. I don't care about the ponies and never even visited Yonkers or Belmont Park (where my ne'er-do-well uncle lost scads of moolah and came close to losing his wife and family). I've never been to Atlantic City or to Blackhawk. I don't bet on sports and have never even had a clear understanding of what it means to "cover the spread." I was in Las Vegas once, in 1963. We slept in sleeping bags in the desert and rolled into town early the next morning. At one of the many palatial casinos, I came upon addicted gamblers who'd been up all night playing the slots. They were dirty and tired and (is it too strong to say?) degenerate. Desperately in need of Gamblers Anonymous. It was not a glamorous scene.
Moreover, I've never played the numbers. I've never even purchased a lottery ticket.
My resistance to gambling isn't moral -- I don't think that gambling is inherently wrong or sinful. It's just my nature. I'm a frugal guy (some say "skinflint"; others say "cheap as dirt") who can't bear to throw money away.
I think there's a practical reason to resist gambling. Take, for example, the lotteries. They were illegal until a few years ago but now every state seems to sponsor one or more. The result is a huge transfer of money from people who can't afford the loss to the government. Lotteries are in effect a hidden regressive tax -- another subsidy of the rich by the poor. In addition, people who put their hopes in winning a jackpot are, I believe, less inclined to work for the progressive changes that our society needs. People who buy lottery tickets are more likely to become quiescent rather than active. They wait passively for their ship to come in. And it never will.
Now gambling has moved into an even more dangerous phase. Anyone who watches sports on the TV is inundated with ads that encourage gambling. They're omnipresent and unavoidable. It's another gift to us from the Supreme Court, which in 2018, struck down the federal ban on state authorization of sports betting -- a decision that opened the doors to the flood. A peculiar inconsistency: yes, freedom to gamble, but no, no freedom to do what you want with your own womb. And we today learned that gambling has invaded the university. In our state, in 2020, the University of Colorado made a $1.6 million deal to promote sports gambling on campus. A betting company sweetened the arrangement by offering the school an extra $30 every time a student downloaded the company’s app and used a promotional code to place a bet.
To be clear, it wasn't the "University" that made the deal; it was the semi-autonomous Athletic Department -- or, in actuality, the football team. It's an outrageous decision. A respectable university is now in cahoots with a shady industry to promote gambling on campus, and make money off the deal. What future opportunities for corruption with the nose of that particular camel under the tent of innocence!
One solution would be to lessen the emphasis on football. After all, our team is 1-8 so far this year in the Pac-12, having been outscored 374 to 138. Perhaps Colorado should drop down a notch, say to Division III. We'd thrive, I think, against the lesser competition. But don't bet on it.
November 22, 2022 in Autobiography | Permalink | Comments (0)
I seem to have plowed a path of destruction, suicide-wise, in my earlier years.
In 1958, I studied "intermediate algebra" with a cheerful, well-regarded teacher named Ruth B. White. One Monday morning, she wrote her new name on the blackboard; she was no longer Mrs. White; she was now Mrs. White-Green. Her supportive students, I remember, applauded enthusiastically. But just as the semester ended and we pupils moved on to trigonometry, newlywed Mrs. White-Green, sadly and incomprehensibly, took her own life. What a shock and puzzle for a gawky innocent Flatbush "yoot." Why, I asked myself, should re-marriage lead so suddenly to suicide (if indeed the two events were at all related)? To me, this tragic occurrence was an early indication that human psychology was a heck of a lot more mysterious than cocooned me had imagined. And then, a few years later, in the spring semester of my second year in college, I enrolled for a course in medieval history with the very distinguished Professor Theodore Maroon. Just a few months after the class concluded, Professor Maroon destroyed himself. Moreover, the very next year, I surveyed early American literature in a course taught by Professor Stephen Emerson Black, who, the following summer, attached a hose to the car exhaust, shut the garage doors, and put an end to his existence.
I need to reassure myself that it was only a few, not all, of my many teachers who pulled the trigger after trying to educate me. Nevertheless, something of a pattern emerged. The trajectory continued in 1960, when, two months after he officiated at our wedding, cigar-chomping Rabbi Herschel Gray walked into Lake Yahnundasis in order to drown himself. Why? I had nary a clue; still don't, in fact.
Several other people with whom I've crossed paths have also chosen to leave life behind. I remember dour Alfredo Naranja, a college acquaintance from Costa Rica or perhaps Panama. He graduated from Cornell, returned home, and immediately shot himself. I also remember handsome fair-haired Stanley Brown. He was a classmate at EHHS; the two of us studied four years of Latin in the same half-empty schoolrooms. He was not a close friend, though I clearly recall that we occasionally trudged home from school together. Stanley went on to Columbia, where, I was later informed, he graduated first in his class, which is no mean achievement. I wasn't surprised -- he was smart and extremely serious about schoolwork. Stanley then proceeded to Harvard Medical School. Cambridge was my home at that time as well and although our paths had not crossed in four or five years, Stanley telephoned me "out of the blue," as they say, and engaged me in conversations that were longer than I wished. I realize now that I was not as hospitable to him as I might have been. He was lonesome, I think. And then came the news that he had killed himself. I now wish that I had been more cordial -- but how was I to know that he was in such mortal pain? The story has a coda: Stanley's grandparents owned a delicatessen on Ditmas Avenue between East 7th and East 8th. Some years after the suicide, I stopped in at the store for a salami sandwich (or something) and encountered the diminutive elderly storekeepers -- a sad, crushed couple. I knew, or thought I knew, that they were mourning the death of their promising grandchild. Was it my imagination, or was my intuition correct?
And then in graduate school there was Arthur Blue. Arthur was a serious poet and budding scholar. I was a close enough friend that I was invited to his Episcopal wedding in, I think, Wellesley, Massachusetts, where, for the first time in my life, ceremonious kneeling was required of me. Arthur and I kept up an intermittent correspondence after I moved to New York and he to Seattle. I remember congratulating him on the births of his two daughters. But then one December, I received an end-of-the-year card from Barbara Scarlet-Blue, which contained a most memorable sentence: "Of course you have heard of Arthur's suicide." Well, no, I hadn't. I was later informed that Arthur had turned on the gas at his summer house on Vachon Island, where he had been on a solitary vacation. Barbara offered no theory to account for Arthur's act, but now, fifty years later, I suspect, without evidence, that he had sexual identity problems with which he could not cope. If so, he would be another casualty of the commonplace bigotry of that era. Arthur's death is a suicide to which I am not reconciled, and never will be.
And I must also remember Mary Crimson, wife of famous Shakespearean scholar Reginald Crimson, who, depressed, slit her wrists in the bath. It was an absolutely devastating act for Reg and his many friends and admirers.
And then there are the young people, the next generation, who made irreversible decisions when they were far too young to do so. There's the horrible story of Carol Pink, a daughter of friends, who jumped off a balcony in Lincoln Towers in Manhattan and landed, twenty stories below, on the roof of a yellow taxi. Apparently, she tried to grab her brother and pull him down with her, but thankfully she did not succeed. And Alice Magenta, daughter of Hill neighbors, who killed herself in her late teens, a disaster made more excruciating because her elder half-brother had done the same deed few years before. Their parents never recovered from the twin losses; but why should they? Another young person was twenty-two year old Francesca Crimson, the daughter of a pair of famous artists and herself a promising photographer; another plunge from the roof of a tall building. And also, the teen son of my longtime colleague Richard Purple, who did himself in with drugs, though his religious family chose to believe, against all the evidence, that it was an accidental overdose.
I respect suicides, even when I don't understand them, because I believe that everyone has a right to do what they want with their own selves. But I am saddened beyond ordinary sadness when very young people take their own lives. If an adolescent or twenty-something boy or girl told me that they had suicidal thoughts, I would say "almost everyone has a few bad years; almost everyone is miserable during adolescence. But almost every one of these unhappy beings turns out to live a productive, useful and essentially happy life. Give it a few years; don't make a precipitous decision. Hold on; hang tough; trust me, it's going to get better."
November 20, 2022 in Autobiography | Permalink | Comments (0)
Like many of my peers, I've lately taken to reading the obituaries. When I was a youthful fellow, I took pleasure in announcements of births and weddings and anniversaries. No longer, alas; nowadays it's nothing but deaths. Reading about the departed is not a habit of which I'm particularly proud. It's an unsavory fixation upon the newly dead -- and is slightly ghoulish to boot. Yet daily checking of the obits is not without a positive side: often it's exhilarating to read about those amazing folks who have survived wars, dictatorships, displacement, injury, and disease to live accomplished and joyful lives. Obituaries are confusing.
It's not that I search out the obits -- they intrude upon me willy-nilly, like it or not.
For one, there's the New York Times which every day memorializes a couple or a dozen famous persons -- some of them people of my exact age cohort -- who have made a mark, for good or ill, in this our shared life. How does one properly respond to such departures? With empathy, certainly. But also, not infrequently, with a touch of reluctant (and embarrassing) survivor-superiority.
I must admit that I'm frequently dazzled by these eminent people's list of accomplishments, even if I haven't the least clue about exactly what they have achieved. My own life has been, it would seem, so dominated by hearth and home, so narrow and provincial that I cannot always appreciate the eulogized. Often they have distinguished themselves in areas of expertise that have completely passed me by: computer technologists who have created portals and platforms that will always lie beyond my ken, physicists who have shed light (incomprehensible to me) on dark mysteries, superstar rappers, mvp's in sports that I didn't know existed, billionaire entrepreneurs with their 35,000 sq. ft. homes and their stupendous megayachts, generals and spies, etc., etc., etc. It's astonishing how little these famous folk have touched me; how little overlap there is between their worlds and mine. Clearly, I've inhabited an impermeable bubble.
If so, why do I care, why do I read their obits, why do I bother to applaud or (secretly and guiltily) pooh-pooh their contributions?
But hey, I can't blame it all on the Times. Every second month, I receive an e-mail notice from the college that I attended, back there in the 50s, that lists the recent deaths of my classmates. Only a few years ago, it was a trickle, now it's a flood. While nothing forces me to open the electronic envelope, nevertheless, I do so, "attracted" as David Copperfield once said about Uriah Heep, "in very repulsion." Nor must I read the obituaries of members of the graduate school through which I slipped, barely noticed, sixty-years ago. Do I remember these people? Rarely, even despite occasional parallels in our careers. In addition, I follow the obituaries in the local Daily Camera. People I know, or, given my fifty-year residence in this fair city, those to whom I am connected by a couple or three degrees of separation. Sometimes I am shocked by the death of a person whom I hadn't heard was ill, or who died suddenly in a bicycle crash or a fall from a step stool. Such revelations deeply disturb a Sunday morning. And yet, is it so horribly wrong for me to congratulate myself that it was not I but that other guy who was mowed down by a speeding truck on Canyon Boulevard? (I had just crossed at that same spot a day before, uneventfully. Luck of the draw!)
Does it matter that the obits that I read are not truly representative of my contemporaries? They are accounts of people who have made something of themselves, lived useful and noteworthy lives. I can't help thinking about the others: the ones who slunk off the planet quietly -- those who were drunkards or druggies, or who were seduced by some weird religious cult and disappeared into the desert, or those who gave up the struggle and took their own lives, or those who retreated. along with their six scrawny cats, to a dirty SRO on the upper West Side (except when they venture to the street to harangue passers-by with their idiosyncratic religious theories).
Even the obits that do come to my notice don't tell the whole story. They're curricula vitae that 99% of the time are entirely laudatory. The ancient tag "de mortuis nihil nisi bonum" is rigorously honored. The notices don't state what everyone knows -- that the dearly departed was a notorious skinflint who squeezed the last nickel from his tenants and his employees, stiffed his partners, and regularly harassed his former friends with nuisance suits. They fail to mention that an apparently upstanding citizen was also a neglectful father who eventually ran off with his peroxided mistress and a Harley, or that he was known to the neighbors as the guy who poisoned the Labrador retriever of that nice elderly couple down the street. Or who was fired because he showed up plastered once too often. Sometimes it's what's left out that's most revelatory. Obits should be read with care; I don't always remember to do so.
But to tell truth it's not the obituaries themselves that bother me --it's my own ambivalence and confusion. Why the fascination with obits? Is it the same impulse that causes commuters to stop and stare at the wreck on the highway? Could it be that I enjoy, genuinely enjoy, reading about the deaths of my fellow creatures? And if I do so, what sort of morally defective person am I? Do I suffer from an incurable case of schadenfreude -- a delight in the misfortunes of others? Or is it even worse -- mere undiluted gloating? For truly, I am forced to admit, there is something almost triumphant about reading an obit. "He's dead, but I'm alive." How pathetic and reprehensible a feeling -- and how transitory! When I am in a generous mood, I know that when I read an obituary, I daren't gloat, but should rather mourn the common fate of all of us poor fragile mortals. "Death is certain, sayeth the Psalmist." "No man is an island entire of himself." Although I might gloat today, tomorrow I too will be as dead as a doornail. Another bucket, mine, will be kicked. And yet I do not always experience the fellow-feeling that I would like to admire in myself. If I'm not a bad person, I'm certainly not always a good one. No question but there's a chasm between what I feel and what I am convinced that I should feel.
Some obituaries present special problems. For example, I am immediately put off when the the obituary begins with the foolish new age euphemism, "he transitioned.... " Such a phrase hardens my heart, I'm sorry to admit. Let's face it; he didn't "transition." He died. But I'm equally saddened by the obituary that announces that "he went to live with the Lord." Such pathetic self-deception.
But the hardest moral problem for me occurs when I come upon the obituary of a person I genuinely disliked. There aren't many of them; I'm not a hater. But still, it's very difficult for me to find genuine empathy for someone I truly loathed. It's wrong for me to rub my hands in triumphant glee because that nasty s. o. b. is gone forever? I would prefer not to be the kind of person who dances on graves.
November 13, 2022 in Autobiography | Permalink | Comments (0)
Stunning, is it not? Just at the west side of our fair city, set against the first manifestations of the Front Range. Six well-tended fields, scores of players and many, many parents and grandparents (among them me, on sunny Saturday mornings). I can't imagine a more idyllic and peaceful scene.
Do Luke and Caleb and Asher appreciate the glory of their situation? Why should they, after all? It's what they've always known; they take it for granted that soccer should be played in such lovely and prosperous surroundings. Later on, they'll come to know more about the circumstances of less fortunate people.
It's hard for me not to compare Foothills Community Park with the P S 217 schoolyard of my own childhood. Ours was a representative "playground," no better or worse than would be found in any other middle-class or working class neighborhood. No grass, just solid concrete from one chain-link fence to the other. It was where we ran races, played "two-hand touch," flipped baseball cards, played punchball, stickball, basketball, softball, boxball, box baseball, handball, and any other game that could be improvised with a pink spaldeen. There were, as I remember, four basketball backboards and rims, arranged as two full courts. But one of the backboards was missing, the pole having disappeared many years ago and never replaced. Another of the poles had been set in the ground at an angle of perhaps 80 degrees and never corrected. It was useless. And then the two other baskets, on the Newkirk Avenue side, were set in ground that was not level, so that the basket was 9' 6" or so if you shot from the left side and 10" 6" on the right. Maybe this was a benefit; it helped us master trigonometry.
The P S 217 schoolyard was crowded. Various sports overlapped and shared the fields. If you were playing basketball, you had to watch out for line drives off the bat of one of the softball players. This taught us to be alert.
I did not feel at all deprived or "underprivileged" -- it was life as I knew it -- but I'm mighty glad that my grandchildren enjoy the luxury of grass and space and peace. In the words of the great Sophie Tucker, "I've been rich and I've been poor, and, believe me, rich is better."
October 25, 2022 in Autobiography, Brooklyn in the 1950s, Sports | Permalink | Comments (1)
The word "nostalgia" has a curious history. It was coined in the late 17th century by attaching Greek άλγος (algos - pain) to νόστος (nostos -homecoming). Originally, nostalgia carried a strongly negative signification: "intense homesickness" -- "the depressing symptoms... that arise in persons when they are seized with a longing to return to their home and friends." Then, for reasons that are not on the record, sometime during the first part of the last century, the meaning of nostalgia shifted and became much more positive. It's now a good word: "a wistful yearning for the past." A useful word.
Nostalgia is a familiar phenomena that all can recognize: the savoring of a pleasant memory from earlier in our lives. It seems that nostalgia contains within it a bias toward or even a falsification of the past. It's implicit in nostalgia that things were better "back then." For example: I am a member of a Facebook group called My Flatbush House from Years Ago. Its contributors routinely idealize their childhoods. Reading their posts, you'd think that the Flatbush of our youth was if not the the classical Golden Age at least the Garden of Eden. "I loved my Brooklyn childhood." "I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything." "I grew up in the 40s and 50s! We were so lucky to have known those days." "Much simpler times, more real and human-sized." "There was no fear, everybody felt safe; we played out in the streets, unsupervised, until it was suppertime." "We walked to and from school in every weather." "Going out meant playing games in the street." "I feel so blessed to have lived such a wonderful free life." "The fragrance of roses was everywhere in July (why don't roses have perfume anymore?)"
"Ou sont les neiges d'antan?" "Those were the days, my friend,/ We thought they'd never end." "Rocky Top you'll always be/ Home sweet home to me."
Of course I also remember the good times, but I can't embrace such unalloyed, uncritical celebrations. Yes, I can savor some pleasant moments in my seventy-years-ago life. But I also recall that the 1950s was the era of "juvenile delinquents" and gang wars, back alley abortions, ethnic strife, "broken homes," heroin, segregation, overcrowded chaotic schools, imminent nuclear holocaust and "take cover" drills, McCarthyism, polio, the Korean War, Stalin, and Walter O'Malley.
It's fascinating that the English language does not have a word for an antonym of nostalgia. One of my sources suggests "cynicism." But I'm not a cynic; I'm an intermittent and realistic anti-nostalgist.
And why, when I lie insomniac (as is my too-frequent custom), do I not savor the odor of those ever-perfumed Coney Island Avenue hybrid tea roses but instead am tormented by nightmares of fear, humiliation, awkwardness, embarrassment and loneliness. My childhood was pretty good one, thanks to my attentive parents. So why do I obsess about the bad times? Have I gone full curmudgeon? Or am I simply more honest than my cohort of Flatbush contemporaries?
In The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, Shakespeare explores nostalgia and its opposite. Two old guys, Shallow and Silence, reminisce.
SHALLOW: I was once of Clement's Inn, where I think they will talk of mad Shallow yet.
SILENCE: You were called 'lusty Shallow" then, cousin...
SHALLOW: On that very same day did I fight with on Samson Stockfish, a fruiterer, behind Gray's Inn. Jesu, jesu, the mad days that I have spent. And to see how many of my old acquaintance are now dead.
SILENCE: We shall all follow, cousin...
SHALLOW: Death is certain. Is old Double of your town living yet?
SILENCE: Dead, sir.
SHALLOW: Jesu, jesu, dead. He drew a good bow; and dead. He shot a fine shot... And is Jane Nightwork alive?... Nay, she must be old; she cannot choose but be old; certain she's old, and had Robin Nightwork by old Nightwork before I came to Clement's Inn.
SILENCE: That's fifty-five years since.
And then comes the correction, the anti-nostalgist.
FALSTAFF: Lord, lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying. This same starved justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth, and the feats he hath done about Turnbull Street; and every third word a lie.... He was the very genius of famine, yet lecherous as a monkey,... And now is this vice's dagger become a squire and talks as familiarly of John o' Gaunt as if he had been sworn brother to him, and I'll be sworn he never saw him but once in the tilt-yard, and then he burst his head for crowding among the marshal's men.
And on and on, at great amusing length.
Shallow and Silence indulge their nostalgia; Falstaff sees thing differently, but whether he is a realist, a cynic or a curmudgeon is open to interpretation.
October 24, 2022 in Autobiography, Brooklyn in the 1950s, Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (1)
Before I forget, I would like to put on the record the most memorable student sentence that I received during my entire 50+ years of teaching literature: "After Gregor Samsa was transformed into a large insect, his lifestyle changed."
October 21, 2022 in Autobiography, Books | Permalink | Comments (0)
The premise of Riley Black's The Last Days of the Dinosaurs (New York, 2022) is a most splendid one. Imagine, she proposes, that it is 66 million years ago and dinosaurs are the monarchs of the earth. What was it like, in that era, to be alive in, say, the steamy forests where Wyoming now lies -- a world in which club-tailed ankylosaurs were tracked by tyrannosaurs while primitive mammals scuttled in the ferny underbrush. Rich and strange, certainly. And then, how was it all transformed on "the worst day in the history of the planet" when the Chicxulub asteroid plowed into the Yucatan? One fine day, the dinosaurs were triumphant; and then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the six-mile-wide asteroid crash lands and everything goes all kablooey -- the sure and firm-set earth shakes, the atmosphere turns furnace hot, and acid rain and smoke and fire and tsunamis snuff out 80 per cent of our planet's animal species.
It's a fabulous idea for a masterpiece of science writing, and consequently I'm grieved to report that The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is a disappointing book. It is loose and melodramatic and outrageously padded -- a thirty page essay turned into a swollen three hundred page opus. It's much too pop; it's insufficiently serious and therefore leaves poor frustrated me craving data and detail rather than reiteration. Who could believe that the high drama of Chicxulub could become quite so tedious? I put the blame on Ms. Black's literary agent, who, I have no shadow of doubt, advised her to "turn your idea into a book, and keep it easy -- not too technical -- you'll sell a lot more copies."
What a shame, because Black is well-informed and writes with intermittent flair. She loves her reptiles, and in particular displays genuine warmth, almost reverence, for every young person's favorite dinosaur, the tyrannosaurus rex. An infatuation that lingers from her childhood, I suspect. I myself, not similarly transfixed, might have supposed that T. Rex had been expelled from the Terrible Lizard Hall of Fame sometime in the 1990s, when it came to be gospel that the 60-foot tall monster was not a top-of-the-food-chain predator but merely a snuffling scavenger. Was it not revealed to us that the creature's meager brain was dwarfed by its olfactory bulbs, so that it could effortlessly detect decaying flesh over the unbounded western landscapes? And was it not also agreed that its puny forelegs were useless for pursuit or attack? Black will have nothing of such paleontological revisionism. Her T. Rex is a hunter, lurking in ambush to pounce and to crunch with one powerful bite the enormous protuberant osteoderms that protected the stegosaurus spine. To me, the idea that a beast as gigantic as a tyrannosaurus could conceal itself behind bush or boulder and sneakily lunge at its prey seems totally ludicrous.
Black, bless her kindly heart, firmly embraces the unrevised T. Rex. Her loyalty is transcendent. In a burst of psychological overkill, she describes her crush on the dinosaur as an example of anemoia. And what, readers rightly ask, is anemoia? It's an unfamiliar word that describes a baffling concept. Upon investigation,"anemoia" turns out to be a recent coinage, a "fire-new" word (as WS, in LLL, calls such innovations). It's "a nostalgia for a time one has never known," such as Black seems to feel about the years and days that preceded Chicxulub. And here I must once again reveal my want of imagination. Anemoia, however hard I labor to grasp the idea, is too subtle for my downright brain. Isn't it the case that "nostalgia" is by definition a cherishing of something in one's own personal history, as such a one as I might remember with warmth a concert or a wedding or that long ago glorious day in which I, batting leadoff, started the game with a triple to right field.
I can't quite fathom a nostalgia for something I've not known in my own person. The emotion that Black describes I would call simple curiosity. I'm as intrigued as the next guy about the past and I can certainly summon a yearning to have been present at some great historical event, but I wouldn't call it anemoia. For example, I might wish that I had been at Fenway on September 30, 1960, the day that Ted Williams blasted a home run on his very last time at bat -- but I wasn't there and it would be a falsehood to claim otherwise. [Full disclosure: I was in attendance, just behind third base, the previous day, September 29, and therefore missed the moment by a scant twenty-four hours.] Unlike Black, I'm not anemoiac about the dinosaur-dominated world of the K-P boundary, but I have other anemoiac -- as I've now redefined the word -- yearnings.
My most pressing and immediate wish would be to have joined the crowd at a performance at the Globe Theatre in London, perhaps of Hamlet in 1599 or Macbeth in 1606. Why? Because even though Shakespeare's works have been studied microscopically for more than 400 years, no one really knows how those plays originally looked or sounded. My suspicion is that they were far more foreign, more strange, less realistic and more primitive than scholars recognize. After all, the most brilliant play ever written, King Lear, was performed in daylight and the actors had to project their voices to a crowd of 2000 people, many of them shuffling about, gossiping, and cracking hazelnuts. No sets, no curtains, no lighting, and no scenery to speak of. I'd guess that the cast employed a style of dramaturgy closer to its medieval inheritance of allegorical representation than we like to admit. Furthermore, I am convinced that if I were present there at the actual Globe, I would discover an endless series of unknown unknowns. Unimaginable unknowns, that would knock our anemoiac socks off. The past is another country; they do things a heck of a lot differently there.
But wait! My dormant anemoia, now aroused, yearns to experience in my own person other events in the past. Where else to indulge my wants? Certainly in Athens, at a performance of a play by Sophocles -- which I can guarantee to be a hundred times stranger than anything London could possibly offer.
But why only the arts? Now that I think of it, I would love to take a gander at forested Manhattan Island when Henry Hudson's Half Moon made its first landfall. I could have talked to the Lenapes; tried to warn them about the dangers that were coming down the pike. And there's much more. Just prior to struggling through The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, I read Marie Favereau's The Horde (2021), a most fascinating history of the Mongol civilization that conquered and controlled the area from Hungary in the west to Korea in the east during the 13th century and the first half of the 14th. Favereau's depiction of the Mongols was novel and disorienting, essentially because I'm accustomed to think about great empires as centered on a dominant imperial city -- Athens, Rome, London. I believe that I understand a little of what life might have been like in Rome; after all, I've read some of the ancient historians and I know a bit about cities. I've even toured Pompeii, for goodness sake! But the Mongols did not live in cities; they were not particularly literate, they were unabashedly polygamous, animist, and almost entirely nomadic. It's a challenge to imagine a "city" of a hundred thousand people in constant migratory motion. When Mongol men went to war, which they seemed to do often and always, they brought along the women and children, the cattle-drawn carts and wagons and the felt tents along with their horses, goats and sheep. To spend time with a wandering horde, an entirely unfamiliar form of civilization, and to try to understand their mental world, would certainly challenge and enlarge my (and your) conception of what it means to be a human being.
Favereau doesn't dwell on such speculations (she is more concerned with military history than social or psychological matters) but nevertheless the ways in which the migrants related to each other and to their environment had to be entirely foreign to us mostly urban, post Age of Reason moderns. What was it like to be a Mongol? Perhaps I feel this question personally because a recent examination of my DNA tells me that I'm 1% Asian by genetic inheritance. I assume, naturally, that like approximately 16,000,000 other people, I'm directly descended from Mongol leader Chinggis (formerly Genghiz) Khan through one of his seven wives or his innumerable concubines. Is it anemoia, a recognition of my kinship to Grandpa Genghiz, that has produced in me, this morning, such a wildness in the blood? Or is it the caffeine?
In actual fact, although I'm most curious about Mongol life, I don't think that I would have made a good nomad. In the first place, I suffer from serious directional disabilities and would no doubt promptly misplace myself on the vast and featureless Eurasian steppe; and secondly, I lack enthusiasm for subsisting on kumis, the fermented mare's milk which was the staple of the Mongol diet.
Let me now admit that while I indulge some pseudo-anemoia for my distant Mongol forebears, I feel much closer to my more recent Ukrainian shtetl ancestors. If I could be plopped down in the western Ukraine, I might be able to absorb the texture of life in Staroconstantinov in 1895, just before brave Isaiah and Eta set out for America. As things stand, I know almost nothing of any importance about the lives of my eastern European ancestors. How did these resilient folks survive centuries, millennia, of dearth, disease and pogroms? What did they eat? Where did they sleep? What, indeed, did they do for "fun," if they had any conception of fun? What did they read? How did the sexes relate to each other? How did they find privacy? And most significantly: how seriously did they embrace that narrow, all-encompassing and demanding religion?
A nineteenth-century shtetl seems impossibly foreign and faraway, but in the longer time frame, it's actually very recent. The most distant past that we can readily imagine is when the archeological record begins to appear -- perhaps five thousand year ago. But my and your fully human ancestors migrated from the Olduvai Gorge some 60,000 years ago, which leaves approximately 55,000 years without any data at all -- or at least nothing beyond the merest occasional trace. For these many millennia our forbears lived in world where there were no cities, no writing, no pottery, no weaving, no domesticated plants or animals, no metals, no wheels and therefore no vehicles -- only stone hand axes and later spears and much later still bows and arrows. Two thousand five hundred precarious generations of foraging! I would like to see for myself how our common ancestors managed to survive when the gigantic short-faced bear competed for the cave and the terrifying European lion lurked in the shadows. I suspect also that the most dangerous predator our g g g... grandfathers faced was the tribe next door -- otherwise why would we have inherited such hostility to people who look or act just slightly differently than ourselves. Wouldn't it be profoundly anemoiac to join a family of our mutual forebears for a week or two and participate with them as they went about their lives?
What a treasure-trove of unknown unknowns would we confront!
October 10, 2022 in Autobiography, Current Affairs, Dr. Metablog's Greatest Hits, Science | Permalink | Comments (0)
Promenading last Friday on the semi-famous Boulder Mall, we stumbled upon a Certifiably Big Event.
Ours is a college town where the three major religions are marijuana, massage, and football. On the evening that precedes a Saturday home game, the Mall is turned over to a football rally--a gigantic and noisy one. Have any of my regular readers or stray internet pilgrims ever been to such an event? It's quite an echt American experience: the uniformed marching band -- all epaulets and brass and drums, the perky cheerleaders, a float featuring sports heroes of yore, the hundred gladiators themselves (all much taller and thicker than ordinary human beings) along with chants and rousing speeches. Tons of school spirit and not a shred of irony.
The next day, despite the ginned-up enthusiasm, our team was blown out by UCLA, 45-17.
Rallies are not my kind of event. I'm constitutionally allergic to rah-rah and for the last couple of decades I've been boycotting football.
Why no more football for me? In truth, football was never my passion. I hardly ever played the game -- only a little "two-hand touch" in the schoolyard, so I'm not surrendering much by proscribing a sport that is a danger to everyone's physical well-being. There are too many dreadful injuries, especially head injuries. Too many retired players afflicted with dementia. A few days ago, surfing the channels, I accidentally glanced at a few minutes of a NFL contest. Even in that brief stretch, a cornerback was badly battered and carried by stretcher into an on-field ambulance. To me, it looked like it could be a broken neck. I'm sorry that I paused to watch; it will be along time before I do so again.
And I've always been resistant to Rah-Rah. Rubs me wrong; always has, right from the start.
The local mall rally caused me to remember my first days at Cornell, 66 years ago. I was a most naive freshman (now "freshperson" or "first-year") and had not a glimmer of an idea about college life -- none of my family or friends ever having enjoyed such an experience. Completely at sea. My peers in the freshman dorm insisted, you have to go to the rally. I had no idea what a rally was but if going to college meant going to rallies, then why not? I knew no better and tagged along with my new acquaintances. So there it was, just like last night on the mall. The band, the cheerleaders, the athletes, the rah-rah exhortations. One after another the speakers (were they coaches?), told us how hard we were going to cheer tomorrow for dear old Cornell and victory. We sang Cornell songs, the lyrics to which were handed to us on a mimeographed sheets of paper. It was far too enthusiastic for me -- too patriotic I guess one might say. I was not true to my school. How could I love Cornell or think fondly of my alma mater. I had just arrived, for goodness sake, and hadn't even finished unpacking. The insisted-upon emotion seemed contrived and artificial and I resented the pseudo-nostalgia. I don't like being subsumed into a crowd. I respond negatively when I'm exhorted to cheer or wave or sing. It all seems dangerously close to the unthinking obedience of nationalist politics.
And then, next day, came the game itself. Dutifully I trudged to Schoellkopf to watch our guys encounter Princeton. I remember nothing about the contest, not even who won or lost. But I can still feel the cold September drizzle -- and I know that I caught a stiff cold. In my four years in Ithaca, it was my first and only football game.
I soon learned that Cornell had much to offer beyond the rah-rah. It took a year or so, but eventually I found my people.
September 28, 2022 in Autobiography | Permalink | Comments (2)
Ukraine has been invaded and whole cities have been obliterated by the Putin dictatorship. It's tragic. Once again, I'm overwhelmingly grateful that my grandparents chose to pack up and leave the blighted Ukraine. It's a decision that has looked better and better with each passing year.
My father's family came from a Ukrainian "shtetl" called Starokonstantinov, or Alt Konstantin ("old Constantine"). As a youth, I overheard but did not understand conversations in Yiddish about a place that my grandparents called (phonetically) Xusantine-gebernia, where the X stands for a non-English deep guttural fricative. Seventy years ago I paid little attention to my eastern European ancestry. Now I'm fascinated.
Where is Starokonstantinov? What is a "shtetl?"
I've just read Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern's new (2014) and highly pertinent history, The Golden Age Shtetl (an oxymoronic title if there ever was one). Y P-S defines a shtetl as "an East European market town in private possession of a Polish magnate, inhabited mostly but not exclusively by Jews, and subject to Russian bureaucracy." Starokonstantinov, he claims, was a "quintessential shtetl." "My" ancestral shtetl lies in the western part of Ukraine, about 50 miles south of a line drawn between Lviv and Kyiv. Nowadays, it has a population of about 30,000 souls.
I know that my grandfather's people lived in Starokonstantinov from the middle of the nineteenth century, but I have no idea when they first arrived -- it might have been years or centuries before. The town itself is not an ancient foundation. It enters history only in the late 16th century when a Polish noble named Konstanty Ostrogski built himself a castle (which still survives) and took ownership of the surrounding area. Starokonstantinov was a "private town" -- meaning that it was owned by the Ostrogski family for several hundred years. In its first years, Starokonstantinov was included in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1569 it became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1793, and for many years, even after my ancestors had struck out for the new world, it was a possession of the Russian Empire. Now it's in the independent Ukraine, and hoping to remain so.
The history of Starokonstantinov is marked by a series of tragedies prior to the one now in progress. An early disaster was the Battle of Starokonstantinov in 1648, which was a key event in the Chmielnicki Massacres of 1648-49. Eastern rite Cossacks broke into the fortified town and killed all of its 130 Jewish families and as many Polish Roman Catholics as they could find. During the early part of the 18th century, the Haidamack massacre of Uman by Cossacks spilled over into other Ukrainian shtetls, including "mine." And then beginning in 1881 came the series of pogroms -- anti-Jewish peasant riots provoked and tacitly supported by the Russian officialdom. In Starokonstantinov, there were 6611 Jews in 1847 and 9212 (61% of the total population) in 1897. (There would have been two more if my grandparents hadn't seen the light in 1895). During the Nazi occupation in 1942, virtually all the remaining Jewish population (6731 in 1939) was murdered. It's a troubled, tragic history.
I'm not sure what it means to say that a town was wholly owned by Polish nobility. Did the Ostrogskis own all the land, or the land and some of the buildings? Did they administer the public works? The churches? Did they possess the surrounding farms? Did they own, until they were freed in 1861, the serfs? Most likely, each shtetl had its own particular form of ownership (the late medieval world was anything but standardized). Y P-S does not explain; perhaps he assumes it's common knowledge.
Starokonstantinov occasionally makes an appearance in The Golden Age Shtetl.
I had not realized how active my ancestors might have been in the vodka trade. "In Starokonstantinov, the possession of Countess Rzewuska, about fifty [Jewish-owned] inns and taverns yielded 67 percent of the town revenues." (Query: how and when did the shtetl pass from the Ostrogskis to the Rzewuskis, who were a very prominent and wealthy Polish family). As far as I can tell, the "town revenues" went directly into the hands of the Polish overlords. In 1827, "Starokonstantinov Jews realized the that their efforts to prevent the draft of men for twenty to twenty five year terms in the Russian army [had failed], and the Jewish populace turned against their own kahal elders and attacked their houses." "Local police had to summon an additional army unit to suppress the outburst." (The "kahal" was a committee of prominent Jewish citizens who were the nominal governors [under Polish supervision] of the Jewish population.) In the first half of the nineteenth century, the divorce rate among Jewish couples in Starokonstantinov, was 16 percent. In larger cities, it was even higher (in Letichev it was 47 percent). Y P-S attributes the surprisingly high rate of failed marriages to the relative freedom of Jewish women and to the breakdown of traditional constraints as the Jewish population became increasingly urbanized. A major fire in Starokonstantinov in 1835 hastened the shtetl's decline. Russian travelers found Starokonstantinov and especially its roads deplorable. "A Russian army officer observed that Starokonstantinov is dirty beyond any measure: but 'if we bother ourselves to learn the reasons for this situation, we would perhaps find out that even the Jews, whom are usually blamed, have nothing to do with it.... To drive through the streets of the town is a real challenge, as there is no pavement. Stones once paving the road have long sunk into the soils. When it is raining, they do nothing but prevent movement.'" Mud season in Starokonstantinov must have been an annual challenge. Nevertheless, Starokonstantinovites were readers: a merchant estimated that in the shtetl there were "about 20,000 books, mostly prayer books, bible and bible commentaries, tractates on the Talmud and the Kabbalah." Y P-S thinks that this number must be a great exaggeration. But it's on the record that a merchant named Pinhas Yosef Bromberg from Starokonstantinov brought twenty Hebrew books with him while traveling on business to St Petersburg.
My great-grandfather was a participant in the commerce of Starokonstantinov. According to my father, he was a "factor." A "faktor" (Yiddish from German) was essentially a middleman. My ancestor had a horse and a wagon (perhaps, I allow myself to fantasize, two horses and two wagons). According to tradition, he mostly dealt in grain, but factors such as he bought and sold whatever was available: wood, coal, ribbons, calico, mirrors, bolts and screws, vodka and wine. They did much of their business at fairs and Starokonstantinov was famous for its very prominent fair.
May 05, 2022 in Autobiography, Current Affairs, Genealogy, History | Permalink | Comments (2)
I read Imagining Robert, My Brother, Madness, and Survival by Jay Neugeboren for neighborhood and neighborly reasons. Its author is a 1955 graduate of fabled Erasmus Hall High School (I was class of 1956). Much of the story takes place in the area of Brooklyn now called Lefferts Gardens. Walkable, or at least bicyclable, from East 9 Street.
It's a sad tale. Younger brother Robert went seriously off the psychological rails in his late teen years. Older brother Jay relentlessly chronicles his brother's lifetime of struggles. It becomes clear that modern medicine does not offer any remedy or hope to people with Robert's illnesses. The system relies on ineffective drugs and ineffective therapies and what amounts to involuntary imprisonment. It's a painful, discouraging history.
And it's also a good and moving book. Very sincere and very emotional. I confess to dropping an occasional tear.
And yet I don't know whether it's right to expose a loved one to such public scrutiny. I myself wouldn't have made that choice. But I empathize with Neugeboren's tale, inasmuch as I know from personal experience that therapies for some forms of mental decay are no better now than they were during the Darkest Ages.
April 23, 2022 in Autobiography, Books about Brooklyn | Permalink | Comments (0)
Young 'uns, I don't know that you entirely grasp the glamor and mystery of maturity (which in some jaded circles is called "old age.") Let me tell you, the
golden years are just chockablock full of sensual romance of a kind that you might not now appreciate.
Just the other day, for example, we were both instructed to make another visit to the phlebotomist (it seems hardly a month goes by that some specialist or other doesn't need to inspect a sample of our personal sanguineous fluids).
Being economical people, we scheduled our appointments for the same time, same place.
Her blood draw was in anticipation of a knee replacement; mine for routine monitoring of my half-a-dozen annoying senior conditions.
So there we were, side by side, in adjacent cubicles, stripping our sleeves for the venipuncture.
I ask you, is there anything on earth more romantic than a senior couple experiencing simultaneous blood draws. Rapture, rapture! Joy and jollity!
In a merrier world, the instant of venipuncture would have been accompanied with an orchestra of swelling music, perhaps Brahms. And there would have been candles; next time this happens, we'll surround ourselves with a whole Liberace of candelabras. Dozens of long stem red roses. Beakers of Veuve Cliquot '42. An applauding audience of family and friends.
It would have been even more thrilling if my technician hadn't taken three tries to hit the mark. "Your vein rolled," she said accusingly, compromising ever so slightly the transcendent moment.
April 02, 2022 in Autobiography, Wisdom | Permalink | Comments (1)
It should be remembered and recorded that in October of 1960, Eleanor Roosevelt herself visited the home of my parents --my childhood home (539 East 9 Street in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn).
I myself missed the occasion, alas. I was then living in Massachusetts, undergoing the first disorienting days of graduate school. But I know the story.
During the 1960 presidential campaign (John F. Kennedy versus "Tricky Dick" Nixon), JFK's Catholicism emerged as a divisive issue. It's hard to believe what a fuss was made about his religion, especially nowadays, when no one bothers themselves that Joseph Biden is not only a Roman Catholic, but a serious one at that (JFK's personal commitment to his religion was, let's say, nominal).
Among Jewish voters, some of whom had grown up in Brownsville or Williamsburg or the Lower East side where Jewish-Irish conflict was a fact of life, there was a great deal of resistance to voting for JFK. And other Jewish voters, harking back to the old country, remembered Catholics as their antagonists and were hard put to vote for a candidate of that persuasion.
It fell to the task of Mrs. Roosevelt to persuade these reluctant voters that they could and should cast a ballot for Kennedy. At the time, there was no one in America who had more credibility with Jewish populations than she. It was well known that Mrs. Roosevelt had lobbied her hesitant husband for more lenient policies toward "displaced" Jews
I don't know how it came about that our living room was chosen as a site for Mrs. Roosevelt to meet with voters. I suspect that it was through my mother's extensive contacts with members of the League of Women Voters, an organization of which she was a stalwart volunteer. I know that my mother assembled 50 or so voters, almost all Jewish women, and seated or stood them in our very crowded second floor living room. Mrs. Roosevelt arrived, and as my father said to me later, she "dragged her ass" up two flights of stairs, spoke for 20 minutes, presumably in that upper-class nasal twang for which she was famous, answered a couple of respectful questions, and then limped back down to her car. And went on to the next venue. And the next. (She was 76 at the time, and not in great health.) Apparently she followed this same arduous routine for months.
That's how elections are won.
Eleanor Roosevelt died two years later, in 1962.
March 14, 2022 in Autobiography, Brooklyn in the 1950s | Permalink | Comments (0)
Another long troubled night, another astonishing dream. This time, I found myself lurking in a primitive cabin inhabited, it seemed, by a big happy family. There were a bunch of kids and a cheerful be-aproned matriarch cooking on an old wood stove what looked to me like a cauldron of soup. Immediately, the scene shifted to a hall or a church basement. There were eight or ten long tables at which a couple of dozen unfamiliar but clearly delineated folks were seated, waiting for their dinner. But first, some singing. An unidentifiable patriotic song, and then, a hymn. I recognized it as a hymn because it included the line, "He died in vain." Still in the midst of the dream, I said to myself, I have to remember this verse, so I took out pen and paper, and wrote down these words: "he died in vain." As I did so, a large, bearded, slightly threatening man accused me of "making fun" of the proceedings. He demanded to inspect what I had written. I showed him my writing and explained to him that I thought "he died in vain" was theologically wrong, because according to the usual Christian interpretation, Jesus did not die "in vain."
End of dream.
In the morning, awake, I did some research to see if "he died in vain" appears in any familiar or remote hymn. Just as I anticipate, no soap. However, I discovered that the most frequently cited use of the phrase comes not from a hymn or from the Bible but from the Gettysburg Address: that "we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain." Why should my dreamatorium think to quote Abraham Lincoln? But why not, especially since there's been a lot of Lincoln talk in our household this last while what with Lynn reading a biography and also Team of Rivals. Then I wondered, could the cabin in the first part of the dream be a reference to Kentucky log cabin in which Lincoln was reputedly born. A long shot, but not impossible. Anyway, it's my dream; I can interpret it as I want.
There mysterious dreams inspire in me an idea for a stunning new technology. I think it would be very helpful if someone would devise a recording device for dreams -- so that they could be saved and then played back on the TV screen. It would be fascinating, I think, to see not only the fragments that one remembers but the whole multi-hour experience laid out there in full color and stereophonic sound. What a boon to mankind! What a convenience for psychoanalysts!
I imagine something like an applewatch with an app for recording a month or so of all-nighters. I know I'd buy one.
Impossible, you say? Well, did they not laugh at the Wright brothers?
I think I need to present this idea to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Bill Gates. Someone with imagination and a history of achievement. Someone who would know how to monetize so brilliant a conception. I myself am willing to invest my entire income tax refund, however large it turns out to be.
February 19, 2022 in Autobiography | Permalink | Comments (0)
Some years ago, I wrote about meetings of the E & L Chafetz Family Circle, a biennial gathering of my immigrant grandmother's family and also of her many cousins, spouses and descendants. I recalled that Youthful Me objected to being dragooned into attending these sessions. I also confessed that I hadn't a glimmer of understanding of what those meetings meant. Here's what I wrote:
What I didn't know, and is so obvious to me 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 White Russia or the Ukraine behind, endured the miseries of steerage, slept four to a bed for years and half-acclimated themselves to a new and utterly foreign world. For me. They had sacrificed themselves to invest in me. So that I could "do well in school," get an education, live a better life. I was their emissary to America, to the future.
It is still painful to admit how little I had appreciated these diminutive and ancient but very brave people.
As it happens, I was not the only person to come to the same conclusion.
In A Walker in the City (the city is the Brownsville section of Brooklyn), the distinguished man of letters Alfred Kazin had long ago (1951)made the identical point:
My [immigrant] father and mother worked in a rage to put us above their level; they had married to make us possible. We were the only conceivable end to all their striving; we were their America.
Kazin proceeded to analyze his parents' marriage (he's a generation older than I so his words are relevant not to my parents, but to my grandparents and those of their Chafetz generation). "Love" became his subject. As I type his words, I think of Joseph and Sonia, Isaiah and Etta:
Our parents, whatever affection might offhandedly be expressed between them, always had the look of being committed to something deeper than mere love. Their marriages were neither happy nor unhappy.; they were arrangements.
Powerful words, I think. Their marriages were "arrangements" -- certainly not the touches of sweet harmony.
Not "love." Love was not for such as his parents (or, to continue the argument, my grandparents).
I am perfectly sure that in my parents' mind, love was something exotic and not wholly legitimate, reserved for "educated" people like their children, who were the sole end of their existence. So far as I knew, love was not an element admissible in my parents' experience. Any open talk of it between themselves would have seemed ridiculous. It would have suggested a wicked self-indulgence, a preposterous attention to one's own feelings.... They looked on themselves only as instruments toward the ideal "American" future that would be lived by their children.
I have the same sense about my forebears. I never heard any of them use the word "love" and I don't think it would have been a comprehensible value for them. To fall in love, to be in love, was not their expectation. Their aim was more elemental: simply, to survive.
Moreover, not only did they not recognize romantic love, they also, as far as I can remember, attached little importance to "happiness."
What an oddity! They had left the dark backward of eastern Europe, lands of dearth and pogroms and cholera, and traveled to a country in which the "pursuit of happiness" was inscribed in its founding documents. But their aim, I am absolutely sure, was not to achieve ephemeral happiness; their aim was to put a roof over their heads and put food on the family table.
Life and liberty, yes; the pursuit of happiness -- an utterly alien concept.
February 08, 2022 in Autobiography, Books about Brooklyn | Permalink | Comments (1)
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.
January 29, 2022 in Autobiography | Permalink | Comments (0)
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.
January 06, 2022 in Autobiography, Books about Brooklyn | Permalink | Comments (0)
December 29, 2021 in Autobiography | Permalink | Comments (2)
My new reading project: novels set in Brooklyn. There are, I've already discovered, tons of them. I wonder how long I will last at this endeavor. Will it be a sterile or a fruitful exercise?
How is it that I never read, until this very week, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? It's certainly the best known novel with the noun "Brooklyn" in its title. I've known about it all my life and just never got around to looking at a single page. Did my parents, always tentative about sex, warn me off because the novel has a few frank passages. Or was it anti-Brooklyn snobbery? As a young person, I wanted to read about far off places -- Pitcairn Island, nomadic central Asia, and the Africa of Rider Haggard, -- certainly not familiar grimy Brooklyn. At the McDonald Avenue branch of the public library, there were many well-worn copies of of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn sitting on the shelf -- which I ignored and, if I remember correctly, disdained.
What did I miss? Tree is not much in the way of a fiction. There's nothing like a plot, only a series of loosely-related episodes, and except for the central figure, not much character development. It's a barely-disguised autobiography. Francie Nolan, tracked from birth through her escape to, believe it or not, Michigan!!, comes from a grindingly poor family ("food insecure" before the term was invented). Much of the first few hundred pages is the barebones account of the struggle for sustenance (and lodging). There is so much emphasis on overcoming lack that Tree almost seems to fetishize or celebrate poverty.
So much scrabbling for the next meal is hard to bear, painful to read. It's especially painful for me, because Betty Smith, born in 1896 in Williamsburg, preceded my father, also a native of Williamsburg (born in 1904) by only a few years. He came from an immigrant family as poor as poor can be, and some of the stories that he told me about the impoverishment of his youth echo and sometimes exceed Smith's. The essence, therefore, of this "novel," is familiar to me, perhaps entirely too familiar.
One blot upon the novel is its casual bigotry. Irish characters sometimes go to "Jewtown" for clothes or food. Jewish characters are gross stereotypes. But what can be expected from a popular novel of the 1940s, when the radio offered us, day after day, large doses of Amos and Andy, Life with Luigi, The Goldbergs. How we guffawed at ethnic "humor" in those unenlightened days!
Nor was I happy about the novel's Brooklyn chauvinism. For example:
""There's no other place like it," Francie said.
"Like what?"
"Brooklyn. It's a magic city."
"It's just like any other place."
"It isn't. It's mysterious here in Brooklyn. It's like -- yes -- a dream. The houses and streets don't seem real. Neither do the people."
I wish the novel offered some corroboration for the claim of Brooklyn's magic and mystery. If it was there, I didn't find it in this grim novel, nor at the corner of Newkirk and Coney Island Avenues where I first came to awareness.
The "tree that grows in Brooklyn" is the so-called 'tree of heaven," ailanthus altissima. Smith has chosen it as a symbol of resilience, for the tree of heaven can thrive under the most inauspicious circumstances. I, for one, can remember playing on the roof of one of those six story apartment houses so common in our neighborhood, and noticing an ailanthus growing right out of the asphalt. I was astonished. But I wish that Betty Smith had chosen a different tree to invest with meaning, because the ailanthus is, frankly, a "trash tree." It's generally considered a noxious weed, an invasive species. It grows rapidly but is short-lived. Its wood is soft and useless. It suckers vigorously and eternally, pours forth strong alleopathic chemicals upon its neighbors, invades subterranean sewers and pipes, is extremely fecund, and stinks. It is known to gardeners and foresters not as the "tree of heaven" but as the "tree of hell." It's not a tree that often finds itself celebrated in fiction. Nor in pastoral. Brooklyn, my Brooklyn, was a city of magnificent oaks, maples, sycamores and elms. My people, my fellow Brooklynites, deserve a more distinguished avatar than the tree of of so-called heaven.
Some will remember that T. S. Eliot once referred to the tree that grows in Brooklyn as the "rank ailanthus."
December 23, 2021 in Autobiography, Books, Books about Brooklyn | Permalink | Comments (0)