Dr. Metablog

Notting Hill (1990), Two on a Tower (1882)

We watched Notting Hill, a cute 1999 "rom-com" or "date movie" with cute couple Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. (It's hard to believe that the film is almost twenty years old. It's so slight and fluffy that I can't remember whether or not I saw it last millennium, but frankly, it wouldn't make much difference one way or the other.)  In Notting HIll, Julia Roberts plays a pricey celebrity actress ($15,000,000 a film) who happens to wander into Hugh Grant's tiny bookstore and -- a few cute scenes later -- into his tiny Notting Hill bedroom. It's a slight, unconvincing fairy-tale of a film and I'm giving away no secrets when I say that the cute apparently- mismatched couple not only overcome all psychological obstacles and class anxieties in order to marry but that also, in the cute coda scene, when she's lying in his lap on a bench in the park, she's well along in her pregnancy. Ah love! Ah romance! Ah idealized domesticity! Ah cuteness!

Cynic that I am, I'm curious whether she's crammed herself into his narrow digs (and displaced his second-banana roommate) or whether she's purchased the biggest finest mansion in the upscale Notting Hill neighborhood and moved the new husband into it. And closed down the bookstore. The film is wise to sidestep concerns of such dreary ordinariness. 

Notting Hill is a rip-off and inversion of Pretty Woman (1990), in which Julia Roberts was poor and Hugh Grant was Richard Gere, a mega-billionaire. Notting Hill might just as easily have been called Pretty Man -- it's that close a parallel. Only without the shopping.  

And Notting Hill, though upscale, is no Rodeo Drive. It's a neighborhood that has gone through a number of transformations. Once famous for its piggeries, by the middle of the 19th century, it was on the way up. In 1862, when Thomas Hardy left Dorchester and his Wessex homeland to apprentice himself as an architect, he took up residence in Notting HIll's recently constructed Westbourne Park Villas. And there in Notting Hill he wrote his first novel, never published and now lost, called with the remarkably appropriate Hugh-and-Julia title of The Poor Man and the Lady. 

Lower class boy and upper class girl was a perennial theme in Hardy's novels. An obsession, in fact. By coincidence, I'd just finished reading -- on the same day as I watched Notting Hill --one of Hardy's most thorough explorations of the poor-rich theme -- his novel Two on a Tower (1882).

No idyllic pregnancy in the park in the Hardy universe.

In Two on a Tower, Lady Constantine falls in love with Swithin St. Cleeve, an impoverished amateur astronomer, but Hardy strews their path with one obstacle after another. For the Lady, a wastrel husband who is missing in deep dark Africa, and who may or not be dead; an inadvertent pregnancy;  a duped second husband, this time a clergyman;  for St. Cleeve, an badly-needed inheritance that can only be claimed if he remains single, and an extended exile. For both of them, misunderstandings, accidental damaging eavesdroppings, important letters gone astray, etc. And finally, when it appears possible that the poor boy and lady might find solace together, a sudden inexplicable spontaneous death.

Good thing that Thomas Hardy didn't write Notting Hill. Trust me, there would have been no happy ending. Perhaps Hugh would been disfigured in the fire that destroyed his bookstore and his livelihood, and Julia, repulsed, would have returned to her abusive alcoholic boyfriend. But very likely something even more arbitrary and cruel.

  

A Cliffhanger

I've been reading the novels of Thomas Hardy. Some of them are familiar old friends, like Jude the Obscure and Return of the Native; some I've read so long ago that they're new again (Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd);  and then there are a few that I know I've never looked at before, such as The Woodlanders, Under the Greenwood Tree, and, the one I just finished a half a second ago, A Pair of Blue Eyes.

Blue Eyes is an early novel (1873), moderately autobiographical. In it, young Stephen Smith is an apprentice architect of working class origins (as was Hardy) who woos Elfrida Swancourt, a maiden of a higher station. He has a rival for Elfrida's hand in a former teacher, elegant and prudish Henry Knight.

It's safe to say that this is a novel only for confirmed Hardy enthusiasts. There's little in it that Hardy doesn't do better later on.

On the other hand, Blue Eyes contains one rather wonderful piece of melodramatic excess. Elfrida and Knight go hiking on a dangerous cliff and Knight slips and gets himself into an awkward position, hanging on six hundred and fifty feet above the ocean. His foot "was propped by a bracket of quartz rock, balanced on the edge of the precipice." She's clinging to him and they're both stuck. Knight is ever the gentleman. "Clamber up my body till your feet are on my shoulders: when you are there you will, I think, be able to climb on to level ground." "What will you do?" asks Elfrida. Knight answers that he will wait "whilst you run for assistance." But just their bad luck, there's no one around. And so the chapter comes to a cliffhanging close (the novel was originally published in serial form in Tinsley's Magazine).

Several minutes and several pages of reflection pass. At last, Elfrida reappears, her form "singularly attenuated."  She carries a bundle of white linen.

Jumping jiminy, holy moly, I say, -- the girl has removed her underclothes.

She tears the linen into thin strips, knots them, and forms "a perfect rope, six or seven yards long." Knight 'clambers' up the rope, and is saved.  But by surrendering her undergarments,  Elfrida has, as Hardy delicately puts it, "absolutely nothing between her and the weather but her exterior robe or costume."  Goodness gracious me, the poor dear is clad only in her "outer bodice and skirt."  So, of course, to spare everyone further embarrassment, she runs away as fast as her little legs will carry her.

Poor struggling Thomas Hardy has wrestled Mrs. Grundy to a draw.  

Good thing Elfrida was clothed in sufficient unmentionables to construct a rope seven yards long. Suppose Knight had been down there couple more yards and she had to remove her "upper bodice."  Would she have done so, or would she have let Knight plummet?` Hardy arranges it so that Elfrida can defy social norms, but not to the point of actual nudity. Hardy is bold, but not too bold.  

I suspect that if Hardy had his way and wasn't enchained by the humbug prudery against which he struggled all his life, he would have stripped Elfrida to the skin. How would Henry Knight have responded? Probably keeled over from the shock.

What would Elizabeth Bennet have done in the same situation?  Removed her underclothes to save her suitor?  Probably not. The most likely answer: Jane Austen would never have let her go out walking near a cliff with a gentleman.  

A Choice Euphemism

Victorian novelists had a hard time describing bodies, especially female bodies. Their usual practice was to sidestep such subjects entirely though the more daring of them might resort to suggestion or innuendo.

Here's an instance in which Thomas Hardy ties himself into comic  knots trying to tell his audience that although Tess Derbyfield is very young and almost childish she has early developed a large bosom:  "She had an attribute which amounted to a disadvantage just now; and it was this that caused Alec d'Urberville's eyes to rivet themselves upon her. It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fullness of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was. She had inherited the feature from her mother without the quality it denoted.  It had troubled her mind occasionally, till her companions had said that it was a fault which time would cure." 

A later novelist might simply have noted that she was physically mature and that her emotions would eventually catch up but for now she was vulnerable.

Back in Brooklyn we might have said, "She had a pair of gazongas on her like you wouldn't believe and they're going to get her into a lot of trouble"

Cliche of the Decade

There's this woman of a certain age, good looking, usually blonde. Generally, she's a detective but she could be reporter or a spy -- some sort of investigator. She has an instinct for her work, an unusual insight or gift. There's a murderer or villain out there and she's determined to get him; it's personal with her and often she has to violate procedures in order to bring this character to justice. She regularly confronts her superior, an older man who is a stickler for the rules and wants to shut down the investigation. As a last resort, she'll ask for 24 hours, or more rarely 48 hours, to bring the villain in. And guess what -- it turns out that her instinct was right all along and after a brief struggle, in which her life is in danger (often there's an attempted assassination, usually by speeding vehicle), the criminal/mastermind/murderer is handcuffed (British version) or shot (American version).

"Leonardo the Enlightened Lion" by Ralph Ganesha Jefferson

Once Leonardo defeated the old king and began to rule the pride, he evolved into a more modern lion -- more sensitive, more sharing, and more mindful. While he did not shave his mane or become less manly, he transitioned to a new kind of male. First  he decided no longer to bite the necks of the lionesses whom he mounted. Instead he wooed them gently with wine and flowers. He was a considerate mounter -- always taking care that the experience was sweet for his lionesses. And soon after, he gave up the custom of breaking the backs of the kittens of the previous king. Instead he nurtured their babies and brought them porridge and toys and stuffed animals. Nor did he drive the juvenile males into the bush. He taught them to dance and to draw and to meditate. And finally Leonardo stopped treating other animals as prey. He became a gazelle guardian. Conscious of the environment, he encouraged all in his pride to eat organic fruits and vegetables and wholesome ancient grains. Nowadays Leonardo the enlightened lion starts each day with a large bowl of gluten-free granola. He's into wellness.

The Mall of Me

I had to go to the huge shopping mall the other day and let me tell you, what a colossal waste of effort! There was nothing for me. Lots of jewelry, fancy duds, shoes. There must have been ten shoe stores for the ladies and almost as many for the guys. But I've already stocked up on shoes: I buy multiple pairs of a design that works for me, stow them deep in the closet, and pull out a new pair when the one in use springs a leak. Same thing with pants: multiple copies of Lee Regular Fit jeans in a variety of colors, bought online or if I'm in a sociable mood at a shop around the corner. The big malls, with their sun glass huts and perfume counters and candle stores and  knick-knacks, doo-dads, and tschokes interest me not all. Nor their food courts -- gag. Or their muzak music, programmed to make you want to spend, spend and spend again.

I can, however, imagine a shopping mall designed for my particular and personal satisfaction. It would be called "The Mall of Me."

Anchoring one end of the Mall of Me is a large book store, carrying both new and used, but stocked with volumes of history, fine arts, crafts, popular science, biography, travel,  fiction, gardening and what used to be called "natural history", with lots of room to browse and sit and read. Proviso: the "bookstore of me" carries zero books on Spirituality, Self-Improvement, Soul Regression, Tarot, Alternative Therapies, or Healing Arts. No books written by TV pastors or repentant politicians recently released from prison or by instant millionaires. No celebrity autobiographies. At the other end of the Mall of Me, there's a shop selling music cds which  specializes in the great age of middle European music from 1685 (birth of Bach) to 1911 (death of Mahler), but also features a treasury of classic blues, bluegrass, American roots, popular song, rock and roll, and gospel of the golden age. No New Age, No Rap, no Electronic. Between my two "anchors," there will be a good garden store featuring expensive, elegant, heavy-in-the-hand garden tools. No power mowers or power tools, but when appropriate to the season, racks of seeds, preferably of heirloom and antique vegetables. Next to it, a movie memorabilia and poster store, with large collections from the earliest days of cinema right through 1950, especially Shakespeare movies. And then I'd like a high-end antique store displaying walls and shelves of classical and Asian works of art. Unfortunately, because of budgetary constraints, I won't be doing any purchasing in this particular shop, but I'll be pleased to browse in it, at least weekly, perhaps oftener. Also, a cafe where a guy could purchase a hot chocolate and an almond croissant. I would also like a store that specializes in 19th and early 20th century Caucasian rugs and wall-hangings though here, once again -- it would be more for appreciating than for actual buying. Subject to the same constraints, a baseball memorabilia shop -- National League only. A high end crafts store. And as for restaurants: a Jewish deli, modeled after the now defunct Second Avenue Delicatessen. An imaginative Asian fusion restaurant. A bagel bakery. No fish, and certainly no sushi. Perhaps a hole-in-the-wall one-person walk-in shop where a guy or gal could help me with computer and cell phone anomalies and failures -- someone who speaks in traditional English, not in acronyms. And then there will be buskers: at one end of the mall, a string quartet;  at the other end, a bluegrass band. No fire-eaters, contortionists, or drummers banging on pots and pans. All performers personally vetted by me. No panhandlers or noble solicitors with their dread clipboards.

And of course, some intelligently-designed play areas for infants, new walkers and small children. And some comfortable chairs for their parents (and me) to sit and watch the kiddies frolic.

Yes, I think that will do it.  It's the Mall of Me.

Now that I think of it, everyone should have their own mall. Instead of vast mall installations, let's have targeted malls. Individually designed and executed.

Merchandising genius!! 

Sciascian Geography

Years ago, I read, in translation of course, a few of Leonardo Sciascia's Sicilian mysteries. Excellent books: The Day of the Owl (Il giorno della civetta -- 1961)), Equal Danger (Uguale pericolo --1973), The Challenge (Il contesto--1971). Last week I tried to read one of Sciascia's short stories in its native Italian. A good idea, but quite a struggle. Too taxing for my present fluency. Sciascia's vocabulary is enormous, mine is puny. Not to mention Sicilian expressions that would be stumpers and require footnoting even for mainland Italians.

The story I tackled is Il lungo viaggio, (The Long Voyage). Some impoverished Sicilian peasants pay a man whom we would call a coyote to smuggle them into America; he takes their entire savings, takes them on board his ship, and then after ten excruciating days sets them right back down in Sicily. A sad tale of exploitation, not, alas, irrelevant today. 

Sciascian geography: the Sicilians think they are headed for the middle Atlantic coast of North America, where they will find Nugioirsi, Nuovaiorche, and my very favorite, Brucchilin.

Reposted: "Crosspatch, / Draw the Latch" and Industrial Capitalism

One of the most joyful of nursery rhymes, and a personal favorite, is this brilliant piece of poetry:  

                               Crosspatch,

                               Draw the latch.

                               Sit by the fire and spin.

                               Take a cup,

                               And drink it up.

                               Then call the neighbors in.

The clicky rhymes and jaunty meter are undeniably beautiful -- and there's much more complexity than first meets the eye.  

In the first triad, a "crosspatch," -- a "cross or ill-tempered person, usually a girl or woman"-- is at work, spinning; in the second triad, she's exhorted to drink and also to invite her neighbors "in" -- presumably into the room, or just as likely, the tiny cottage-- where she lives alone. In the first strophe, the theme is isolation, but in the second, isolation is challenged by the calls of society and by the hope of a more satisfactory and convivial life.   

What can we know about the surly individual addressed by the evocative designation, "crosspatch?"  The first element in the name --"cross"-- implies not only sourness, but also resistance, as in "cross-grained." The second element--"patch"-- suggests that the crosspatch's discontent is not without cause. We can infer that she's poor because she's a person whose garments are either assembled from various rescued materials, as in "patchwork," or that her clothes are, in another sense of the word patch, repaired. In addition, it's possible that ill health has caused her skin to become "patchy." But "patch" also signals a degree of mental stress, as in Shakespeare's "patched fool." In this signification, patch derives from Italian pazzo, crazy. The crosspatch is therefore disabled physically, socially and psychologically.

At the outset of the poem, our "crosspatch" sits glowering, impoverished, perhaps muttering indistinctly, friendless, without family, her youth blighted by poverty, huddled against the last embers of her dying fire. What is it that she is spinning? No doubt she ekes out a meagre living in the impersonal mercantilist "putting-out" system. Some exploitative proto-capitalist venturer has delivered to her lonely door a quantity of unspun wool or cotton; her job is to return the material to him in the processed form that will then be passed on to an equally poor weaver, then to a tailor, etc. She works alone and never sees the fruits of her labor except for the occasional, paltry farthing that allows her a bare subsistence. No wonder she is slightly barmy and has "drawn the latch" -- closed herself off from her fellows. But then, suddenly, comes the antistrophe, and in a series of importunate injunctives the crosspatch is solicited to rejoin the company of humanity. "Take a cup,/ And drink it up,/ Then call the neighbors in." What's in the cup?  Spiritous liquors, no doubt, which, though designed to dull the pain of wage-slavery, also act to augment the revelry with which the poem climaxes. The wine is not sipped, but it is drained to the lees. And once the door is unlatched, and the neighbors -- neighbors of both sexes, no doubt,-- are called "in," why then, let the libations and the wild rumpus begin!  Alienated labor is suddenly set aside and replaced by the natural bonds of one human being to another, and the stasis of the opening lines of the poem transforms in a flash into a wildly kinetic bacchanal. Emotional weakness transmutes into healthy liberated pleasure.  Dour Puritanism, with its punishing work ethic, yields to the spirit of holiday and to pagan, perhaps even dionysian, excess. Here, in miniature, is the essence of the comic vision. In a few powerful lines, freedom, good humor, and natural appetite triumph over bondage, artificiality, social constriction and repression; the justifiably sullen crosspatch, in a burst of energy, reintegrates herself into the social nexus from which she has been banished.

Whether or not the crosspatch can permanently liberate herself from the oppressions of industrial capitalism, or whether the anodyne and spurious relief of alcohol is a merely transient solution is left unresolved. To ask a short poem, however dense with meaning, to answer so difficult a question would, just possibly, be to ask too much of it and, perhaps, to push the evidence the merest tad too far.

Even More New Words

Carinate, which sounds vaguely dental, actually describes the shape of a particular kind of ceramic or metal vessel. An object which has a rounded base and inward sloping sides is "carinated." Hypogea, which is drawn directly from Greek under (hypo) and earth (gaia) means, obviously, underground, but in the world of archaeology generally refers to an underground temple or tomb. Catacombs and crypts, therefore, are both hypogea. A megaron was the great hall of a Grecian palace but archaeologists use the word to describe the large entrance room of any substantial structure. An exedra is a semicircular recess set into a building's facade. It think of it, perhaps incorrectly, as a half of a rotunda. A plinth is the base or platform on which a column or statue rests. Ashlar is finely dressed stones, generally in the shape of a cube or a rectangular solid. Ashlar construction is therefore different from rubble masonry, in which walls are made of irregularly shaped or found stones. A tophet is a burial place for children either sacrificed or dead of natural causes; it's a word of Hebrew origin and recalls the valley near Jerusalem n which ancient Canaanites sacrificed children to Moloch or Baal. I'm embarrassed that I apparently never encountered the word annona, which characterizes the grain supply of the city of Rome in ancient times.  Annona, the common noun, is also personified or deified as "a theophany of the emperor's power to care for his people through the provision of staples." Annona, the goddess, is sometimes assimilated to her compatriot Ceres. Acephalous" means headless, and describes "clerics not under a bishop" or lines of verse missing a first foot. In archaeology, it's a decapitated statue. A cist is simply a stone-lined grave or shaft.

These splendid words are drawn from Shepherds, Sailors & Conquerors, Archaeology and History in Sardinia from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages by Stephen Dyson and Robert Rowland, 2007, which I read with great care, enjoying especially the middle chapters on Sardinia's fascinating nurghagic civilizations.  

Sleepers

In the catchment area of P. S. 217, as indeed in my home territory of darkest Flatbush, there was very little immigration or emigration. People stayed put, for the most part, and the students with whom you entered kindergarten were the ones who were likely to graduate with you at the end of eighth grade.

I can think of two outsiders who came not from a near neighborhood but from the rumored "outside world." One was Beryl McLeod, who arrived from Scotland, stayed long enough to engender in me a most powerful and confusing pre-adolescent crush, and then disappeared. Lovely Beryl spoke with a most exotic and enchanting accent, Glaswegian if I remember correctly. And then there was Alan Dean, who dropped in for a year or two from western Pennsylvania. He was a diminutive tough boy, not very bright but competitive on the punch ball field. He also spoke in an dialect unfamiliar to me and which I now judge to have been country or Appalachian. One day in Miss Finsmith's crowded stuffy fifth-grade classroom we pupils were asked to elucidate a picture that the teacher had displayed.  It was a of a young lad with a candle in his hand. I recall very clearly a sentence of Alan Dean's:  "you can see that it's nighttime because he's wearing his sleepers."

Alan Dean's "sleepers" made a lifetime impression on me, not only because I had never heard that specific term before, but because I wasn't until that moment aware of dialectical differences in vocabulary. I knew about soda but I had never heard of tonic;  I knew about pancakes but had never heard of griddlecakes or flapjacks, and I wore sneakers all day every day but knew nothing of tennis shoes or tennies -- not to mention plimsolls. I was not only monolingual but monodialectical, if there be such a word. For someone to employ  the word "sleepers" for an item of clothing that I knew only as "pajamas" was therefore a transformational experience.

And a very sensible word, at that. Much to be preferred to other deplorable dialectal terms for pajamas, as for example the twee diminutive "jammies," or worse, the lazy "pj's" (not doubt employed by the sort of people who would call orange juice, O.J.), or even worser, the infantile reduplicative "jim-jams." 

So I was on the alert the next time that 'sleepers" swam into my imaginative ken, which was when I first became acquainted with John Donne's clever little love poem, "The Good Morrow," in which the poet claims that until he fell in love, he was immature, unconscious: 

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?

Who the heck, I wondered, were these "seven sleepers?" Not, in fact, a wardrobeful of pajamas nor (my first guess) a parody of the famous 'nine worthies" of chivalry?  But no, inasmuch as Donne habitually and regularly conflated religion and sex, he knew that the seven sleepers were a group of enthusiastic early Christian converts who were  imprisoned for their faith in a cave near Ephesus, fell into miraculous sleep, and then woke up two centuries later to discover to their delight that their city had adopted and institutionalized their religion. Rips van Winkle of miraculous devotion.  

Of other religious or literary sleepers the surely the most prominent are Thoreau's. In a poignant passage about railroads in Walden, Thoreau recalls that "sleepers" is the demotic names for the wooden ties on which the steel rails are laid. From this suggestive bit of nomenclature, Thoreau elaborates a conceit about the way the new industrialism favors some and crushes others. "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad?  Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon.” So "sleepers" live on.

I have never heard this sense of "sleepers" in conversation, but then, I don't talk about railroad-making all that much.  Nevertheless, it is not difficulty to endorse the continued pertinence of Thoreau's witty comparison. 

No doubt my regular metablogian readership has been waiting patiently for me to mention that the "sleeper" is the first and easiest trick learned by beginners with the yo-yo. At least, such was the case in the 1950s P. S. 217 schoolyard.  And a spy in a "sleeper cell."  And a dark horse. Surprise.  A film;  in fact, many films.

A lifetime of many and various "sleepers."

September 21, 2015.  Let me add that Sleepers are plentiful in the old West Bradford cemetery, they being one of the first families to colonize the part of Vermont where now I am writing this paragraph.  A quaker Sleeper disrupted a church service in the 1790s, shouting at the congregrational minister, 'Sir, you preach false doctrine."  There's a Sleeper farm right at the end of South Road, just over the line into Corinth.  Never met them, don't know if their family religious enthusiasms have persisted.

Olivier Truc; Fiction; Age

Olivier Truc's Forty Days Without Shadow came highly recommended, both by the forty or so literary awards that it has garnered, and also by trusted friends. It's a murder mystery -- or rather a "police procedural" -- and indeed it is a very good "read." It's set in the northern reaches of Scandinavia amidst tensions between the indigenous Lapps, or more properly Sami, and their Swedish and Norwegian oppressors. It's got everything: a brutal murder, a child molester; a budding but blighted romance between a veteran policeman and his beautiful novice partner; a tough wise old "native" who clings to the traditional ways; a search for an old gold mine; stolen Sami artifacts, and enough red herrings to furnish a medium-size Stockholm restaurant. And snow, lots of snow. Snowshoes, snowmobiles, snowstorms, snowdrifts.

And yet I had to discipline myself to keep on with the reading. Something, perhaps age, has blighted my appetite for fiction -- not just genre fiction, like this mystery, but all fiction. Let me confess: to read stories, rather than to read history or biology or geology has come to seem frivolous. An indulgent  waste of time when I could be learning something substantive. 

I looked up some reviews of this novel. Let me quote one opinion: "the background information about the Sami lifestyle will slow down the action and readers may wish that Olivier Truc had left his documentary days behind." Interesting, but I had exactly the opposite reaction. What kept me intrigued and kept me plowing through the snowheaps was precisely the ethnographic and historical detail that the reviewer deplores. I wasn't just being "entertained";  I was learning something!

Five years ago, I reported on this very blague that in my youth I loved to read science fiction and fantasy, but that somewhere along the line, I lost my taste for such flights of imagination. (If anyone is interested, they can find the relevant paragraph here.) I would say that my condition has worsened -- my resistance to fantasy has now spread to almost all fiction. Odd that I don't feel the same way about movies: I prefer fiction films, stories, to documentaries.  

Darwin carried his Virgil and his Milton to Tierra del Fuego and claimed that the books sustained him throughout his Beagle days. But later, in his autobiography, he revealed that he no longer found any pleasure in poetry.  I can't compare myself to Darwin in any way except that we both grew older.  Yet I wonder whether an impatience with fiction and a loss of aesthetic sensibility isn't a characteristic of septuagenarians.

Lost Books

If a person could rescue one of the many lost books of the Greeks and Romans, which would it be? I think most ordinary walking-around-Americans would nominate the lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics, about which Umberto Eco made such a fuss, and which is presumed to be an philosophical analysis of the genre of comedy.

I myself am not enamored of Aristotle's lit crit. I suspect that if the second book had survived, it would only show that Aristotle had invented a vocabulary to describe the various elements of comedy -- and as a result generations of scholars would have felt an obligation to conduct sterile and inhibiting debates about the precise interpretation of his various technical terms. So, therefore, if I were interested in comedy, rather than rescuing the second book I'd prefer to read Homer's lost Margites, famous among the ancients as a comic counterpart to the Iliad and Odyssey. It might have been fun, and we would certainly learn a lot more than we now know about the archaic Greek sense of humor. My suspicion is that we moderns would find the Margites to be a trial, a puzzle, a genuine challenge.  

Not only comedies but tragedies also have perished. Anyone who has been dazzled by the great Greeks would want to read the 60 or 70 lost plays of Aeschylus, the hundred or so that have disappeared by Sophocles as well as the 60 or so vanished plays of Euripides. No doubt our understanding of the great age of Athens and Athenian religion and art and politics would have to be thoroughly rethought. Nothing more tragic than the loss of the tragedies.

And then there is Livy's history of Rome in 142 books, of which only 35 (plus fragments and reports) survive. How much more full would be our knowledge of the last years of the republic with Livy as a guide.

But if I had to choose one work of the ancients that has perished, I think I would opt for one of the books that were written by Livy's student and friend, the emperor Claudius. Claudius, whose first wife (and one of his better ones) Plautia Urganilla was a native speaker of Etruscan, wrote two books about the Etruscans: a general history, and a volume on the Etruscan language. It's this second book that I would most want to rescue. Claudius was the last person known to have been able to read Etruscan, a language which was becoming extinct in his lifetime.

Etruscan was an isolate -- a language with no known relatives, like Basque. It was written in an early (8th century) variety of Greek, so it can be recited, but it cannot be understood. Etruscan contributed not only its alphabet but a few words to Latin: "atrium," "histrio," "taberna," "stilus," and "cera," for example. Approximately 13,000 Etruscan inscriptions are in existence, mostly on gravestones. There are also about 300 bronze mirrors with religious or mythological scenes on one side, many with Etruscan inscriptions on the obverse. They are found in the tombs of women who, it would seem, must have been literate. There are no surviving Etruscan manuscripts but there is the Zagreb mummy.  Sometime around 125 in the last pre-Christian millenium, an Egyptian technician re-used a linen Etruscan book to wrap a body. Twelve hundred legible words survive. They seem to record prayers and invocations to the gods. Not much else, except for a great linguistic mystery in the heart of civilized Europe. Alas that Claudius's books did not make it through the dark age bottleneck!

What is a Tax-Cart?

What indeed?  In Trollope's Barchester Towers, when Mrs Quiverful discovers that her husband, rector of Puddingdale, is not to become warden of Hiram's Hospital, she sets out to Barchester to confront the bishop. Not a walker, and not the owner of a horse or carriage of her own, she "begged that Farmer Subsoil would take her thither in his tax-cart."  A tax-cart, as far as the dictionary is concerned, is a "small spring-cart on which a tax is paid." So it is properly a "taxed-cart."  A "spring-cart" is a "springed-cart" -- i.e a cart with springs. But were taxes paid on all vehicles? If so, why should this one kind of vehicle be called a "tax-cart?" But if not, why should this particular kind of vehicle be singled out of taxation. Trollope does not illuminate. 

And so to the other nineteenth-century horsedrawn vehicles (barouche, basket carriage, berlin, britchka, brougham, buckboard, buggy, cabriolet, caleche, cariole, carryall, chaise, chariot, clarence, concord wagon, coupe, croydon, curricle, cutter, daumont, dearborn, dennet, diligence, dog-cart, fiacre, fly, fourgon, four-wheeler, gig, go-cart, governess cart, hansom, herdic, jaunty car, jersey-wagon, kibitka, landau, patache, phaeton, pill-box, post-chaise, rockaway, shandrydan, shay, sociable, spider-phaeton, spring-van, stanhope, sulky, surrey, T-cart, telyezhka, tilbury, tarantass, trap, troika, victoria, vis-a-vis, wagonette, whitechapel, and wurt) now add "tax-cart."

Superhero Perils

I awoke this morning from a semi-nightmare all in a dither about Superman's x-ray vision. Inasmuch as the blue-haired one can see through dense objects (except, if I remember correctly, lead) then it follows as night the day that he cannot help seeing through his own eyelids. Superman must therefore suffer from what the sleep consultants call "poor sleep hygiene." Unable to keep the light out of his own eyes, he must therefore be subject to a degree of insomnia. No wonder he's always powing someone in the jaw -- he's just not getting enough sleep.   

Has anyone else given thought to this important topic?

Six-Leggedness

I read Planet of the Bugs (Chicago, 2014) by Scott Richard Shaw, a Wyoming entomologist. It's a good book on a great topic -- the evolution of insects. In the acknowledgements, Shaw thanks his editor for helping him to "shape a bulky manuscript into a sleeker book" but I think I  would have much preferred the fatter unpublished version, which I imagine would have been heavier on lurid, fascinating detail. I think that Shaw's editor may have misunderestimated his enthusiastic readership.

Shaw loves his insects and writes the evolution of life bug-centrically. Instead of the ordinary telling of evolution, where everything leads ineluctably to majestic us, Shaw presents the triumph of the six-legged kind. For example, Shaw disparages our (I mean mankind's) walking and running. "Two-legged bipedal locomotion is so unstable and difficult to master that it seems highly improbable and almost pointless." He has a point there. A child takes a year to learn to walk, and even after he does so, he staggers like a drunken sailor for several months. No other creature on earth is so ungainly at the outset.

Moreover,  Shaw adds, six-leggedness optimizes balance and stability and has the potential for rapid motion. "Six legged form is sublime. Fifty million insect species can't possibly be wrong."

If I understand it correctly, most insect species propel themselves by alternately moving one of their two tripods of legs -- and tripods are inherently stable.  It's a great system. 

Now that I've achieved the "golden years", I spend too much time worrying about crashing to the ground. I don't want to break a hip or a wrist, both of them common afflictions of the two-legged. Nno one has ever seen a beetle trip, or an ant sprawl embarrassingly on the sidewalk. 

Too bad we don't have six legs. Or even four (the othe two having evolved into arms).  We'd be better off. We'd need two pairs of hips, of course, and copulation would be more complicated, but it would be worth it. Speed, stability, grace. Four legs would definitely be sublime.

On the other hand, I'm glad that we evolved an internal skeleton, which the insects never did. I wouldn't want an exoskeleton or carapace. It would be ungainly, troublesome. And probably accompanied by all sorts of emotional displays. "Don't pay any attention to him. He's moulting." 

On the Kindle with Tertius and Rosamund

I'm reading Middlemarch again. It's either my fourth or fifth time through the best novel ever written in the English language. If you want to know about the nineteenth century, start with George Eliot. 

I had the oddest feelings fifty pages in. (Actually, "pages" is an anachronism because I am reading on the kindle.)  Lydgate is flirting with beautiful, empty-headed Rosamund Vincy.  I thought "this time let him be smart;  let him not marry Rosamund."  I must have been in an unusally plastic frame of mind, or in some sort of reading reverie. I know that novels are immutable, but I was hoping against hope that Lydgate had learned something since the last time I read the novel. Even though he made a fool of himself with that actress in Paris. And then last night, just before I turned out the lights, Lydgate did it again -- fell for the blonde curls and the glistening eye. He's learned nothing, not a thing, in the last ten years. And now I have to live through the saga as his crush turns into crushing disappointment and bitterness. Marry in haste, repent at leisure. Poor Lydgate.

 The kindle changes the input but doesns't do a thing for the outcome. 

Three Perspicuous Comments on "Books."

Charlie Dressen (manager, Brooklyn Dodgers,1951-53):  "You  know something? I never read a book in my whole life.... I can read newspapers and magazines. But I never read a book. You think I should?"

Jean Harlow (actress, on her birthday wishes): "Don't get me a book. I already got a book."

Anatole Broyard (critic): "If it hadn't been for books, we'd have been entirely at the mercy of sex."

A New Machiavel

I tried the first three installments -- a netflix diskful of episodes  -- of House of Cards. I plan to watch a few more, but I'm deep into negative enthusiasm, not at all sure that I'm going to continue. Cards certainly grabs you, and it's startling and theatrical, but it's also far too cynical and depraved for my rose-colored tastes. I just don't believe in it. I know that it's all the rage to assume that politicians are horrid and power-obsessed -- but every one of them, all the time, without a moment of relaxation or redemption?  And so I'm skeptical of every character, every twist in the plot, every nasty turn of phrase. And because I'm skeptical, I just can't, as they say, "get into it." Or at least, not all the way in.  (Full disclosure: during episode three I fell into a 'deep rest,' sometimes denominated a minor nap.)

The character who dominates House of Cards is Kevin Spacey's Frank Underbelly -- I mean  Underwood --  who is fascinating but not credible. Or rather, he is not designed to be credible, because he regularly violates the fourth wall and converses intimately with viewers. Underwood is ruthless, implacable, ambitious, vengeful, depraved, vicious, malignant, and amusing. He turns his audience into his co-conspirators.

And where have we seen this curious concatenation of traits before?  Think back, fit audience though few, to your college class in the History of English Drama. There you encountered the vice and his crossbred friend, the machiavel,who were ubiquitous in medieval drama. Shakespeare brought this semi-supernatural hybrid to perfection two separate times -- once in the person of Richard of Gloucester in Richard III and then again as Iago in Othello.

Richard of Gloucester winks to his audience that he "can smile, and murder whiles I smile,/And cry 'Content' to that which grieves my heart, /And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,/ And frame my face to all occasions."  Now if that isn't Frank Underhill to a T, first spotted killing a puppy and a few scenes later baldly and straightfacedly lying to his President. Richard can "set the murderous Machiavel to school" in order to gain a crown; our unFrank friend Frank once wanted to be secretary of state, but now he just wants revenge. Richard and Iago are capable not only of falsity but even of murder to get what they want.  Both of them kill their own wives. "I'll have her, but I wlll not keep her long," says Richard of Queen Anne. 

And therefore If I were to offer advice to Zoe Barnes, the reckless young reporter for the Washington Herald, I would suggest that she steer mighty clear of Frank Underwood. I would tell her to read Othello post-post-haste and take careful note of what happens to Desdemona's lady-in-waiting Emilia.  Hint: "Fie, your knife upon a woman."  

Zoe, please, please, get out of there while the going is good!

In Shakespeare's plays, Richard and Iago both overreach and come to grief. Richard is left to die on the battlefield and Iago is subjected to the rigors of Venetian justice ("Torture will ope his lips.") And that's what is supposed to happen to machiavels.

I'm curious as to what will happen to Frank Underhill. By rights he should be publicly humiliated and die a ghastly death. But inasmuch as we live in an exceedingly cynical age, we can guess that Frank will only die when Kevin Spacey is offered better work, or when ratings plunge, or when the series jumps its inherent shark.  

Lucinda Roanoke

I've been reading Trollope's Palliser novels again -- my third or fourth time through this series of six great big whoppers.  It's a familiar tour -- but with enough forgettings and misrememberings on my part to keep me focussed and surprised.

I finished The Eustace Diamonds late last night. I know that I read this novel for the first time in 1961 because it was in the curriculum of a course taught by showman Professor Edgar Rosenberg. I haven't the siightest recollection of that early reading or of Rosenberg's lectures either, but then, sixty years have gone by and larger and larger cavities riddle my porous Swiss cheese brain. 

The Eustace Diamonds is rich in both plot and character.  In addition to the usual "who is going to marry whom" scenario (three separate instances here) and still another version of the handsome but weak  hero who is going to the dogs but redeems himself in the last installment, there's a genuine cops-and-robbers mystery along with three separate detectives (none of them as competent as Mr. Bucket). And then there's also a riotous profusion of characters. Some, like Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Mealyus, products of Trollope's uncontrollable disgust with those nasty Semites, merely disfigure the page. Others are stock characters who appear in novel after novel, the name alone changed:  in this case the the patient Griselda figure Lucy Morris. But then there's a glorious almost Dickensian abundance of highly-marked, genuinely individualized and extremely imaginative, credible inventions.

There's Lizzie Eustace, with her fibs, taradiddles and utterly conscienceless lies; George de Bruce Carruthers, who has an eye for the main chance but knows how to protect himself against pretty women; elderly Lady Linlithgow, who's all tart tongue and selfishness; Lord Fawn, a pitiful small-minded aristocrat; and the bustling opportunistic hypocrite Mrs. Carbuncle.

And then there's Lucinda Roanoke, who inhabits a corner of the novel but who is fascinatingly perverse. She's an American, very young and handsome, impecunious, who's being shopped around to snare a husband. Under pressure, and against all good sense, she accepts an offer from the brute Sir Griffin Tewett. Lucinda has no intention of becoming an obedient wife. The engagement becomes a war of attrition between the "lovers."  Sir Griffin holds on only because, it appears,  he doesn't like to lose and because he assumes that he'll be able to control Lucinda once he's married and has legal authority over her. He looks forward to the only sort of sex that might occur, which woud be nothing less than rape. Lucinda is sex-averse and finds even a kiss to be abhorrent. As the wedding day approaches, she announces that she will never be Sir Griffin's bride. She threatens both murder and suicide. On the morning of the long anticipated day, she simply refuses to leave her room. Trollope tells us that she has gone mad. And that's the end of the affair.

Lucinda doesn't quite fit into the space. On the surface, the episode makes the point that women were offered no place in society except obedient wife. But this is not comedy of manners;  it's pathology. Sir Griffin is a sadistic monster. Lucinda does not want to submit, and therefore "chooses" insanity. Trollope does not follow Lucinda into her madness; instead, he dismisses her from his novel in exactly the same way that the English society dismisses such women. Trollope can't make a drop of sense out of the situation that he himself created. Lucinda deserves, and will earn, a novel of her own. But it won't be written by Anthony Trollope.

"Barefoot to Palestine"

I'm enchanted by a sentence in Othello that is spoken by Desdemona's lady-in-waiting, Emilia. She's helping Desdemona to undress and the two women are engaged in informal chat. Desdemona, perhaps wondering why she had the misfortune to fall in love with exotic Othello, allows her mind to wander. It comes to rest on a countryman of hers, a good-looking man named Ludovico. And then her interlocutor Emilia praises handsome Ludovico in words that should compel every sentient being to gasp in astonishment and admiration.

About Ludovico, Emilia makes a remarkable claim: "I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip."

All that needs to be said is, wow! But let me try to explain why the sentence so transfixes me.  

It's hyperbole, but not the ordinary hyperbole of largest or smallest or coolest or most awesome. It's a hyperbole beyond hyperbole. A lesser writer might have said, "I know a lady who would have walked a long way to make love to him." Not Shakespeare. For "a long way," Shakespeare give us "barefoot to Palestine"; for "make love" he offers "a touch of his nether lip."  It's extravagant and wheeling.

A hike, shod, to the holy land, would have been a long and exacting journey. Barefoot, beyond belief. The evocative word "Palestine" infuses religion and sanctity into a sentence about sex and desire -- and therefore generates a love-longing that is as powerful, as silly, and as ill-planned as a crusade. And for what aim? Not even, for this mythical lady hiker, a big, zonking, mouth-filling kiss; simply for the merest contact of lips. No, not even lips, just one lip -- the lower one.  It's an hyperbole of minimalism.

In the poetry that Shakespeare knew from his childhood, it was men who would make the vows and undergo the trials to court their beautiful ladies. But this lovely sentence reverses the convention. It is, so to speak, Sadie Hawkins day in Venice. 

Emilia elsewhere asserts that women have desires as strong as lovers of the other sex;  here she demonstrates that women's love-longing can be as ridiculous (and as powerful) as men's. 

And everyone who knows Othello will hear in the word "Palestine" an intimation of the violent act that once, many years ago, shook Aleppo.

Fowles, Snakes, etc.

By March of 1962, John Fowles had finished but not yet published The Collector, a work that I've never loved, and was still fussing with The Magus, the novel that hit me so hard when it appeared in 1965. Fowles was also reading just as randomly as I do, as I have now discovered from reading his journals, which have been condensed into two giant volumes.  (A "journal," young readers, was a literary form that preceded and anticipated the blog.)

On the whole, Fowles, as befit his name, was a birder rather than a "snaker," so I don't know how he stumbled upon Clifford Pope's The Great Snakes. I am not surprised that the one fact that Fowles gleaned from Pope's herpetological knowledge that "snakes copulate for hours, sometimes a day at a time."  A very Fowlesian piece of information.

I am surprised that he also reported in his journal the same snake anecdote that Dr. Metablog noted right here on this very blog. Back in 2006, Dr. M.  made mention of the instructions provided to early African missionaries on the proper response to meeting one of those 25-foot-long,  300-pound reticulated Burmese pythons. I found it in a book called Man the Hunted. Here's the story:

Remember not to run away; the python can run faster. The thing to do is to lie flat on the ground on your back with your feet together, arms to the sides and head well down. The python will then try to push its head under you, experimenting at every possible point. Keep calm, one wiggle and he will get under you, wrap his coils round you and crush you to death. After a time the python will get tired of this and will probably decide to swallow you without the usual preliminaries. He will very likely begin with one of your feet. Keep calm. You must let him swallow your foot. It is quite painless and will take a long time. If you lose your head and struggle he will quickly whip his coils around you. If you keep calm, he will go on swallowing. Wait patiently until he has swallowed about up to your knee. Then carefully take out your knife and insert it into the distended side of his mouth and with a quick rip slit him up.

In 2006, Dr M. wrote:  "Well-meant advice, I'm sure, but perhaps difficult to follow. Suppose you're just not in the mood to allow the python such liberties with your person. Suppose you've forgotten to bring your knife; suppose the python decides to start with your head rather than a foot. Suppose you involuntarily wiggle just a teensy bit. Suppose you just don't feel that it's a good day to be engulfed."  Fowles' comment is shorter but equally pertinent.  He writes:  "And spend the rest of your life in an asylum."

When I realized that Fowles and I had a common interest in giant man-eating snakes, I decided that the least I could to honor his memory was re-read The Magus. Which I did, at first with enthusiasm and then with increasing dismay as the the novel's flaws began to overwhelm its beauties. The Magus is too contrived, too obvious. Nicholas Urfe, the naif, is so unsuspicious that he is fooled by Conchis, the magician, over and over again -- many more times than is remotely credible. The reader (the 2013 reader, that is, not the 1965 reader) catches to the repeated gimmickry. But then after Urfe realize that he's been sadistically manipulated, he stockholm-syndromes his tormentors far too rapidly and cursorily.  It should take as much time to heal as to be harmed. As a result the book is out of balance -- too long in the middle, too short in the resolution. And then on top of that there's the heavy-handed Jungstuff and the grade-school pop Freudianism!! O my gosh. I was embarrassed. And in addtion, there is the deeply, unliberated Victorian attitudes toward sexuality in a book that claims to be "advanced."  Anyway, it just did not work this time through. What a disappoingment.

And I'm disappointed in Fowles as well. I began to read his journals in the hope that he would be  complex and philosophical and aware, but, no, he was just like me -- simple, defensive, insecure. 

And what a snob: so much and so often worried about his bourgeois background and so ashamed of his  well-meaning parents.

Most unforgiveable is not that he ran off with his best friend's wife, but that he wouldn't let Elizabeth keep her daughter. He made her choose between him and her own child.  In my view, a man should never come between a parent, a mother, and her offspring. It's a violation of the natural order, if there is such a thing as the natural order.

Nevertheless, I'm clinging to my most positive memoriesof Fowles The French Lieutenant's Woman, which I still believe to be a novel that will last.  But frankly, I'm just a tad frightened to re-read it.    

Nineteenth-Century Romance

I've several times poked fun at sad instances of Victorian sexual prudery. If, gentle reader, you doubt that I'm capable of prude-pokery, check here, here and here. 

My mild animosity toward the sexual silliness of our ancestors originated in my childhood. My father, though in most things a font of good common sense, was, sexually speaking, very much a old-fashioned dyed-in-the-wool Victorian. Whenever a discussion of sex or anatomy or reproduction would arise in our house, he would immediately turn red and stumble out of the room. Early on, I learned not to ask. On the few occasions when my poor papa mumbled something before he bolted, his information was always uninformed, frequently wrong, and occasionally dangerous. 

My father inhabited an earlier psychological universe and he couldn't possibly have imagined how the  invisible worm has turned. If he were alive today, he couldn't watch movies or TV or read novels. Too much gross language, too much frankness, too much nudity, too much casual coupling. He would have been aghast and embarrassed.

Nevertheless, repression has its compensations. It is absolutely clear to me that people of his generation and earlier experienced pleasures that cannot be realized now. The brave new libertine world of hooking up and sloppy drunken sex and XXX sites gratifies the instincts, but at significant cost.

Return we now to the last years of the nineteenth century, when Helen and the great poet Edward Thomas went a-courting. In their young twenties, a couple of years into their anguished relationship, they (in Helen's words)

were sitting in the undergrowth of a little copse in a remote part of the common. Edward had said that he had never seen a woman's body, and I do not remember quite how it came about, but I quite naturally and simply without any feeling of shyness, knelt up in our secret bower and undid my clothes, and let them fall about my knees so that to the knees I was naked.  I knew my body was pretty, my breasts wre firm and round and neither too small nor too large, and my neck and shoulders made a pleasant line, and my arms were rounded and white, and though my hips were small, the line of the waist was lovely.  I was proud of my body, and took the most innocent pleasure in its lines and health and strength. So we knelt in the grass and dead leaves of the copse opposite to each other, he silent and I laughing with joy to feel the air on my skin, and to see his enraptured gaze. For as he knelt he gazed wonderstruck and almost adoring, quite still, quite silent, looking now and then in my eyes with a serious ecstatic look, his eyes full of tenderness and love, searching mine for any sign of regret or shyness. He did not touch me, but just knelt there letting hie eyes take their fill of the beauty that was filling his soul with delight. When, without a word, I lifted my clothes about me, he helping me, he only then said, 'Helen, I did not know there was such beauty.'

Scoff as you will, ungentle readers.

I know -- it's prettified and romanticized. But it's an innocence that cannot be invented. And I'm not scoffing. I don't think that there's a person on our continent or in our century as naive as Edward Thomas was in England in 1898. Nor do I think that there's anyone who could say what he said, and say it with such bedazzled and wonderful sincerity: "Helen, I did not know there was such beauty."

It's a world that we have lost.

(Helen Thomas unveils in her memoir, Under Storm's Wing).

 

A New Biography of Edward Thomas

I've just finished a genuinely wonderful new biography by Matthew Hollis called Now All Roads Lead to France, a Life of Edward Thomas. I'm dazzled, and glad to be so. The book is carefully and comprehensively researched, literate, sensible, and compassionate. Its author is confident enough not to overwhelm the poor reader with pounds of extraneous detail. I'm not easily rivetted, but this biography was truly rivetting. Thank you, Matthew Hollis.

I'm a longtime Edward Thomas enthusiast. Thomas learned how to employ the language really used by men more successfully than some of his highly-regarded predecessors. I didn't know much about Thomas's life, and therefore hadn't realized (though I might have guessed had I been more astute) how much Thomas had learned from Robert Frost. The two became inseparable friends during Frost's English years and spent hours and hours together, neglecting their wives and families but talking poetry and poetic language. Clearly, they cross-fertilized.

In fact, if you listen closely, you can hear overtones of Frost in Thomas's best-known poem.

Yes, I remember Adlestrop --
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop -- only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

The first line of the poem is so casual and demotic that it sounds like what later came to be called "found poetry." I'm glad to know that there is an actual Adlestrop up there in the Cotswolds, though surely Thomas was well aware that "Adlestrop" sounds as though it were invented by the Ministry of Silly Names.

The poem is a latter-day pastoral which contrasts the hiss of industrial steam with the with perennial birdsong and cloudlets. A brief ecstatic revelation.  

My all-time favorite poem by Thomas is this blank-verse masterpiece:

As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed the angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.

The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,
The ploughman said. 'When will they take it away? '
'When the war's over.' So the talk began –
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
'Have you been out? ' 'No.' 'And don't want to, perhaps? '
'If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm, I shouldn't want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more...Have many gone
From here? ' 'Yes.' 'Many lost? ' 'Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.'
'And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.' 'Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.' Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

Although understated and matter-of-fact, it's a moving, emotional story. The conversation between poet and ploughman is framed by the lovers, who enter the wood, attend to their pleasure, and then emerge. The poet is at first flippant and even jokes about losing a limb. But he is soon taught that there's nothing amusing about the end of an peaceful era. "Everything/ Would have been different.  For it would have been/ Another world." In these two lines, I hear gas attacks, trench warfare, dysentery.  and catastrophic casualties (including Thomas's own). The ploughman is more optimistic and hopeful, but he proved to be mistaken.

How Rupert Brooke Died

From a mosquito bite to his lip. 

Rupert Brooke was an immensely talented young poet, best known today for the hyper-nationalistic World War I sonnet, "The Soldier." He lived for just twenty-eight years and his death was a tragedy for letters.

It's easy to be skeptical about the mosquito. I've been in the company of these insects many times, and I've never been bitten on the lip. Mosquitoes seem to avoid the mouth area -- at least, they avoid my mouth. But then, I don't know anything about the habits of eastern Mediterranean mosquitoes.

Brooke was a sub-lieutenant with Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve; the mosquito attack took place while his ship was anchored in the Aegean. He developed an abscess and sepsis and as a result was transferred to a French hospital ship, the Duguay-Trouin. He died at 4:46 pm on 24 April, 1915 and was buried in an olive grove on the island of Skyros.

An unlikely death-- as odd and irregular as that of Aeschylus (struck on the head by a tortoise dropped by an eagle), or Isadora Duncan (strangled by a scarf entangled in the wheels of a motor-car). Or the unfortunate composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, who, while conducting in the traditional manner by beating time with staff, accidentally knocked his own foot, causing an abscess which became gangrenous and fatal. Alas, no antibiotics in 1687. 

My guess is that if Brooke had not been bitten and had survived Gallipoli (where his ship was headed), the "pure and elevated patriotism" displayed in "The Soldier" might have become less enthusiastic. Brooke  might have evolved in a direction similar to that of his jaded-about-warfare contemporaries Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfrid Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Ivor Gurney, and Edward Thomas. But we'll never know.

Who's Laughing Now?

Many years ago, when I was young and invulnerable, it was most amusing that Mr. Barkis, the "willin'" carrier in David Copperfield, offered up his shillings with such agony.

Barkis is bedridden with a cripplingly painful illness. He has a locked box of coins, and although he has become "near," he has the generous impulse to give David a guinea. However, to fetch the money costs him a martyrdom. "He endured unheard-of agonies in crawling out of bed alone, and taking it from that unlucky box....  We heard him uttering suppressed groans of the most dismal nature. This procedure racked him in every joint."  

Barkis's pain was, once upon a time, comic. Nowadays, alas, I can only imagine that Barkis has ruptured a disc, and must endure a chronic, unameliorable, incurable torture that will only end with his death.

And then there's the Fat Boy, in Pickwick Papers, who cannot prevent himself from falling asleep. What's so funny about chronic fatigue or narcolepsy? At my present advanced age, I tend to fall asleep every time I lie down with a book, even if the book is a  wild extravagant wonderful novel by Charles Dickens. Inopportune sleep by day is almost as unpleasant as insomnia or nightmares (or insomnia plus nightmares) at night.      

I think also of Mr F.'s demented Aunt, in Little Dorrit , who can no longer follow the conversation, but "after regarding the company for ten minutes with a malevolent gaze, delivered the following fearful remark:'When we lived at Henley, Barnes's gander was stole by tinkers.'"' 

Is her senility, or as we would now say, her Alzheimer's, so very amusing.

It were, but now it ain't no longer.

Dickens died young, at 58, so there is no way to know whether his sense of humor would been softened by the ravages of disease and age.

Does Religion Rot the Brain?

Unaware that I was choosing a splashy and controversial best-seller, I selected from the library's new book shelf something called Unorthodox (New York, 2012), by one Deborah Feldman, and a sadder, more dispiriting book I have rarely read.

Ms. Feldman had the misfortune to be raised in the Satmar branch of the Hasidic movement -- a sect that, at least as she describes it, is unhappy, puritanical, finicky, repressive, ferociously anti-rational, patriarchal, and bossy. Boys study Talmud but girls are not educated past a high school -- what would be the point, when, as Deborah's grandfather once told her, "girls belong in the kitchen?" Feldman's memoir is not just dreary, it's ostentatiously lurid. Its subtitle is "the scandalous rejection of my Hasidic roots" -- and the attention-mongering scandals that she recounts are mostly sexual in nature. 

There is a old story that John Ruskin collapsed in a heap when he discovered, on his wedding night, that his bride had pubic hair. Feldman out-Victorians the great Victorian, claiming that she did not know that she had a vagina, an entrance, an opening, "down there." Is such ignorance possible in this age?  And then she explores her sexual failings, mostly her vaginismus-induced post-honeymoon extended virginity -- which she blames on her Satmar upbringing (although want of curiosity might also be a factor).

Feldman's memoir has upset the Hasidic community and there is at least one website devoted entirely to attacking its veracity. And in fact the memoir does contain the commonplace omissions and elisions of autobiography --  none of which seem to invalidate the whole. However, the defenders of the sect miss the point (as does Ms. Feldman).

The Satmar movement isn't reprehensible because it dishonors brains and women and especially women's brains. It's reprehensible because it is erected on a lie. "We learn in school that God sent Hitler to punish the Jews for enlightening themselves. He came to clean us up, eliminate all the assimilated Jews...."  What an absurd and odious doctrine! Are we expected to entertain the hypothesis that six million Jews died for eating lobster?  "The first and greatest Satmar rebbe said that if we became model Jews, just like in the olden days, then something like the Holocaust wouldn't happen again, because God would be pleased with us." So Hitler and the Nazis and the SS and the camps are a) the fault of the Jews themselves, and b) God can be placated if all Jewish women wear thick stockings and wigs and cover themselves from collarbone to wrist and knee.  It's a brainless argument, and one that, if you think about it for a few seconds, gives the victory to Hitler. Plus, it's an argument that creates a god who is even crueler and more idiotic than usual.  

Indoctrinated with this criminal bullshit, the survivors of the Shoah and their descendants voluntarily re-ghettoize themselves and, of their own foolish accord, imprison themselves into a new dark age of their own invention.

Here's what I learned from this book. Satmar is a check-your-brains-at-the-door cult that controls 130,000 adherents who manifest all the symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder. It's "bad things will happen to me if I step on a crack on the sidewalk" raised several painful orders of magnitude.  

Ms. Feldman may have escaped the cult but she's still in the dark. She's left Satmar behind because she couldn't read the books she wanted to read or wear the clothes she wanted to wear and she couldn't locate her own vagina. But it's not her vagina that readers should worry about;  it's her brain.  

A Suppressed Event

I've been reading about the early colonization of New York city, a subject that I've not approached since my days in elementary school in the 1950s, where, in retrospect, it seemed that we went over the ground quite regularly -- Henry Hudson, the purchase of Manhattan Island, New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, and the English acquisition of the Dutch colonies. As we learned it, it was a sunny story, untroubled and inevitable -- a path leading from pleasant but primitive beginnings to its inevitable culmination in the Greatest City in the Greatest Country on earth. There were large helpings of nationalism and triumphalism -- attitudes that I've come to loathe -- along with the insistence that America was chosen among all the nations for peace and tolerance. 

It appears, however, that there are events recounted in Russell Shorto's The Island at the Center of the World (New York, 2004) that, if they had been mentioned, might have diluted our tadpole triumphalism. Keift's War, for example, was never discussed.

Willem Kieft was one of the Dutch governors of the new colony, and he was a pioneer in genocidal racism. A small group of indians had camped at Corlaer's Hook (now the Lower East Side) and a larger group had settled near what is now Jersey City in New Jersey. The Indians (Wickquassgeck and Tappan) sought sanctuary from the Dutch against the Mohawks, to whom they had fallen behind in their tribute payments. Kieft, for reasons of his own, launched an unprovoked attack. According to a contemporary chronicler, "infants were torn from their mother's breasts, and hacked to pieces in the presence of their parents, and the pieces thrown into the fire and in the water, and other sucklings, being bound to small boards, were cut, stuck,and pierced and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone. Some were thrown into the river, and when the fathers and mothers endeavored to save them, the soldiers would not let them come on land but made both parents and children drown.... Some came to our people in the country with their hands, some with their legs cut off, and some holding their entrails in their arms....  After this exploit, the soldiers were were rewarded for their service, and Director Kieft thanked them."

Such atrocities (there were many others) were omitted from the P. S. 217 curriculum. 

When I read these stories, I feel as though I was tricked. I'm indignant and angry.

It's all part of a grand deception in which every child is indoctrinated with the idea that his own group is wiser, kinder, and better than the others.

If our great country were truly superior, we would have shown it by telling the truth, the whole truth, not a purged and sanitized half-truth.  

Book Report: "Some Hours" by Edward St. Aubyn

I've now read the first three of the quintet of the much-praised Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn, and that's all I'm going to read. It's been a long time since I've encountered anything so nasty.  Is there a word for a place in which every single individual is evil, snobbish, vindictive, petty, and cruel. Kakatopia, perhaps. In St. Aubyn's world, Iago would have been an innocent. True enough that he was jealous, obsessed, manipulative and murderous, but I doubt that even Iago would have anally penetrated his five-year-old son.

And moreover: if I were a handsome, rich young woman (or a plain poor one) and my date asked me to get down on all fours and eat some squashed figs off the patio floor without benefit of fork or knife, I would run away screaming, slam the door, and let a few years lapse before resuming social activity. So, I hope, would everywoman. In the world of St. Aubyn's fiction, reader, she marries him, and the couple live miserably ever after.

The dilemma that's posed by these novels is that in addition to being richly kakatopic, they're also amusing, clever, and arch, with dialogue that might have been written by a jaded Oscar Wilde. So I laughed -- but whenever I laughed I felt dirty and complicit.

So no more St. Aubyn for me. These novels transcend satire and transmute into ugly spewing. Not for me, thanks.

Book Report: Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding

I'm sure that I once before read a book called The Art of Fielding, perhaps in the 1960s, but it wasn't a baseball novel; it was a old-fashioned critical monograph about Henry Fielding, the author of Shamela, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Amelia, and Jonathan Wild. (For what it's worth, Chad Harbach, who contributed this year's The Art of Fielding, though a skillful plotter, doesn't have the range or the release or the depth to play in Henry F's league.)

I generally stay away from big-selling first novels. I prefer to let them marinate for a decade or two, check out their staying power, before I make an eight-hour commitment (not counting naps) to a 400-pager. It's an economy of my own: there are too many great old things that I haven't gotten around to yet. But I must say that Harbach's Fielding, highly recommended by friends, kept me engaged right down to the last sentence. Plot, plot, plot, is the formula, and there were enough surprises and twists in the story to keep even a skeptic like myself turning pages enthusiastically. It's a hybrid novel, a genre-crosser, with baseball books and academic novels (and a touch of Death in Venice) in its bloodline. 

What's best, beside the surprises in the plotting? The characters, most of whom defy or challenge stereotypes, what a blessing. What's worst? The style: not a memorable sentence or turn of phrase in the entire bland (ninth-grade vocabulary, straight-ahead syntax) book. Most disappointing: the killing off of an important character just when his situation becomes interesting and troubling. Harbach, in my opinion, punts just  when he should have pulled the goalie and swung for the fences.  

Libraries in My Life

I can't remember a time when I wasn't at home in a library. Although very much a schoolyard urchin, passionate about baseball, trading cards and punchball (or any kind of game played with a spaldeen), I rarely failed my weekly trip to the storefront Avenue J branch of the BPL, where there were cases upon half-height cases of juvenile and later "young adult" books. I read like a hungry larva, without direction or discrimination. A few years later, when I reached Erasmus Hall, my after-school employment was to shelve books at 75 cents an hour at the BPL branch at McDonald Avenue (accumulating the $900 which paid my full first-year tuition at Cornell). I not only mastered the Dewey Decimal System but also absorbed everything that the library had to offer in the 612.6 area of knowledge. At college, I was dazzled by McGraw, my first real library. In my senior year, I was granted a stack pass, and therefore was able to waste many hours not only in aimless browsing, but also lolling in long by-passed and superseded libraries-within-the-library. I doubt that those most pleasant out-of-the-way nineteenth-century nooks and corners survived modernization, more's the pity. Later, in Cambridge, it was first Widener (where genuine incunabula sat unprotected on the shelves), then Houghton, my first experience with rare books, which, I discovered, are to to be savored not only with the eyes, but with the fingertips and the nose. Thence to Colorado, where, without the resources of a major library, I dutifully read STC books on microfilm -- which made me queasy, or on microfiche -- which produced genuine nausea. In 1976-77, I spent one day a week at the British Library, studying sometimes in the old circular reading room, where on downpour days buckets were distributed around the room to deal with the leaks, and at other times in the North Library, where I read big hunks of the perpetually exciting Thomason Tracts. In the early 80s, I was able to enjoy the Huntington in San Marino, where the highlight of the day was lunchtime among the exotic cacti and succulents. Later, at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, I found not only an unequalled trove of books and mss., but also camaraderie with similarly-obsessed specialists. There was always someone who could answer the obscurest of questions, and there were even a few times when I was able to return the favor. At a cafeteria lunch, once, I asked (faux-naively) "what do we do with the orts?" and everyone at the table knew exactly what I meant -- orts the word that Shakespeare used in Troilus and Cressida to refer to the uneaten portions of a meal. 

Now I've come full circle and the Boulder Public is my three-times-a-week destination. Not great holdings, but through the miracle of an efficient interlibrary loan system, and supplemented by googlebooks and other electronic resources, I can find enough to satisfy my unsteady, dilettante brain.