Dr. Metablog

Basketball in My LIfe

My father, who was born in 1904, was a basketball enthusiast when the game was in its infancy. He played guard on Eastern District High School's team and later played as a freshman at CCNY under legendary coach Nat Holman. But Dad came from an impoverished family and left college after one year because, he told me once, "I couldn't see how I could stay in school when my family needed so much." So while his formal education went by the wayside, he was able to make up the difference by a lifetime of reading. And although he was not a complaining sort, it was clear to me and I think to my brothers that he felt a bit grieved that his formal athletic career had been cut so short. He kept at it, though, on his own. Well into his forties, he was absent from family dinner one night a week. "Wednesdays," my mother explained, long before I could understand what the words meant, "your father goes to the gym." And Saturday mornings, in warm weather, were reserved for tennis. Dad very much wanted his three sons to carry on his athletic tradition, but I think, in retrospect, that in the long run we all disappointed him. Both my brothers were fine athletes although not big or fast enough for professional careers; I was, alack and alas, a disappointment. Dad, who had also been a semi-pro catcher in baseball, taught Gene and Jon how to throw an "inshoot" and an "outshoot," but he could not bring himself to coach me because it was obvious that with my 55 mile an hour fastball and scattershot arm, I wasn't going anywhere, pitching-wise, and although he showed me a couple of basketball moves he was, I recognize, a bit embarrassed by my want of athletic skill. (In my defense I must report that although I was more academic than athletic, I was voted "class athlete" by my P. S. 217 (8-5) eighth grade class -- a group which must have been, now that I think of it, quite a collection of klutzes). My older brother was a good enough basketball player to play for his college team for a year, and my younger brother was an outstanding sandlot all-star in baseball who once struck out Joe Torre, who, it will be remembered, finished his major league career with a .300 lifetime average. (The second time he pitched to Torre, my brother says, the future MVP hit a ball that "is still circling the earth.") I myself had the briefest career on the diamond. The pinnacle of my experience was that, once, playing second base, I turned a double play -- took the toss from the shortstop, stepped on the bag, gracefully wheeled, and pegged the ball perfectly to the first baseman. It happened once and once only, but it was glorious -- definitely a Hall of Fame moment. The peak of my basketball career occurred in the slippery court (which doubled as a dance floor) in the basement of the Flatbush Jewish Center on Coney Island Avenue and Avenue J. I was, I estimate, thirteen years old. Wearing number 3, in black and gold, I was steaming down the left side of the court on a fast break and was forced away from the basket, so instead of a layup I managed a sweeping running left-handed hook which caught nothing but net. There was modest applause. None of my teammates guessed that I had intended to bank the ball off the backboard and that it had slipped out of my hand and swished, entirely by accident. I only reveal this deep secret now, very now.  Another high point in my career: I once won a local foul shooting contest. I hit 23 of 25. One small caveat, though. The contest was conducted in the P.S. 217 schoolyard, where the baskets were, how shall I say this correctly, unsteady and soft. As a result, they were like sewers -- everything flushed. I doubt that I would have made 23 on a standard rigid rim. Nevertheless, I did win the medal and the other competitors all used the same ball and basket as I -- so, therefore, a modest triumph. And then playing basketball faded into the background, because I didn't get my growth until very late and for a while I was playing at 4' 11" or 5' 1" against hairy guys who had already reached their full mature height. But I continued to pursue my undistinguished career -- including the most competitive activity of my life -- three on three half court in the EHHS gym, one basket wins, and "winners out." And then a little intramural in Ithaca; an occasional pickup game in Cambridge. Oh, and twenty years later on, I played a bit with my own offspring, all three of whom were more athletic than I. My last pathetic hurrah (almost a decade ago, now) was being obliterated at h-o-r-s-e by my granddaughter Ella. 

Nevertheless, I retained my interest in the sport. No longer a participant, I became a serious spectator. I know enough about roundball to appreciate both player and play. For thirty years or so, I had a good seat at the home games of the CU Buffaloes -- it was high quality college basketball (although the Buffs rarely enjoyed a winning season). One source of interest and fun for me was to evaluate the talent and try to predict which of our guys (or the visitors') had the skill and size to move up to the next level. Over the years, I followed the early days of many a later NBA regular -- and even a couple of stars. I remember in particular Jay Humphries, who played four excellent seasons for CU and then averaged in double figures during an extended NBA career. Also local lad Chauncey Billups, "Mr Big Shot" himself. Andre Roberson, a terrific defender and rebounder who never lived up to his potential because he just couldn't master the corner three; Matt Bullard, a fine outside shooter; Scott Wedman; Alec Burks; Derrick White (still playing for Boston and getting better each year); and Spencer Dinwiddie, whom I didn't judge to be an NBA player but who has become a steady professional. The high point of my CU spectatorial career occurred in 2006 when the Texas Longhorns brought to our stadium a gangly teen-ager named Kevin Durant. One didn't have to be a sophisticated evaluator of talent to recognize that KD had a spectacular career ahead of him; it was grandly obvious. It took him only two years to lead the NBA in scoring. I stopped attending CU games when the athletic department, an independent entity with only a loose connection to the University, demanded that I make a donation of $400 for the privilege of purchasing season tickets. I resented the presumption, and I felt that there were many causes more worthy of my limited philanthropy than CU basketball. Although I stay away from our local Events Center, I'm still an occasional arena visitor. In fact, just last season, LERM and I bought incredibly expensive tickets to watch the Cavaliers take on the Pelicans at the Smoothie King Arena in New Orleans. The venue was up-to-date but way too brightly lit, and crowded, and noisy. Moreover, I dislike the theory that attendees must be continually entertained and placated with garish novelties. I don't go to basketball games for the half-time acrobats or the animal acts or the costumed dancers or the "kiss-cam" or the ear-popping "music" nor to be commanded when to cheer or when to chant "DE-FENSE." I go to watch and admire the players. Despite the distractions it was a good game, even though Zion Williamson was out with an ankle injury. These pros, even the unheralded ones, are fabulous athletes and they are especially impressive in person. 

So for most of my life it's been the electronic medium that has kept me abreast of the game. It all started with radio; I suspect that very few readers of this entry will be able to recall the fast-paced narration of Marty Glickman on WHN, but he was, let me tell you, a hoops artist who could bring the Knicks alive with voice alone. Then came television, sometime around the early 1950s. The thirteen inch black-and-white Dumont that my father acquired displayed an image that seemed miraculous at the time but paleolithically primitive compared to the 60" HDTV that entrances me nowadays. It's all present -- right there before my astonished eyes. Incredible no-look passes and sensational blocks and three-pointers from downtown -- and also horrid tattoos -- in brilliant color. In my TV-basketball saturated brain is stored the entire history of the NBA from then until now. In the 50s, Max Zaslofsky, Harry Gallatin, Sweetwater Clifton, Carl Braun, the McGuire brothers Dick and Al, and Ernie Vandeweghe, who played only home games because he was a full-time medical student. A team that was good but always managed to lose to the Celtics -- who had Cousy and Sharman and later Bill Russell, the Jones boys (Sam and KC), Havlicek and Heinsohn. I was in those years a most loyal and enthusiastic fan of our own New York Knickerbockers -- the championship teams composed of Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschere, Bill Bradley, Earl Monroe, and Walt Frazier, names and faces as present in my memory as the more celebrated Dodger boys of summer. Then came the Magic-Bird era, LA "showtime," Michael Jordan, Duncan-Ginobili-Parker-Popovich, and now LeBron James, who, although, he is certainly the most effective player in history, is less exciting to watch than his innovative contemporary, Steph Curry. During this last while, I've become a devoted GSW fan; when they were at their best, a few years ago, they played an extraordinarily beautiful game. There were nights when they'd score 30 baskets on 25 lovely assists. It's been a great ride that's now coming to an end, but there's another generation of players on the horizon and perhaps I'll be around long enough to enjoy them. After all, I've been there for the entire history of the NBA. What developments I have seen! What was once a local, coterie sport has gone international, with many of the best players coming from overseas or south of the border. Where once all the players, save a few, were White and middle-class, now 75% to 80% are Black and inner-city, bringing with them a heck of a lot of skill and flash and dazzle. Lumbering awkward centers, with their slow roundhouse hook shots, have been superseded by astonishingly mobile 7-footers who can protect the rim but also drift outside to nail a three. Salaries, in the old days, were little more than nominal and now there are marginal players making millions off the bench. The athletes have become celebrities -- and their shoes have become almost as famous as they are, and more lucrative. Franchises, which once went for a song, are now worth billions.

When I'm watching a game on a Sunday afternoon, I think about my father. I wish he could sit with me and discuss the progress of the sport. I'd like to show him what has happened since he left us in 1985. He'd like it that the players are bigger, faster, stronger, in better shape, and that the shooting is more accurate and the defenses more subtle and sophisticated. He'd love the pick-and-roll and the pick-and-pop. He'd appreciate the alley-oops and the accurate full court passes. I also know what he wouldn't like -- the overhasty three, the lenient interpretation of walking and palming, and the occasional showboating, Most of all, he'd hate it that the NBA is now in cahoots with the gambling establishment. He would see it, as I do, as a major miscalculation -- as a scandal waiting to happen. 

Every once in a while, even at this advanced age, I dream that I'm in the midst of a game, and I rise up and with an effortless flick of the right wrist launch a perfect 40-foot three that hardly even grazes the net. A childish fantasy, perhaps, but still very  satisfying.  

Anemoia

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!

Our Visit to Beardstown, Illinois

We visited Beardstown, in southwestern Illinois, because it was the birthplace, in 1845, of one of Lynn's maternal great-grandmothers, Mary St. John DeHaven. Even though it's Lincoln country, we had no idea what to expect, the AAA entry being so scant, but we soon discovered that Beardstown is a place that had its moment of glory sometime in the nineteenth century, but which has allowed history to pass it by. While it's not entirely derelict, it's not even slightly prosperous -- nor has it achieved quaintness. The industry of note nowadays is the JBS meat-packing plant out on the Arenzville Road; most of its employees come from south of the border, which is why the only indication that Beardstown might someday be rejuvenated is the dozen or so new downtown taquerias and iglesias.

Our first stop in Beardstown was a decaying, rather pathetic 200-foot long peeling boardwalk along the sandy Illinois River, a waterway which in the years before the Civil War had been a thriving commercial thoroughfare. There we watched a solitary tug struggle to free a barge that had somehow run itself aground. Perhaps the boardwalk had once welcomed visitors and tourists, but during our stay the only spectator beside ourselves was a very frayed out-of-work fellow who arrived on a beaten-up bicycle, and who seemed entirely out of his depth when we asked if there was a place in Beardstown to purchase a cup of coffee. To me, he seemed addled; I suspected meth or opioids.

After gazing at the sluggish river for half an hour (remembering Abraham Lincoln's enthusiasm for river transport), we toured the few blocks of the old downtown, in which fewer storefronts were occupied than were vacant. We looked in at an antique store -- actually less "antique" than "junque" (unless a flashy bejewelled Elvis Presley doll was a revered artifact of a prior civilization). Lynn purchased an owl-decorated piece of blue porcelain for $5.00. We inquired of the proprietor, Mrs. White, if there were a coffee shop in Beardstown. Patricia White, we soon learned, was a recently retired public school music teacher and a lively lady knowledgeable about all things Beardstownian. I asked her about the intriguing storefront adjacent to hers, which proclaimed itself to be a Grand Opera House. I was skeptical that any sort of grandeur could be found in such dreary town, but I was wrong. Mrs. White generously offered us a tour of the old theater. She warned us that it was in deep disrepair but she said that she and others, led by the local chiropractor, were working diligently towards its restoration. So up a flight of dark stairs we went, and there, lo and behold, was revealed to us the picturesque ruins of what had once been a remarkable structure. Here's a photograph of the remains of its ornate frescoed ceiling and 20-foot-high windows:

The theatre had a well-proportioned stage and had once (before the balcony was pulled down) been able to seat several hundred people. In the littered backstage were the remnants of nineteenth-century traveling shows, including a large painted backdrop of Venetian gondolas, left behind by a company from St. Louis. But the building, though its bones were good, was a wreck: leaks in the roof had caused the ceiling to deteriorate. The auditorium itself had served as a storage area for the overflow merchandise of decades of store owners. It would take a dozen roll-offs and weeks of work just to remove the trash and find the floor. Nevertheless, the Grand Opera House offered us an insight into what Beardstown had been when it was a thriving community. I was so impressed by the theater that I decided to donate my bit to its reconstruction. I had determined on $100 until I noticed that Mrs. White had donned a red white and blue Trump 2020 face mask. And so arose a moral dilemma: I want to support the arts, and I would love to help return the Grand Opera House to its former glory. Opera and music should be beyond politics -- but yet I was deeply repelled by Mrs. White's Trumpism. So I split the difference and donated $60 to the cause. A sensible compromise to a vexing problem?? I don't know. But it's what I did. I wanted to ask Mrs. White what Donald Trump's ignorance, bigotry, authoritarian predilections and corrupt, vacant life had to offer to a cheerful retired teacher in a decaying midwestern town, but I saw no reason to provoke a controversy.  

Afterward, we found some lunch up the street at Sally's Bistro. The bistro did not live up to "bistro" expectations, and could more honestly be called Sally's Diner, but it did make a good BLT and almost-decent coffee. We did not try the "alligator bits" for which it is famous, even though Sally assured us that the bits were much better than the usual alligator tail. (Beardstown has an alligator farm but we didn't tour it.)

Mrs. White had also told us about the "old cemetery" so on a lark we went off to investigate. We wandered about, not expecting much, until we stumbled upon a gravestone which revealed that the late Henry Foster married the late Mary McKeever DeHaven. Lynn doesn't know precisely who these people are, but there are so many of her family names on the marker -- that of her grandfather, George Foster Massey, her uncle, McKeever Massey, her second cousin, Katherine DeHaven Milligan -- that they must  be long-departed members of her extended ancestry. Certainly cousins of some degree.

We googled Henry T. (for True) Foster and found that he was a pillar of the frontier community of Beardstown. He had immigrated from Maine; Mary from Philadelphia. We were gratified by this unexpected find. 

On the return trip from Beardstown to Jacksonville, we stopped at Griggsville, which, we were astonished to discover, is the "purple martin capitol of the nation" and the location of the world's largest purple martin skyscraper. Skeptical?  Here's the proof:

So altogether a most rewarding day.

Douglas Bush's Milton Course

In the mid 1980s, thirty-five years ago, I was in residence for a week at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., researching an article on one of the lesser English Renaissance dramatists -- a pleasure as well as a condition of employment. The article turned out to be not a bad piece of academic prose, if I do say so myself, but not something for the ages either. It was a mere twenty years since I had completed my degree in "English and American Language and Literature" at a Large Eastern University, specifically Harvard. I was not drawn to the Folger for professional reasons only. It was a delight and a great privilege to hold in my very own hands and to read dozens and scores of four-hundred-year-old ephemeral books that -- more than the canonical literature -- helped me to understand the age of Shakespeare. Sermons by the wagonload, biblical commentaries, almanacs, political pamphlets, poems by minor and unknown versifiers, broadsides, medical textbooks, collections of jokes, how-to-write-a-letter-in-Latin trots, schoolbooks. The library possessed inexhaustible troves of such material. The Folger's plenty licensed my dilettante brain to follow its own naturally wayward inclinations.

While doing my duty and also having some fun, I fell in with a fellow Folgerite named Boyd Berry who was visiting from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Over cups of coffee, Boyd and I discussed some of the less well-known writers of the period in whom we shared a mutual interest. I remember that we also talked about the teacher's perennial frustration at engaging the interest of our sometimes less-than-enthusiastic students. I do not remember what prompted me to ask Boyd this question: "what was the worst course that you ever took either as an undergraduate or graduate student." He replied, without hesitation, "Douglas Bush's lecture course on Milton at Harvard in 1961." I was flabbergasted, in part because I hadn't guessed that Boyd had been at Harvard during my years there, but more because I had enrolled in exactly the same course -- same time same station same year -- and because Douglas Bush's Milton course was also my own nominee for the worst course ever. Parallel lines had accidentally and miraculously met, so to speak. Although Boyd and I were the same age, he was one year behind me and had taken the course as a senior undergraduate while I had been a first-year graduate student. It seemed an astonishing coincidence, but then, the universe of students of English Renaissance literature is a small one. Nevertheless, the fact that we shared the same opinion about Professor Bush's course was comforting and, as they say, "validating." Boyd said out loud words that I had only speculated upon in petto. Perhaps I wasn't the only outlier.

Why were we in such accord? The obvious answer is that Professor Bush, then in the tail end of his much-celebrated career (he had uttered his infant cries during Grover Cleveland's second presidency), was tired and bored by his teaching and put little heart into the work. In brief, he droned, unconscionably. Not only did he drone, but it seemed as though there was an invisible shield between his podium and our seats. He didn't speak to us -- he addressed the empyrean. His lectures consisted of a superficial running commentary on Milton's poems. "There's a particularly lovely passage starting on line 695," -- as if a challenging idea would be beyond our collective capacity. If a student broke into the drone to hazard a question, Professor Bush's characteristic answer was, "Well, that seems self-explanatory." But Bush's classroom style was not the only reason for my unhappiness; I had more substantive concerns. 

Let me interject a few words about Professor John Nash Douglas Bush. Although almost forgotten today, Bush was by all odds the most formidable and learned literary scholar of his generation. He knew everything there was to know about English, Romance, and classical literature and had written a dozen comprehensive critical and historical books. If the gossip can be trusted, he greeted the dawn of each new day by reading two hundred lines of Latin poetry and a hundred of Greek. I am sure that he knew more about John Milton than Milton knew about himself. He had edited the volume of Milton's complete poetry (English, Latin, Greek, and Italian) and, astonishingly, had memorized the entire twelve books of Paradise Lost. He was an exacting scholar and a stylish and witty writer. Moreover, he was a kindly, gentle man, cordial and generous to his students -- even to me. If he had flaws of character, I didn't know of them. To my mind, he was an unimpeachably excellent person and scholar -- and at the same time a teacher from whom I learned just about nothing.  

I was once invited -- along with a clutch of my ambitious graduate-school classmates -- to some sort of reception at Professor Bush's Cambridge residence. His home was exactly as it should have been -- that is to say, if one were making a movie about a distinguished Harvard professor, one's location scout would not rest until he discovered the Bush quarters. It was a spacious and civilized home presided over by gracious Mrs. Bush, who was also exactly as she should have been. I remember that the giant main room in the house -- which must once have been two or more large rooms that had been sutured together, was Professor Bush's enormous study. It was more like an institutional library than something to be found in a private home. Just as one would expect, the study was lined floor to ceiling with handsome wooden bookcases chock full of an enviable display of publications in many languages, some of which I could identify. I remember being served sherry, I think, and also something preternaturally green and fishy on an unfamiliar but I'm sure very elite kind of cracker. This dream of an academic utopia filled me with envy. It also scared the living blazes out of me. Why? Because for all Professor Bush's elegance and his library, and his lovely deferential wife, his movie-set home struck me as soft, fey, self-satisfied, and bloodless. I was dazzled and intimidated by its splendors but at the same time wary and resistant. Only five years beyond crowded Erasmus Hall High School in darkest Brooklyn, I knew myself well enough to know that, however seductive, his style of life was not for me. I would have to find a more appropriate path. 

Now I want to step further back and report on two cases in which I was in conflict with Professor Douglas Bush. Actually, the conflicts were only on my side; Professor Bush, Olympian and serene, did not notice -- nor should he have, frankly. These incidents continue to haunt me to this day, sixty years after the fact. Both occurred not in the Milton course, but in an "advanced" seminar called "Science and Humanism in the Seventeenth Century." I must explain that the word "humanism" did not carry the meaning that it does today, as in the phrase "secular humanism" -- an approach to the natural world that is allied with agnosticism and which sometimes resolves into pure atheism. Professor Bush's humanism was the altogether different "Christian humanism." It was, in brief, the noble but ultimately unsuccessful Renaissance attempt to fuse the "inspired" and "revealed" truths of Christianity with the thoughtful, upstanding but unfortunately natural  morality of the Greeks and Romans. If "Christian Humanism" could be distilled to a sentence, it would be Desiderius Erasmus' daring speculation -- that he would like someday to be able to say, "Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis", or "Saint Socrates, pray for us."

I was a humanist of the secular variety -- by birth, inclination, education and because in my brain there was no place, not even a lone neuron, where "faith" or "prayer' or "worship" might in more standard heads be lodged. Bush, on the other hand, was not just a scholar of Christian Humanism, he was an honest-to-god trapped-in-amber Christian Humanist -- and a devout one, deeply rooted and entirely comfortable in late medieval/early renaissance thinking. In his seminar on Science and Humanism, humanism was right and just, and science, its antagonist, was, if not altogether bad, at minimum a very dangerous alternative. Did not both Bacon and Descartes assert that "nature" -- the real world -- could be studied directly, on its own terms, rather than as an entity infused with god's being and majesty. That we mortals might study nature not to reaffirm the goodness and omnipotence of god, but to accumulate objective knowledge and to reap practical material benefits. It's a fact that the separation of nature from the "truth" of religion has over the centuries unquestionably led to the marginalizing of Christian thinking and therefore, according to Bush's view of the world, to the steep decline of civilization. The world, no longer driven by revelation, has been going to hell in a hand basket, as Professor Bush said or implied every Tuesday at 4:00 pm.

Regular readers of this blague as well as Dr. Metablog's family and friends will recognize that Youthful Me did not accept Bush's premises. In fact, in those days, I was probably even less open to religious ideas than I am now. And therefore, each Tuesday was a day of discomfort.

And then, one afternoon, Professor Bush began the allotted two hours by launching a surprise assault on the then-new and controversial Third Edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The Third had shocked traditionalists. Until 1962, dictionaries had been "prescriptive "-- that is, they explained how language "should" be used and they stigmatized as colloq. or subst. [substandard] those words or expressions that fell below the bar. The Third forsook tradition and was not prescriptive but descriptive. It aimed to record the language as it was really used. The Third therefore included many words hitherto banned as slang or vulgar and it was loose and permissive with regard to "shall" and "will", and "imply" and "infer," etc. For Professor Bush, the Third was a plunge into darkness -- another example of the collapse of Western Civilization as we know it, or should know it. So he excoriated the new dictionary and its editors and its supporters. The tirade having been completed, he turned mildly to the class and asked if anyone present had a different opinion. Now I had learned a little about modern linguistics at Cornell, and I was a descriptivist both by education and democratic instinct, and I knew that Bush was completely out of step with contemporary thought. I was astonished to discover that I knew more about this particular field of knowledge than he. But, alas, I was totally intimidated and did not open my mouth. What abject cowardice on my part! Nary a word did I say, and so the class segued to a discussion of the Cambridge Platonists and their vain attempt to tame and assimilate Descartes and Spinoza. I still wonder if any of the other 2G's around the table were aware of my shame. Probably not -- did my peers, the late Arthur Oberg, the late Jake Mills, the late Brian Hepworth, the late Terry Logan, the late Bill Godshalk, and others whose names I have forgotten, notice my moral collapse? I suppose that it's too late to worry. Nevertheless, my failure to raise my hand and voice still humiliates me, still rankles. 

Another Tuesday, another surrender. In 1961, William Empson published his innovative study, Milton's God. While Empson was not as learned as Professor Bush (no one was) he was a much more imaginative and challenging reader. Some say that after Johnson and Hazlitt, Sir William has been English literature's most insightful critic. Empson was an intellectual and social dissenter (he had been banished from Magdalen College, Cambridge when a condom [horrors!] was discovered among his possessions). He had written two highly influential critical books that every serious mid-century student of literature studied -- the first on ambiguity, the second on pastoral. Empson read Paradise Lost through a very different lens than Bush. He was not a Christian; in fact, he confessed himself anti-Christian because he judged there to be a serious moral flaw at the heart of the religion -- that the sacrifice of Jesus was a highly elaborated form a scapegoating. About Paradise Lost, he concluded that God (that is, the character God in the epic) was confused and contradictory, repeatedly tying himself into logical and rhetorical knots in order to justify the unjustifiable. He also argued that irrespective of Milton's intention, the character God became more complex and interesting when he became less ideological and more dramatic; more, so to speak, human. He revered Paradise Lost, but for his own, not Bush's, reasons. Milton's God was trashed by Professor Bush, who dismissed Empson as a simple "village atheist." I was stunned. True enough that Empson was an atheist, but true also that he was a powerful thinker, not someone to be given the back of the hand with a flippant ad hominem. Bush's review came out in The New York Times on a Sunday; the following Tuesday, our teacher was lauded by my fellow seminarians. He basked in their admiration. Did my young colleagues genuinely agree with Bush, or were they egregious sycophantic toadies? I don't know and will never know. And then, after the celebration, Bush asked, as if he were open-minded, "Does anyone here have a different opinion?" If Empson had been summarily dispatched, what chance had I? So once again, I fled the field, remained mute -- and slunk deeper into my thick leather chair. 

So there they were, my two abject failures of nerve.

 

Have I flagellated myself sufficiently? 

 

But now I also remember a third Science and Humanism event -- the Tuesday that Professor Bush fell asleep.

 

The class routine was for members of the seminar to offer a ten-minute presentation on the topic of the day, after which Professor Bush would initiate discussion with the unfocussed inquiry, "Any questions, or comments? " At which point I would regularly yearn for my Cloak of Invisibility. One fatal day, the student in question was John Knott, a fine and intelligent youth but not a ball of fire, oratorically speaking. When he brought his effort to a close, there at the head of the table sat Professor Bush, eyes closed, breathing rhythmically, his large round head bobbling on his small round body, lost in blissful slumber. A few seconds went by, then some more seconds, a minute, a minute and a half. Thanks be to all the gods in the pantheon that he did not snore! And yet there we all were, arrayed around that splendid dark mahogany table, frozen. No one moved or even twitched, no one spoke, no one made eye contact with a fellow sufferer. No one breathed. It was unbearable. At last, after another twenty or so ticks of the clock, I had endured all I could endure, and I raised my Complete Poetry of John Milton into the air and was just about to let it slam, when Professor Bush opened his eyes, and without the slightest acknowledgement that something unusual had occurred, intoned the familiar words: "Any questions, or comments?" 

 

I do not recall this event in order to nip at Professor Bush's revered heels. Every teacher is entitled, occasionally in a long career, to lose focus while a beginning graduate student discourses on a volume such as Henry More's Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (an important-in-its-own-day [1660] monograph eloquent in support of rational providentialism and of the preexistence of the soul). For all I know, Professor Bush may have been exhausted because he had been up past the midnight hour Monday night, possibly contributing more to scholarship in an evening than I did in an entire career. In hindsight, it was not the sleep itself that distressed me -- it was the passivity and silence of my fellows -- and the fact that when I remained silent I  honored the charade, the falsehood, that Bush was not asleep. Faced with an emperor's-new-clothes opportunity, I punted. 

 

Just as I had failed to defend modern linguistics, had failed to defend the "village atheist," so I failed to bang my book on the board -- an act which would have been forthright and honest and true to myself. The first two events were disgraces of an intellectual kind; the third was one of manners and, I think, of social class. The alliance of Bush and Harvard had overwhelmed me, taken from me my natural freedom of action. Let me confess that it was a secret guilty pleasure to have been accepted into Harvard's kind embrace. I feared banishment. Would I have still been welcome, would I have been worthy, would I have been a gentleman if I had noisily ended the nightmare. I felt, and I feel to this day, that all of us around the table were in an implicit, unacknowledged conspiracy not to notice the obvious so that we could protect the reverend professor and therefore defend the institutions that he exemplified. We contrived not to notice Bush's well-earned snooze because to do so would have punctured the balloon. It would been bad manners, barbaric manners, and to exhibit bad manners in a wood-paneled seminar room would mean that we were not genteel, not civilized, unworthy of Harvard and of the privileges it bestowed on us. 

 

On the other hand, I myself had only twenty-two years on my scrawny back, and was just five years out of rambunctious Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush, where if a teacher were to fall asleep in class, he would within seconds have been met with derisive catcalls and a squadron of paper airplanes. And I admit that, although I conformed myself superficially to the ways of my "betters," I had enough of a residual catcall-and-paper-airplane soul that I have regretted my inaction now these sixty years. 

 

Family, friends and stray internet pilgrims: perhaps you think that I'm making too much of these trivial long-ago-and-far-away events. Far too fraught, too melodramatic. Are you not, readers, skeptical of the idea that he (that is, me) honestly believes that the essence of his being was threatened by a seminar in seventeenth-century English humanism? Possibly you also think that I exaggerate the gap between Harvardity and Brooklynity. So let us return to early 1960s and re-examine the historical context of these events.

 

I have reported on Douglas Bush's theological convictions; let us now turn to his retrograde views on education.

 

Bush was, without question, an unapologetic elitist. I don't mean "elitist" as the word is now popularly used -- as an all-purpose insult to those who are presumed to think that they are better than we because they are rich or have studied to a prestigious college. I mean elitist as in "snob." Bush was an elitist because he felt that education was only for the elect. Once you admit ordinary, common folk, by golly, the end is near. He was blunt: "education for all, however fine in theory, in practice ultimately leads to education for none." He deplored the ungenteel idea that "students [would] come to college out of a desire for economic or social advantage." Let them stay in the places to which they were born!  In a still shocking moment of undiluted social and racial snobbery, he pronounced that "the rising flood of students is very much like the barbarian invasions of the early Middle Ages." "Barbarian invasions"? His metaphor is "self-explanatory," is it not?  Bush presented himself as a guardian at the gate, protecting Christian Europe from the wild-eyed, uncivilized incursions of Lombards and Visigoths. And how was I to understand the analogy?  Did it not apply to me? Was I a civilized European or was I a violent Vandal? In theory, once I was admitted to Harvard's sacred precincts, I became an insider. But in reality, in my heart, I could identify only with the migratory hordes. Although I was camouflaged by my thrift-store jacket and tie, and I did not bring my seax to class, did not subsist on mare's milk, and felt no urge to sack Harvard, I knew myself to be, in essence, an interloper -- an Avar, or brutal Bulgar, or horrible Hun. Or, in my particular case, a member of the tribe of anxious Ashkenazim. 

 

So now let us circle back to the beginning. Why was "Douglas Bush's Milton course" the worst class ever?  For me, it was not just because Bush regularly lulled his classes to sleep. It was also because in his illiberal hands, John Milton, my John Milton, was diluted and distorted. I was, ante Bush, an admirer of Milton's courage and I was infatuated with his poetry. Milton is the only poet in the language, I believe, who was the equal of Shakespeare. Lycidas (written in 1636, the year of Harvard's founding) is in my opinion the world's single best poem. In tribute, I had memorized its 193 glorious lines. Moreover, Milton was a truly admirable human being. He was the furthest left, the most radical figure in the whole of English literature and perhaps in western literature. Did he not defend the execution of Charles I and the death of monarchy?  Did he not argue that marriage should be based not on dynastic alliances, but on love and sexual compatibility. Did he not authorize every individual to interpret the Bible in his own way, without the interference of a church or its priests and ministers -- the "priesthood of all believers?"  And was it not true that he composed the Areopagitica, a seminal, essential contribution to freedom of thought?  But for Bush, I regret to say, Milton's impassioned advocacy of human dignity distracted from his poetry. He daydreamed in class about the poems Milton might have written if he hadn't allowed himself to be waylaid and distracted by politics. My Milton, on the other hand, was as much a public man as a poet. He had willingly given twenty years of his life and his precious eyesight to work for the radical transformation of society and for human freedom. Bush's judgment was in my opinion a major error, a disabling error, and it meant that the professor, however knowledgeable, was so blinkered by his conservative ideology that he missed the defining points of Milton's life. Just as I could not fully embrace Bush's Milton, he could not or would not ever fully grasp the greatness, the importance of my Milton. It therefore irked me to sit and listen every day, while Milton's contribution to world history was neglected, discounted, or dismissed. It hurt. 

My Life on "The Hill," 1969-2009

We settled on University Hill by lucky accident. Shortly after accepting a teaching position, I received a letter from my then-chairman Harold Kelling, urging me to write immediately to Professor J. D. A. Ogilvy, who had a house to rent near the University. I jumped to follow instructions and in August, 1969, the four of us (ages 30, 29, 4 and 2) took up residence in a small and lovely jewel of a Craftsman bungalow at 9th and College. It was not only a splendid home in which to start life in Boulder but it was also conveniently located: walking distance to Norlin Library, to the bus to Denver and to the Boulder Public Library, as well as just a block and a half from Highland Elementary School. We lived in that fine house contentedly until January of 1973, when (we were now 5, Eve having joined us in June of 1970) it became clear that we needed room to grow. The boys, Nathaniel and Ben, were adamant that we must remain in the Flatirons school district (Highland had been closed and abandoned -- a significant loss to the community). The children had good instincts; Flatirons Elementary was a wonderful school. It was led by Robert Rea, the finest principal I've ever known. During the winter of '73, we migrated from 9th all the way to a 10th street house that had, as they say, "good bones" but which had been "modernized" -- actually brutalized -- by a succession of owners who had trashed almost all of its Arts and Crafts splendors in favor of oversized mirrors, bright green shag rugs, beaded curtains, flocked wallpaper, and plate glass (replacing stained glass) windows. But heck, it was spacious for a family of five even though fabulously expensive ($46,500). We felt fortunate. There was a bonus: when Althea returned to work after a seven-year interval of pregnancy, birthing, and nursing, she was able to walk back and forth to Boulder High School, where she taught mathematics for many years. With the purchase of the house, our commitment to the Hill strengthened.

10th street was our home for 35 years. Over the course of the decades, we restored our abused home to the extent that our resources permitted. We added insulation (its first) and a modern kitchen, refinished the oak floors and stripped the paint from the warm fir woodwork, replaced the wallpaper and allowed the ornate brass registers to glow once again -- and moreover, transformed a backyard wasteland into a pleasing peony-iris-daylily garden. I'm proud to say that we left the house in much better shape than we found it. Meanwhile the neighborhood, sad to say, did not improve along with us but spiraled downward. In 1973, when we arrived, three quarters of the 24 houses on our street were owner-occupied; when we departed in 2009, only four or five houses remained in family hands and the rest had devolved into rentals -- occupied and often over-occupied by CU students. Our block was representative of developments that took place on the Hill during our years of residence. While the Hill had once been an essentially peaceful place, with only a rare disturbance, by the turn of the century, it had deteriorated into a combat zone where we and our adult neighbors engaged in constant struggle with graffiti, overflowing trash bins, weedy untended lawns, noisy late night and early morning sleep-obliterating parties, neglected barking dogs, gratuitous intermittent fireworks (explosions, actually!), thefts, vandalism, as well as fraught face-to-face encounters with rude entitled young malefactors.

What had happened between 1969 and 2009? What caused the decline from a thriving pacific neighborhood to a disorderly student ghetto? There were a host of factors, a few of which I can enumerate. Probably most important is that the University added at least 10,000 students during those years and did not provide housing for a single soul. The Hill, just across Broadway, was easy pickings for enterprising landlords, many of them decent but some unscrupulous, who bought advantageously, and (inasmuch as rental licensing codes were largely ignored and unenforced), maximized their income by dividing dignified, solid old Victorian or Arts and Crafts homes into rabbit-warrens. Many of the new occupants were first-time-from-home students who came from far away, spent a semester or two boozed up and hung over, failed out, and left behind their tuition money, their damage, and their trash. What might have been profitable for CU was disastrous for the neighborhood. Along with the increase in the absolute number of students came a resurgence of fraternities. During the late 60s and early 70s, when many students opposed the Vietnam war and conceived themselves to be anti-establishment, fraternities were among the institutions that were disfavored. Membership in the frat clubs declined significantly, but then recovered with the coming of the more conservative, less troubled Reagan era. I need not dwell on the fact that the burgeoning fraternities, flaunting an ethic that was anti-intellectual and pro-alcohol, were a major cause of increased neighborhood disruption. Along with these factors, came the replacement of marijuana, the drug of choice during the antiwar era, with beer. Marijuana, at least in the mild varieties of the 70s, is a contemplative drug while beer is a noisy one.The turn to alcohol had the effect of increasing the number of bars at 13th and College; while there had only been a couple of drinking establishments when I arrived (Boulder had been "dry" until 1967), by the time I left, there were more than twenty such, and the area had become a drinking "destination" that attracted outsiders to the street and inevitably also to Hill fraternity and house parties. And then sometime during the 70s or perhaps early 80s, the University moved many classes from a Monday-Wednesday-Friday to a Monday-Wednesday schedule, which meant that the weekend, and weekend drinking, now began on Thursday night and continued until Monday morning. It was sometime during this period that a couple of national magazines proclaimed CU as the nation's Number One Party School, which I must assume negatively impacted its pool of applicants. In addition, the welcome liberation of women from oppressive social restrictions had an unintended consequence: it led to much more alcohol consumption by female students. What had once been a rarity -- a drunken woman -- became, I'm sorry to say, commonplace. (I had become accustomed to male revelers untrussing and pissing on my roses, but I was genuinely flabbergasted to see young women pull down their panties to squat on my front lawn). Still another factor was the advent of the cell phone, which made it easy for small nomadic bands of young people to find each other and rapidly coalesce into sprawling alcoholic hullabaloos. Both the city government and the university, two institutions that should have noticed these developments, remained supine and indifferent.

Then came the riots. In 1971 there had been a protest, which turned violent, against Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia. But the scary riots of the 80s lacked a political or social agenda -- as far I or anyone else could tell, they were meaningless expressions of anomie, anarchy, and vandalism. Asked for justification, students claimed that "there's nothing to do in Boulder but drink" -- an unpersuasive argument about one of the most prosperous small cities in the nation, one in which gymnasiums, theaters, libraries, hiking and climbing trails, swimming pools, and other recreational opportunities abound. The Hill experienced four riots in three years -- associated, if I remember correctly, with Hallowe'en or homecoming. Sloppy, reeling revelers crammed the streets, overturned vehicles, and hauled couches off porches to set dangerous street-corner fires. I remember one instance in which rioters on the prowl for fuel appropriated a substantial section of the wooden fence at the alley side of my lot. At last, the city took notice. A commission was empaneled to study and make recommendations. I attended a few of these meetings and was impressed by the seriousness with which the panel took its responsibilities. Members from the Hill neighborhood were Terry Rodrigue and Annie Fox. A report was issue and recommendations were made, but to no perceptible effect, and the deterioration continued. 

The riots led to the re-founding of the University Hill Neighborhood Association by the late Jane Stoyva, Rosemary Crowley, Steven Walsh, Lisa Spaulding, and  Eleanor DePuy, among many others. With my children now departed for college, I was able to become a contributing participant. Simply put, the Association was divided into two camps, which I thought of as the "enforcers" and the "socializers." The enforcers (among them Terry Rodgers, Gregg deBoever, and Ken Wilson) patrolled the neighborhood on Friday and Saturday nights, calling in violations to the police. The "socializers" (myself and many others) tried every which way to integrate the students into the community. In retrospect, neither the one nor the other technique had much of an impact.

Nevertheless, the effort to socialize the young folk had very beneficial social side-effects, at least for me. For example, I was a member of a small group (with Kathy Tucker, Terry Rodrigue, and LeRoy Leach) that established the annual Beach Park Party (does it still exist?). Not only did these neighbors, who had been until then no more than faces to me, become my friends, but I had the delightful experience, several years in succession, of dishing out free ice cream to both adults and children. It was my best job, ever. On 10th Street, Althea and I initiated an annual block party, where, for many successive Septembers, we explained to new arrivals over hamburgers and beans that they were welcome to the neighborhood but that they should respect the people with jobs and young children who also lived on the street. For three or four years I was part of a group that met monthly at The Academy, trying to figure out how to make use of that institution's resources to benefit the community. I made a lasting friend with one of the participants, Ron Roschke, then pastor of Grace Lutheran. I edited an upbeat, cheerful bi-monthly newsletter that was distributed throughout the hill to permanent and new residents alike. In addition, I represented aggrieved neighbors at restorative justice hearings, where young scamps were counseled by their practiced attorneys that to clear their records and escape punishment, all they needed to do was to grovel a bit and feign remorse. I attended and spoke at many City Council meetings. I made many friends by patrolling our street on Sunday mornings with a black plastic bag, picking up beer and soda cans, empty cigarette packs, those ubiquitous red beer cups, and various pieces of discarded clothing. (If there's a good reason why a bra should lie in the gutter on a weekend morning, I can't imagine what it might be.) I made my best Hill friend, Vin Scarelli, when we met at 2 AM, both of us on the hunt for "trumpet man" -- a student who like to pop out of his house in the wee hours, blow his trumpet (it might have been a bugle) as loud as possible, and then scurry inside before anyone could nab him. The reward for these activities was that I became member of a vibrant community -- and there's nothing like a common enemy to bring people together

I left the Hill in 2009 in part because I was exhausted by the fight but also because Althea's illness had progressed to the point that we needed to live on one floor, with an elevator.

I reside now in an age-appropriate downtown condo, but I regret that I can no longer walk around the block and enjoy a brief "how are you" with neighbors with whom I've collaborated on one project or another. I miss the society of the Hill, but not its disorder. Among its other virtues, there could have been no better place to raise children.

One might succumb to nostalgia -- except that when I sit on my Walnut Street balcony on a summer evening, I can hear distant booms coming from up there on the Hill, and I remember that they were exceedingly jarring and disturbing. The far off blasts remind me why I relocated and they cancel out any longing to return. But let me confess that if I were to come back to the Hill, I would return as a committed "enforcer."

Can the Hill be saved, or is it doomed to further decline?  There's no better location -- everything is at your doorstep -- schools, libraries, Chautauqua, foothills, all the diverse riches of a large University. It's a neighborhood of great architectural integrity -- an outdoor museum of 1900-1920 American design, almost as interesting as antebellum New Orleans or Art Nouveau Riga. Its housing stock is unparalleled in Boulder; in a better world, it would be a tourist destination. UHNA does a wonderful job of advocacy, but it's in an unequal contest with powerful political and business forces. I think it was during the 90s that a few of us, the late Neil King most prominently, tried to engage the university in an improve-the-Hill project. We proposed that the neighbors and the university (we hoped also for grant support) pitch in to create an entity that would buy houses on the Hill and rent them to, say, newly-arriving professors or staff who would otherwise be forced to commute from Lafayette -- nowadays, Erie or Ft Lupton. And by doing so little by little to undo and reverse the tipping point and rebalance the ratio of adults to students. Although Neil was persuasive and influential (he had once been city attorney), he could not develop any traction with either the city or CU. I am not sure if our plan was workable, but I learned that to save the Hill will not be easy and will require big money, big thinking, and the coordination of many disparate groups. 

In the meanwhile, the struggle between the  enforcers and the socializers continues. Should police educate or should they arrest and ticket our student hooligans?  Let's do both. If a new first year student arrives in Boulder on a Thursday, misbehaves during the weekend, and the following Monday forwards to his mommy and daddy the news of a $5000 fine -- well, that will certainly be educational, will it not?

My Life in Objects -- XIV (Puppy)

This woebegone object was once a plump and thriving stuffed animal -- a bear, in fact, though for some reason my children always called him "Puppy." Their only other stuffed animal, a snake, was named "Snakey." Pedestrian nicknames to be sure. I admit that our family wasn't very imaginative about naming our mascots.

Even though Puppy is past his prime, he's still a most treasured critter. If the house broke into flames, and I could only rescue one item, I'd have to grab Puppy and leave to their fates the jeweled goblets, the ancient diamond tiara, the Stradivarius, the Vermeers, and the First Folios. Puppy is more valuable.

Puppy looks as though he was abused, but it's not so. He was only loved to death. Because he was our only bear, the three children struggled for ownership. Poor Puppy was a field of combat. He was pulled, stretched, thrown, dunked, employed as a soccer ball, and in at least one memorable instance, voluminously vomited upon. Over the course of the decades, the sad fellow lost almost all his fur, his corneas, his entire snout, two-thirds of his stuffing, and both of his original ears. I myself attached two prosthetic leather ears, only one of which survives -- and also sewed on his asymmetrical leather mouth. In addition, early in Puppy's career, I performed a delicate musicboxectomy. 

Why only one stuffed bear to be struggled over? Why not three -- one apiece -- as would be sensible in families that hope to avoid sibling strife? Why the paucity of stuffed animals? Because both Althea and I came from families that were ideologically opposed to such indulgences. Grandma Anne, Althea's mother, wouldn't allow stuffed animals in her home because they were "unsanitary." My parents didn't much believe in toys of any kind -- kids were supposed to make their own entertainment out of pots and pans. (My father came from so impoverished a family that a stuffed bear would have been an inconceivable luxury.) Therefore my brothers and I grew up deprived of warm, furry, reassuring "transitional objects," which had no consequences whatsoever, for me, setting aside the periodic gloom and the vast existential void in my soul.

Puppy is now in my care because my children can't decide to whom he properly belongs. I hope they don't fight over him after I die -- he can't take any more pummeling. I stow Puppy in a drawer of the old Irish desk, but because of his long service to the family, he deserves much better. Rightly, Puppy should lie in state, ensconced in an illuminated lucite display case atop a stately jasper or malachite plinth. 

"Bisson Conspectuities"

"Bisson conspectuities" is one of my all-time favorite Shakespearean oxymorons. Although it's not as transparent as, say, "hot ice" or "living death," it's much more quirky and colorful. "Bisson conspectuities" appears in Coriolanus in one of the scenes in which Menenius banters with the Roman crowd. They attack and he parries by enumerating his own strengths and weaknesses. He concludes with an insult that flaunts his patrician education: "What harm can your bisson conspectuities glean out of this character?" (In this case, a "character" is a summary statement of a person's habits or nature, a "characterization".)

The odd word "conspectuities" is an invention of Shakespeare's. He derived it from the participial form of the Latin verb "conspicio" -- to observe, gaze, or watch. It's a nonce word, a hapax legomenon; unlike some of Shakespeare's more inspired coinages, conspectuities never domesticated into English -- the OED lists only this sole appearance. "Bisson," on the other hand, which means "blind," was not new to the language but was in fact an ancient word of Germanic origin -- and already obsolescent in 1608, although the venerable proverb "the bysom ledys the blynde" might still have been current in the provinces. In Hamlet, the deliberately archaizing First Player uses the expression "bisson rheum" for "blinding tears." 

"Bisson conspectuities" means "blind sight" or "blear vision." It's an especially striking oxymoron because its component parts are drawn from opposite ends of the word hoard -- old and new, plain and polysyllabic, Germanic and Latin, rustic and citified.

But there's a complication. The word "bisson" doesn't actually appear in the Folio; there it is "beesome." "Beesome, usually spelled besom, meant and still means, "broom." But in the context of Coriolanus, broom is meaningless; and so, beginning  with Lewis Theobald in the 1720s, editors have uniformly substituted "bisson" -- an inspired conjecture but still a guess. It's possible that Shakespeare wrote "bisson" and a scrivener or printer incorrectly read 'beesome" -- but perhaps not. An oxymoron of transcendent genius might be merely an illusion -- a creation not of Shakespeare but of editorial tradition.

"Bisson conspectuities" puts quite a burden on members of the Blackfriar's audience. It's hard to believe that Shakespeare thought his first hearers would grasp the phrase's meaning on the fly. It's easy for us to understand it now, four hundred years later, with a treasury of annotations at the foot of every page. Perhaps Shakespeare didn't care if the audience comprehended? Is it possible that he was writing just for his own delight, for his pleasure in words? For readers rather than playgoers? Or perhaps he had already divined that he was writing for enthusiasts and scholars of a latter age.

Jot and Tittle

First of all, let us dismiss the notion that Charles Dickens invented a pair of persnickety punctilious accountants and named them Jot and Tittle. Sorry, it could or should have been the case, but it's not so. Nevertheless, both "jot" and "tittle," often found in each other's cozy company, have stories to tell.

Take jot, for example. In the masterful "seduction scene" in Shakespeare's Othello, Iago first torments the Venetian general and then pretends sympathy: "I see this (i.e. his nasty sly hints that Desdemona has been a-bed with Cassio) hath a little dashed your spirits." Othello responds defensively, perhaps a tad dishonestly: "Not a jot, not a jot."

The noun "jot" is not obsolete but it's not common either. What is a jot? A tiny bit, a shred, a whit, a speck, a scintilla, a mite, a trace, a skoch, an inkling, a dollop. Smaller by far than a mere smidgeon. But in its root meaning, was a jot a measure of liquid, such as an ounce? or of weight, such as a gram? A measure of distance?  A measure of time: "I'll be with you in just a jot."

Professor Google tells me it's none of those things and that I am entirely off track. "Jot" is alphabetic; it translates the Greek "iota," the smallest letter -- no more than a single straight line, a minimal minim. And therefore Othello might just as well have said (the words are cognates), "Not an iota, not an iota." He might have said it, that is, if he hadn't spent his dearest action in the tented field engaging exclusively in broils and battles, but instead had studied at some North African classical academy.

In fact, Shakespeare either didn't know or didn't use the word "iota," which seems not to have entered English until a generation after he ceased putting quill to paper. On the other hand, Shakespeare was mighty fond of the word jot, which he employed at least twenty times (though never so notably as in Othello), always to denote a small quantity and frequently to appear as a partitive: "jot of promise," "jot of ceremony," "jot of color," "jot of pleasure," "jot of blood.'" Shakespeare's "jot" can even signify a moment in time: "No, faith, I'll not stay a jot longer." (His "jot" is always a noun, never the converted verb meaning "to write a few words quickly.")

Shakespeare undoubtedly knew the word "jot" from its famous and mysterious appearance in Matthew 5:18. Here's the familiar King James Version (1611): "For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." The phrasing is almost the same in the Geneva Bible of 1576 -- the translation that Shakespeare himself knew and used. "For truly I say unto you, Till heaven and earth perish, one jot or one tittle of the Law shall not escape, till all things be fulfilled."

I don't know what "all things" are and I certainly don't know what is meant by "fulfilled." But why should I, since Jesus's prophesy has long baffled trained professional theologians. But I do know that the pairing of "jot and tittle" has become proverbial.

What, then, is a "tittle." No, it's not a very small female breast. Nor is it a diminutive seabird, though it's not difficult to imagine a rocky south Atlantic island frequented by the "Lesser, or Little Tittle." In actual fact, it's a stroke of a pen -- and one that's even smaller than an iota. Specifically, it's the dot over the lower case "i" or lower case "j." Or, in an extended sense, any simple diacritical mark. 

Shakespeare used "tittle" just twice. The first was in Love's Labor's Lost in a passage in which Shakespeare makes game of affected language. Pompous Don Armado de Adriano compares little things (the woman he woos) to greater things (himself) "Shall I entreat thy love? I will. What shalt thou exchange for rags? robes; for tittles? titles; for thyself? me." What a difference a "t" makes! "Tittle" makes its second, almost inadvertent, appearance in The Winter's Tale as an element in the dismissive reduplicative "tittle-tattling." Both of Shakespeare's tittles acknowledge that the word is an inherently silly one. Is it accidental that a number of words that resemble tittle are frivolous or infantile: babble, toddle, tattle, prattle?   

"Tittle" smacks of triviality. It lacks heft. It would have been a literary disaster, a catastrophe of the first order, if Othello had responded to Iago not with "Not a jot, not a jot," but with "not a tittle, not a tittle." 

[October 29]  Otis Brown responds: "Dr. M.: you've forgotten the most famous Tittle of all: Yelberton Abraham. How could you?

[November 2]  Vivian de St. Vrain responds:

 

Year of the Rooster

The rooster came to our attention about a month ago. We heard him before we saw him. He was living at the edge of the forest, about one hundred yards from the house. After a few days he became bolder and we were able to catch a glimpse now and then. He's a Barred Rock, fully mature, with a bright red comb and superior wattles, but with woeful tail feathers. We don't know from where he came. We asked around but none of the neighbors is missing a rooster. We guessed: he's an escapee, or, perhaps his owner became tired of him and kicked him out of the truck, or (my favorite theory) he was in a rooster fight, lost his tail feathers and retired to the woods in shame. But in fact, we have no idea how he came to settle on our property.

Little by little he started to become more comfortable with us. He would spend his day in the flower garden, furtively eating insects. He was especially fond of earwigs. A good occupation, I thought. No harm except to the bugs. Eventually he came to tolerate our presence. He would sit a few yards away, studying me while I weeded. He gained our respect, because he managed to survive even though the forest is filled with foxes and fisher cats and weasels and coyotes and the air is patrolled by hawks. He liked to visit the donkeys and peck around their manure piles.  When he started to roost not in the forest but in the blueberry bushes close to the house I became concerned -- this may be more of a rooster guest than I need. And then he took up the habit of cock-a-doodle-do-ing at dawn just outside our bedroom window. And during afternoon nap time. And familiarizing himself with the vegetable garden, where he snacks on cucumbers. (He loves cucumbers.) He became ever more bold -- a few days ago he was just outside the kitchen, pecking on the glass door, hoping, I imagine, to be let inside. And when I didn't let him in, he left a large retaliatory splash of rooster dropping right at the doorway.

We looked out of the small north window of our bedroom and there he was perched on the railing, peering in. A peeping-Tom rooster. (Did he catch an eyeful!!) 

One day a near neighbor telephoned: "Your rooster is here."  "He's not my rooster."  

And then he disappeared. For the first time in a month, there was no crowing at dawn.  OK, we thought, some predator got him. One of these days, we'll stumble upon a bunch of black and white feathers in the forest.

But then a friend who lives on Ira's Pinnacle told us that he had seen a pair of chickens on Hackett Hill Road about a half a mile up the road. He couldn't be sure, but he figured it must be "your" rooster and a hen. 

So that's where he's been!! He's a gallinaceous gallant gallivanting with the local ladies. I thought, good for him; I don't have to concern myself with him any longer. He'll go feral and start a family. He must not know about Vermont winters.

But not so. This morning he was back, solitary, crowing vigorously outside my window. His romance, if it were a romance, didn't work out. I can't imagine why because he's become quite a handsome bird. He personable, friendly and he's grown an an impressive new set of tail feathers. He's plump and shiny; his walk, once furtive, has become a decisive strut. There he is now, cock-a-doodling his head off in the patch of cucumbers.

Side Effects

LENFERA is generally safe to use, but possible side effects include stuffy or runny nose, headaches, goosebumps, hiccups, cramps, sensitivity to bright lights or glare, shingles, gingivitis, numbness of lips or upper palate, dry scalp, ringing in the ears (tinnitus), acid reflux, dizziness, hair loss, hearing loss, kidney stones, constipation and/or diarrhea, sudden loss or gain of weight, inability to swallow, drooling, dessication, macular degeneration, bunions, uncontrollable twitching or muscle spasms, rectal itch, toenail fungus, nausea, abdominal pain, difficulty with breathing, edema, fistula, halitosis, absence of libido, tachycardia, swelling in knees or other joints, scabiosa, bots, flatulence, loss of insight, roseola, Osceola, bloat, priapism, Purim, bowel obstructions, failure to thrive, scoliosis, creeping phlox, aggression, acne, increased facial or body hair, world-weariness, dyspepsia, rash, fatigue, agoraphobia, lycanthropy, high fevers, tremors, blurred vision or sudden blindness, frostbite, ringworm, procrastination, irritability, hot flashes, mange, barnacles, pellagra, night sweats, bladderwort, paranoia, clumsiness, thrush, zeugma, migraine, feelings of humiliation, heart arrest, tuatara, memory loss, white nose, rapture, paralysis, stage fright, bioluminescence, scurvy, hallucinations, chancre, catarrh, pink eye, red eye, rabies, insomnia, nightmares, spontaneous combustion, Coggins, blurring of gender identity, wasting disease, aphasia, blackouts, suicidal ideation, nosebleeds, woe, catatonia, gangrene, acute pain, multiple organ failure, death.

If symptoms persist, consult your physician.

LENFERA has been approved by the FDA.

Zeus: the Apology

If I've offended anyone, I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to; I have tremendous respect for pretty and desirable women. 10s, all of them. So let me just start by saying that many years ago, decades or centuries I can't remember exactly when, I had a thunderous crush on Io. She claims that she signaled me that she wasn't interested, but I did not stop. You know, when you're a god, they let you do it. You can do anything. It was probably a mistake to have turned her into a heifer but I think she enjoyed it then -- even if she complains about it now. Same thing with Leda; it's possible that I misinterpreted her but I honestly thought that her "no" meant "maybe" or "yes," so I turned myself into a swan and grabbed her by the pussy. Maybe I should have backed off, especially since she had already spent that same night with her husband Tyndareus, who had, as everyone knows, very small hands, if you know what I mean. It's good to be a god. And then there was Semele. I mean, she was one of my very own priestesses, and I realize now that your own priestesses ought to be off limits. But she provoked me by bathing nude in the river Asopus. And I happened to be flying by in the shape of an eagle. What happened, happened. It was definitely wrong of her to ask to look at me face to face and I regret that I incinerated her, but it wasn't my fault. Europa was also an error, but she should have known better than to come near to me when I'm in the shape of a white bull. And the same with Taygete who came to me as a doe with golden horns. I couldn't stop myself. I've always had a thing for golden horns, though I think Pindar made a bit too much of it. And then there was Dia, who happened by, so she says, when I was in the shape of a stallion. What can you expect of a stallion? Alcmene, that's another story. She was tall and beautiful, with eyes that reminded me of Aphrodite. I definitely wanted her. I had to disguise myself as her husband Amphitryon to make love to her. Maybe it was wrong to do so, but I don't think she ever figured out what actually happened, which kind of excuses me. And then there was my adventure with Antiope, where I disguised myself as a satyr; and once you're a satyr well, you know, a satyr does what a satyr does. To seduce Callisto, I had to transform myself into Artemis, which sounds a little like girl-on-girl action, but it really wasn't because it was me. Come to think of it, I can't remember exactly how we did it. And also: I blame Acrisius for shutting up his daughter Danae in a bronze tower. I took it as a deliberate provocation. I had to sneak through an air vent to impregnate Danae in the form of a shower of golden rain, which, I have to tell you, wasn't entirely satisfying and just a little bit kinky.

But what can I say?  I don't want to play the victim, because, after all, I am a god, but I had a hard childhood, what with my father castrating my grandfather and then me being suckled by the goat Amalthea. You get off to a bad start when you're suckled by a goat. 

What I Said at Our "Event"

"Thank you all for coming. We appreciate it more than you can possibly imagine. We've needed, and relied on, the support that all of you have given us.

It's no secret that both Lynn and I have gone through some difficult times. It's good to host a cheerful event.    

A number of people have asked us about our use of the word "wed" in the invitation that we sent to you. (We said, you remember, that we were 'wed" on June 30). I don't want to mislead you. We didn't mean to imply that we involved either state or church in our relationship. There didn't seem to be any point for us to get married legally. People marry for the sake of children, but we've decided that we're not going to have children.

Here's the story. Lynn and I wanted to acknowledge in a public way the seriousness and permanence of our friendship -- for our families, and, I think, especially for our grandchildren (there are ten of them). We wanted our families to know that our relationship wasn't like some streetcar or trolley that you hop on and hop off. So we decided to invite our most nuclear family to Lynn's backyard garden for a brief "ceremony" -- just my children and grandchildren, her children and grandchildren, her brother, my brother, the various spouses -- and pledge our love and fidelity. But then one of my daughters-in-law, Connie, said that we couldn't ask people to fly in from all over the USA just for a five minute ceremony. She suggested that we at least exchange rings. It seemed like a good idea. So we walked over to Classic Facets on the Pearl Street Mall and bought two not antique but vintage rings -- because we're vintage people. Handsome rings, as you can see. And then as long as everyone was coming here a day early we decided that we should have dinner the night before. And if you're going to have a dinner you might as well have some music. So gradually the "ceremony" evolved and grew. But more importantly -- and here's the point -- the meaning of the event evolved as well. It became more significant, more profound, more intimate. We never liked the phrase "commitment ceremony" or even the word "commitment" because it sounds as though you are being sent either to jail or to a mental institution, and we didn't have the vocabulary for what we intended to do. But little by little, while we planned the event, and even more so, after we performed the ceremony, we began to feel more and more married -- in all the positive senses of the word. We can now say "wed" and mean it. I haven't yet been able to say "husband" or "wife" but I suspect that one day in the not too distant future those words will manifest themselves. But the point is that in all the ways that matter, we are "wed."

When my Vermont friend Bert, who's just my age, got married 18 years ago, I said to him, Bert, is it real --that you're head over heels in love at age 60? At the time, it seemed so improbable. But now, here I am, just a year and a half short of 80, and setting out on a new life. And 60 seems like dewy youth.  

So let me repeat to you now what I said to Lynn on June 30. "I bring you my children and my grandchildren, my prosthetic tooth, my lens implants, my hearing aids, my non-standard but warm heart, and I take you and your children and grandchildren and your titanium hip and arthritic finger and I say, "let us make a life of it."

And let me just add that between us we have been married for 100 years (an average of 50 apiece). So we ought to know what we're doing.

And what we're going to do is to ride this old trolley right to the end of the line."

World War II Memories

I was six years old when the war ended in 1945, so my memories are few and arise in no particular order. I remember hearing news reports on the radio that were datelined "Moscow"-- but I conflated Moscow with Bosco, a brand of chocolate syrup popular in the 1940s. I remember that the floor of our kitchen was disfigured with an infinite number of black marks -- rubber was in short supply and the substituted soles left nasty blotches. My mother said, "We'll wait until the war is over to replace the linoleum." Many commodities were in short supply: instead of butter there was a white oleomargerine into which a packet of orange food color was mashed to simulate a credible yellow. There were ration books and ration stamps for gasoline and sugar and coffee and greens. My mother was furious that Mr. Lerner, who owned the fruit and vegetable shop on 18th Avenue, sold black-market lettuces from the back of his store. A bus driver was rude to a passenger; my mother said: "all the decent young men are overseas." We saved our nickels and brought money to school to buy war bonds. Following government advice, my father dug up his carefully tended lawn and planted a "victory garden" of vegetables. There were frequent blackouts: my father's friend Jack Patent sported a white hard hat because he was a warden. My Uncle Dan, a major in the Army Air Corps, came home from the Burma border for a thirty-day furlough and showed me his captured German Luger. We received air mail letters from him and from other soldiers with details blacked out by military censors. I complained to my mother: "Mrs. Callery (my first grade teacher) isn't nice to me." My mother said, "You have to forgive her; she's lost four of her boys in the war." Lost?  Four of her boys? I did not understand. On a sunny spring day in 1945, we heard on the radio that President Roosevelt was dead; my mother sat on the stoop and cried. And in August of that same year, when our family was visiting someone on a lake somewhere, all of a sudden the adults who had motor boats were zooming back and forth and shouting and laughing. I asked what was happening and my father said, "the war is over." 

Uncle Jack's tank was demolished by German cannon fire and he was the crew's only survivor. He lived with shrapnel in his brain until the age of ninety-one. Cousin Saul's older brother was killed in New Guinea, but Sarah, his mother, "knew" that he was alive and waited for the knock on the door or the telephone call until the end of her days. Meanwhile, the poor fellow's bones lay bleaching at Buna or some other long-forgotten field of battle. Before the war, my mother told me, we used to receive mail from the old country -- from the many members of the Chafetz and Tomaszewski and Middlebank and Hessel families who had stayed behind. "But after the war, nothing."

Can we, even now, bear to imagine what became of all those Malkas and Rifkas and Levs and Mendels?   

My Teachers: James Hutton (1902-1980)

The most erudite man that I ever encountered in my own person was James Hutton, a professor of classics when I was an undergraduate at Cornell back there in the 1950s. Professor Hutton bristled with knowledge -- nor is this my opinion only, but one that is well attested by his international reputation and by the list of his writings. Hutton wrote two enormous books (800 pages each!!) that won him his scholarly spurs: The Greek Anthology in Italy (1935) and The Greek Anthology in France and in the Latin Writers of the Netherlands to the Year 1800 (1946). I encountered Professor Hutton in 1958 when, callow and poorly educated, I enrolled in a Latin course called "Terence and Catullus" (of which more later). But first, for those curious readers out there in bloglandia who are on tenterhooks, painfully stretched like new wool and are wondering what the heck is the "Greek Anthology" about which James Hutton composed his pair of magna opera and around which his life centered -- turn we now to the pages of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

In brief, the Anthologia Graeca is a collection of poems, mostly epigrams, that had a complicated ancient history, but originated perhaps with an anthology complied by Meleager of Gadara in the first century BCE, which brought together works by many ancients including Archilochus, Alcaeus, Anacreon and Simonides (all big names in their time). There were a series of early editions that do not survive but an authoritative version was made by Constantine Cephalas in the 10th century. "Cephalas appended a number of other collections: homoerotic verse collected by Straton of Sardis in the 2nd century AD; a collection of  Christian epigrams found in churches; a collection of satirical and convivial epigrams collected by Diogenianus as well as Christodorus's description of statues in the Byzantine gymnasium of Zeuxippos; and a collection of inscriptions from a temple in Cyzicus." And then in 1300 or thereabouts Maximus Planudes brought together an edition which became standard, which, while adding some poems, also deleted or bowdlerized many of those that offended his puritanical Christian sensibilities. Planudes' anthology was the only one known to Western Europe for many centuries; manuscript transmission was superseded when an edition based on his work was printed in 1494.

There's a lot more but that's enough information for us to understand the area which James Hutton worked. Professor Hutton knew the anthology backwards and forwards and made it his business to trace its considerable influence through the Latin and vernacular poetry of late antiquity and the medieval and renaissance worlds. Quite an endeavor, in my opinion.  

Hutton was a Scotsman, born in Airth, son of a sea captain, though from where I sat (in a small seminar room in Goldwin Smith Hall!!), it was impossible to imagine that he had ever been a child or even a young man. He came to the US early in life and there was not a trace of Scotland in his speech. Hutton entered Cornell as a freshman in 1920, received three degrees there, stayed on to teach, and retired in 1973. According to his Cornell obituary, he was a life-long bachelor. For most of his adulthood, he lived with his mother, Mrs. Elizabeth Hutton, and he shared a house for many years with Professor Lane Cooper, his teacher and another bachelor Cornell classicist. After the death of his mother and of Cooper, he continued to live at 123 Roberts Place with his cousin/housekeeper, Mrs. Margaret Green. Perhaps he was a delightful presence among his friends, but to my eyes he was a pale, tall, gaunt, dry-as-a stick, bony man devoid of humor or juice. Born only two years before my own father, he seemed to be generations older.  

Now a few words about Terence and Catullus, the twin subjects of my 1958 Latin classroom experience. 

Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) was Roman playwright possibly of Berber origin but certainly originally a north African slave. Brought to Rome and freed, he wrote six comedies, adapted from Greek originals, of which we students of Professor Hutton plowed through three: Andria (166 BC); The Self-Tormentor (163 BC) and the Adelphi (160 BC). Terence drowned on a trip to Greece, age 25. His must have been a marvelously romantic life, even though much curtailed. Too bad we know only its barest outline.

Here's the title page to the first "modern" edition of Terence's works (1496)

In Terence's plays, young noblemen dally with prostitutes or mistresses even as their fathers insist that they marry more respectable ladies. Plots, often contrived by the dull hero's wily slave, fail to come to fruition because the conspirators are carelessly overheard. Sometimes apparently unrelated women (one rich, the other poor), turn out to be sisters. Sham marriages and double-dealing are frequent. It is not uncommon that sons discover by accident, in the last scene of the play, the identities of their biological fathers. When there are plans to destroy female infants, the girls are rescued and raised secretly, only to come forward as beauties at a critical juncture of the plot. Young noblemen are prone to breaking into the houses of pimps to carry off the girls they love. Generally, plays end with multiple and suitable marriages, the old folks outwitted and the youngsters carrying the day. Slaves are freed.

Meanwhile, characters coin memorable aphorisms in succinct, elegant Latin. Everyone knows "Homo sum, nihil a me alienum puto"  -- I am a man, nothing human is alien to me.  But also quot homines tot sententiae: suus cuique mos -- So many men, as many opinions; to each his own way. And "fortis fortuna adiuvat" --  fortune favors the brave.  And "nullumst iam dictum quod nos dictum sit prius" --nothing new is said that has not been said before. And "amantium irae amoris integratio est" -- lover's quarrels are the renewal of love.

But with all these comic goings-on and witty sayings, there was not one moment that I can remember when Professor James Hutton laughed or smiled or indicated in the least that the plays were clever or amusing. Instead, we discussed grammatical questions with much emphasis on the differences between second century and first century Latin. Dry as dust, it was. The opportunity to find the common humanity of ancient Romans and 1950s Cornellians was missed, even shirked.

Terence's louche and lively plots must have posed a problem for Professor Hutton; Catullus of Verona, a poet of love and sex and bawdy, could only have caused even more of a difficulty. In the edition in which we read Catullus, a drab gray book which must have dated from the early part of the century, certain of the more scabrous poems were omitted but, in a moment of confused prudery, printed -- in a smaller font --in an appendix. I suspect that they were also bowdlerized. Some of the words that Catullus used in his freer verse were not to be found in our dictionary, which had also been cleansed. And in a translation that I consulted (was it the Loeb?) the offending poems did appear, but only in Italian. Was the idea that if anyone could read Italian he must be sophisticated enough to deal with Catullan pornography. Perhaps my readers think that I'm fantasizing or imagining this half-hearted censorship, but it's as true as true. Swear.

Even after all these years, two of Catullus's poems stay in my mind. The best, the most frequently republished and the most influential is known to classicists as Catullus 5. It's a remarkable poem. Here's the Latin, which is not difficult.

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus

Rumoresque senum severiorum

omnes unius aestimemus assis.

Soles occidere et redire possunt;

nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux

Nox est perpetua una dormienda

da mi basia mille, deinde centum

dein mille altera, dein secunda centum

deinde com milia multa fecerimus

conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus, 

aut ne quis malus invidere possitor

cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

And here's a translation. "Let us live, my Lesbia, and love. The gossipings of stern old men let us value at just one penny.  Suns may set and rise again, but us, when once the brief light has set, night is one perpetual sleep. Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet another thousand, then a hundred, then when we have counted up many thousands, let us shake [the abacus] lest some evil man be envious when he knows how many kisses there were." That is to say, Let us keep on making love no matter what the old envious guys think. (Lesbia has nothing to do with lesbians; it's just code for the name of the married woman with whom Catullus was sleeping.)  

I have no recollection of any discussion of this peach of a poem in 1958. Perhaps we talked about the ingenious lux/Nox juxtaposition, but I am sure we didn't touch on either the boasted adultery or the joys of sex. We were still in the last gasp of Victoriana. We were pre-Beatles, pre-Kennedy, pre-readily available contraceptives. Some things were not to be discussed. 

The other poem that stands in my memory is Catullus 61, a joyous epithalamion (or marriage song) which celebrates, with great gusto, the wedding of Vinia and Manlius. It is sensual and almost hypnotic. It's frankness about sexual pleasure pleased me in 1958, when such things were rare. Still pleases me.

But what about the omitted poems, the ones too "coarse" for our tender eyes and ears?  How would James Hutton have dealt with them. Not at all, of course. But now, censorship and self-censorship and propriety eased, we can read the poem that begins Paedicabo ego vos et irrumabo. which I can now translate as "I will fuck you in the ass and then fuck you in the face." And goes on from there. Not part of the 1958 curriculum. In Professor Hutton's class, we were more comfortable discussing a synezis of the genitive than any exercise of the genitalia.

But I wonder, now, about, James Hutton, at home after a hard day of declining and conjugating, at dinner with his mother and his bachelor roommate. What did Professor Hutton think about Catullus's "paedicabo ego vos et irrumabo".

This I know: whether repelled or offended or secretly sympathetic, he certainly did not share his feelings with his students. 

Another Gosse-Pearlman Xmas

And so we've come to the end of the "holiday season" once again.

Another Christmas, another winter solstice, another St. Lucy's day with its deepest of midnights. Even here in ever-sunny Colorado, things are a bit gloomy. However, I have every confidence that another spring is just around the corner. I don't need to bring greenery into the house in order to prevent the dragon from swallowing the sun. The days, now so abbreviated, will lengthen and in five weeks we'll see the first crocuses and a week later the daffodils and pussy-willows. It's going to happen. But as always, the last days of the year challenge me.

I'm relieved and happy that Christmas and the whole Christmas business is done and gone. No one wants to be a scrooge and I don't want to frown on carols and gift-giving and plum-puddings and good fellowship, but in my heart, let me confess, I don't like the holiday. I can't make sense of the virgin birth or the sacrifice of the only-begotten son. I don't even respect the story-- to me it's just dressed-up scapegoating. Moreover, Jesus' revolutionary message about caring for the poor seems to be ignored or repudiated by Christianity's most vociferous advocates. And then there's all that incongruous stuff that has accreted around Christmas -- the hype and the commercialism and the religious chauvinism and the reindeer and the tactless triumphalism. It's both incomprehensible and offensive to me.

And I'm in good company. I have allies. Let us go back to the beginning of the American experience with Christmas.

If the profoundly religious seventeenth-century founders of our country had a single favorite Biblical moment, it's when the Lord (speaking through His prophet Amos) severely condemned the vanity of holidays. "I hate," said the Lord, "I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies." The Lord of Hosts specifically enjoined against the attempt to placate him by sacrificing animals (a matter of topical concern in Amos's time). "Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them; neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts." Nor did He rest with these easy-to-follow injunctions, but He went on to condemn all musical tributes as well. Nor more chants, glees or carols: "Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols." Our Puritan forefathers recognized that the Lord opposed not only rituals and music but all formal observances and rote piety. The Ancient of Days was moved not by empty ceremony but by right action and good behavior. Instead of squeaking timbrels and sounding brass, why, "let justice run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." Taking these uncompromising sentences as their guide, our founders dug in their heels against the ostentatious celebration of all holidays, especially Christmas.

I applaud the old guy, the Father, and I revere Amos. His mantra bears repeating: "Let justice come down as the waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." 

The neglect of "righteousness" in favor of buying things makes me melancholy. I would be happy to see fewer purchases and more good deeds. It would help us through the dark months.

The winter solstice is a sensitive time for me because it's the anniversary of my father's birthday. He arrived to no poorer family on the planet on the darkest day of the year, the twenty-second of December, 1904. ‘And they called his name Emanuel, God with us,’ -- but whether by accident or design, I have no idea. My father lived a long and just life. He had many virtues -- one of them that he was the least materialistic person ever. He had no possessions and craved none. But he was righteous.

I don't know how anyone could write a biography of Emanuel, my father. There was so little plot, so little conflict in his life. He went about his business, raised his family, kept to the straight and narrow. His memory is a blessing to us.

At this time of the year I turn once again to one of the most challenging fathers in literature. The voluminous works of Sir Edmund Gosse are not much read nowadays except by specialists in Edwardian literature, but Father and Son (1907) still stands as one of the world's great autobiographies. 

The father in Father and Son is the biologist Philip Henry Gosse, whom Charles Darwin once called "an honest hod carrier of science." The older Gosse was a minister and a leader of the Plymouth Brethren, a very strict, very puritanical splinter of English Protestantism -- one that could easily have taken Amos as its prophet and leader. According to his son Edmund, P. H. Gosse held that the celebration of Christmas was "nothing less than an act of idolatry. The very word is Popish, [my father] used to exclaim, 'Christ's Mass!' Then he would adduce the antiquity of the so-called feast, adapted from horrible heathen rites, and itself a soiled relic of the abominable Yule-Tide. He would denounce the horrors of Christmas until it almost made me [that is, Philip Henry's son Edmund Gosse the autobiographer] blush to look at a holly berry." 

A passionate man, Philip Henry Gosse. A difficult father. Can we Imagine how Philip Henry Gosse would have suffered to behold a twentieth-century American Christmas: muzaked "Silent Night" in a shopping mall. Or even --horror of horrors --the odious, saccharine "Little Drummer Boy." There's not a sappier song in all of creation.

In Father and Son, Sir Edmund recollects a Christmas of his youth. One boyish year he defied his father and, putting his immortal soul in danger, secretly ate some Christmas plum-pudding that had been offered to him by 'rebellious' servants. But then, overcome with guilt and stomach-ache, he flew to his father, crying out "Oh! Papa, Papa, I have eaten of flesh offered to idols!" Philip Henry then "ran with me into the midst of the startled servants, seized what remained of the pudding,... and ran till we reached the dust-heap, when he flung the idolatrous confectionery on to the middle of the ashes, and then raked it deep down into the mass." 

A frightening episode for a nine-year-old -- but beautifully told. Only an accomplished writer of comedy (and one who was steeped in Dickens) could have invented a phrase as marvelous as "idolatrous confectionery," where the triviality of the noun undermines the high seriousness of the adjective.

Compared to Amos and to the Plymouth Brethren and to Philip Henry Gosse, my own resistance to Christmas is trivial. I'm a dissenter, but a dissenter in moderation.

In fact, I'm not even a Puritan -- I'm delighted with the baked ham and the sweet potatoes. Moreover, I have devised a Christmas custom of my own. Every December 25, I reserve three hours to listen to Handel's Messiah -- not out of piety or reverence, but because the oratorio is so marvelous that it's almost -- almost -- sacred.

There are many Messiahs, but In our house, the performance of choice is, inevitably, the extremely intelligent Pearlman version (Boston Baroque Orchestra and Chorus-- Martin Pearlman, Conductor [Telarc 80322]). Blessings and honor and glory and hallelujahs be unto George Frederick Handel and unto his unsurpassed oratorio.

So this year and every year: rejoice greatly but appropriately, ye sons and daughters of Zion! 

"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.

Baseball, 1955 and 2012

In 1955, Duke Snider lived at 178 Marine Avenue (in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge). His was the middle house in this picture.

Gil Hodges lived here, at 1120 32 Street. Two floors, 1400 square feet. 

 
Harold "Pee Wee" Reese and family made their home in 970 square feet of 9714 Barwell Terrace. Carl Erskine's home, at 9318 Lafayette Walk, was even smaller,

   

just 910 square feet.

Sandy Amoros lived in Bed-Stuy, in this brownstone at 147 Bainbridge Street, most likely on just one of the three floors. His was the leftmost building.

 

 And here is Alex Rodriguez's 2012 house in Miami, Florida.  It's up for sale for $38,000,000,

      

which is what 19,681 square foot waterfront properties go for nowadays. A bargain, for all I know.

De Sternuente, or, Of Sneezing

I enjoy fighting off a sneeze. It takes practice and concentration. When the sneeze urge emerges, without warning, the battle is joined. On the side of the sneeze -- dust or some other foreign particles passing through the nasal hairs, reaching  the nasal mucosa, releasing a flood of histamines which irritate the nerve cells and signal the brain to stimulate the trigeminal network and activate the pharyngeal and tracheal muscles, producing a noisy, 100-mile-an-hour blast of microbes and snot. On the side of restraint -- nothing but enormous personal discipline and the desire not to surrender to animal nature. There are some, who are less committed to mind-over-body, who employ the fingertips to pinch the end of the nose, or, alternatively, who press a knuckle against the philtrum, the infranasal depression which Shakespeare, curiously, called "the valley" -- but frankly, when it comes to resisting sternutation, digital success is only half a loaf. It's far more rewarding to think one's way to a rare victory in the lifelong sneezomachia. Not to sneeze is a triumph of the will.

Which is not to assert that a good sneeze gives no pleasure, if a person would give oneself over to it. It's simply that the sneeze, especially one of the window-rattling variety, is entirely anarchic and inartistic, which might be why there is so slight a sneeze literature. Although hard to believe, it's a fact that Puck is the only character in all of Shakespeare's plays who deigns to mention the sneeze, but he weakens its disruptive force by employing the archaism "neeze." The best-known literary sneeze (or, at least, the only one that now comes to mind) occurs in Pope's Rape of the Lock, when Belinda, ravished by Sir Plume's "glittering forfex," throws snuff in the baron's nose. Immediately "with starting tears each eye o'erflows,/ And the high dome re-echoes to his nose."

Snuff artificially stimulates sneezing, which may or may not be be why Michael, Tsar of all the Russians, proposed amputating the noses of snuffers. Michael's contemporary, Pope Urban VIII, merely threatened excommunication. Some say that the practice of saying "God bless you" to sneezers originated with Pope Gregory the Great, and has to do with the superstition that the soul leaves the sneezing body, perhaps nasally.

Why is it that no one ever says "God bless you" to farters, who are as much in need of divine intervention as sneezers. Society demands that farting, though shameful (and belching, though comic), should be controlled; sneezing is, except for the most determined among us, uncontrollable.  

Reposted: Antimylarmonofilamentarianism

In 1895, my wise and courageous grandparents left the abysmal, backward Ukraine and struck out for the new world. Nine years later, my father was born in a cold-water flat in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The date of his birth: December 22, 1904, exactly at the winter solstice. "And they called his name, Emanuel, God with us." If he had been born in the old country, before the Russian authorities imposed legal cognomina upon us, he would have been named Emanuel ben Isaiah -- his father's name appended to his own as a patronymic.

Despite his traditional moniker and his commitment to the essence of Judaism, my father was fiercely hostile to the irrationalities of religion. His view -- and my grandfather Isaiah's even more strongly -- was that for a thousand years our lineage had been kept in poverty and darkness not just by the czars and the Cossacks but also by the rabbis. In politics my father and grandfather began as socialists and became New Dealers; in philosophy, they rejected theological doctrine and were among the children of the Enlightenment whom Moses Mendelssohn had led to the promised land of evidence and reason. I doubt that any of my ancestors knew Karl Marx's sentence that "the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism," but they spoke and acted as though such wisdom had been absorbed from the cradle. My brothers and I were taught to resist the exclusivity, superstition, and ceremony and especially the triumphalism of religion.   

We now have a religious controversy in our peaceful, progressive, and largely secular western town. A group of orthodox Jews have petitioned the city council for permission to construct an eruv. What is an eruv? It’s a “symbolic boundary that allows orthodox Jews to carry things, including their own children, outside their home during the Sabbath." (Carrying is considered work, and orthodoxy's strict interpretation of religious law prohibits sabbatical labor.) A latter-day eruv is constructed out of fishing line that is strung on utility poles; curiously, it may incorporate functioning electric and telephone wires. If you're within the lines, you're "in" your home.

I know that my forbears detested eruvim and similar expressions of irrational piety. I myself am not enraged by these useless but harmless superstitions. Constructing an eruv does not endanger our species; it's not like opposing contraception or prohibiting stem-cell research. An eruv consoles the believers and doesn't much bother the rest of us. Yet if there is a spirit in the sky, which I very much doubt, I would hope that he would not be so small-minded as to issue ukases about carrying infants on Saturdays; infants should be carried as much as they want, which is just about everywhere and always. And if the god of Abraham and Isaac has become so narrow as to promulgate an inside/outside-the-home rule, I would also hope that he would be intelligent enough not to be flummoxed by such transparent trickery as hanging mylar filament on poles.   

I have no intuitive conception of god, but I think that the orthodox trivialize our human and shared longing for transcendence when they sanctify such petty practices. It would be far more pious for the orthodox to take every nickel spent to appease the Ancient of Days and bestow it on a poor Jewish family from Tashkent. If the eruvim-makers can't locate eligible Jews, there are Hondurans and Sudanese a-plenty who deserve their attention. When the believers re-direct their enthusiasm and their resources toward truly charitable enterprises, they will honor the universal immigrant experience and they will also practice the very worthy Jewish virtue of compassion. The effort spent to construct an eruv is a foolish waste of time.

Here's my father's view:  "It took us hundreds of years to fight our way out of the ghetto and they want to put themselves back in jail. If the rabbis had their way," he would say, "Mahler and Bernstein and Gershwin would play accordion in a klezmer band in Bialystok, Einstein would balance the books for a caftan maker in Kiev, and a hundred and fifty Jewish Nobel Prize winners would squander their intelligence davening in a dim Vilna synagogue."

I think it’s in a Wallace Markfield novel that an old Jewish guy confronts a group of twenty-something Jewish hippies/slackers in Miami Beach. After a heated discussion, he admonishes them:  "And don't ever be ashamed that you’re Jewish. It’s enough that I’m ashamed that you’re Jewish."

Which is pretty much how I feel about the eruvistas.  Well, not exactly ashamed.  Embarrassed, perhaps, by their superstitious infatuation with the "dark backward and abysm of time." 

Advice for Writers

One of this blague's more inquisitive readers is a talented young journalist who knows that before Vivian de St. Vrain morphed into Dr. Metablog, he had spent a lifetime either bent unproductively over the ball point or wearily pounding on the word-processor. The young reader has asked this question:  what have decades of practice taught you, Dr. M., about the craft of writing?  And in response, Dr. M. has peered soulwise and discovered -- not a heck of a lot.

Yet in all fairness, the curious reader's question is flattering and deserves a response. And therefore Dr. M. has pondered and pondered and has now refined the drossy deposits that clog his brainal synapses into as much wisdom as he feels qualified to dispense. (Let us be clear -- the advice that follows is not meant to be argumentative or prescriptive or know-it-all. Different writers do things in different ways. The precepts that are offered here may not apply to all writing; they describe only the Way of the Metablog.) 

Let us assume that the seeker of advice brings to the table intelligence and information and a point of view -- but needs a little coaching on tactics. Point one:            

Just as I respect the first tenet of real estate -- location, location, location -- so I subscribe to the most important (but often neglected) rule of writing, which is

A)  plot, plot, plot, plot, plot. The writer must tell a story. People relish stories, respond to narrative, and are most engaged when they pursue a plot's twists and turns. Just because it's non-fiction, doesn't mean that the story-teller's bag of tricks cannot be accessed. Fortunately, every piece of prose from the briefest anecdote to the most convoluted intellectual argument can and should be structured as a narrative. In non-fiction, the first rule of plotting is to "establish the enigma." The enigma need not be a formal question, but it's indisputable that every essay answers either an explicit or an unspoken question. Is not every writer free to shape that implicit inquiry to his own purposes? And in the process of delivering an answer, is he not also free to sprinkle clues (some of them red herrings) along the path? And also at liberty to let his readers dangle until the moment comes to gratify their curiosity--and while they dangle, to let them endure suspense; suspense that can be intensified by teasing the reader about what's going to happen next? And every once in a while, to spring a surprise by veering off on an unanticipated or even misleading tangent? Nor is there anything wrong with the judicious flashback, the flash forward, or the deceptive digression -- tricks of the trade that have won the laurel since the bronze age, centuries before the time when "establish the enigma" became the watchword. Remember: "all writing is fiction, especially non-fiction." 

Connoisseurs of storytelling know that the most indispensable element in any narrative is climax. Because climax is so essential, it must be exploited to the full, not just on the universal level but also on the particular, and therefore      

B)  every sentence should achieve climax. As a general rule, the climax should come in the sentence's last phrase, or better still, in its final climactic word. The crucial, contributing part of every sentence, the idea which it strives to convey, the very target of its forward motion, should, whenever artistically feasible, come dead last. When this precept is honored, each sentence becomes an arrow aimed at its own natural target. And it follows as night the day, that every paragraph should also come to climax--and that the climax of the paragraph should be its own last sentence. So designed, sentences and paragraphs carry within them both the exciting pressure of forward motion and also coherence of argument. There's an ancillary benefit: when a sentence terminates in a climax, transitions become less awkward, because the intellectual content (or logic) of sentence B begins just where sentence A left off, and the logic of sentence C starts where B concludes. Sentences and logic coalesce and become as one. This maxim, true for sentences, is even more true for paragraphs. And therefore it follows that a practiced writer, making deft use of climax, can easily 

C)  avoid ungainly mechanical transitions, such as "nevertheless," "moreover, "on the other hand," and even that offensive bit of pop neojargonianism, "having said that" -- for these fillers are words that constrict the thoroughfare of thought. Of course there will be times when such connectives usefully signal a switch in direction, but for the most part, transitions between sentences and paragraphs should not be mechanical, i.e. by the use of conjunctive phrases and adverbs, but logical. Logical transitions need not rely on distracting howevers, however easy and tempting it might be to employ them. The best transitions are transparent or, even better, invisible. If a writer studies his sentences and is compelled to admit that they are only linked by banausic connectives, then he must judge whether the argument he offers is truly coherent or whether its logical weaknesses have been plastered over with rhetorical flimflammery. Any writer who wants his prose to be persuasive will profit by examining his connectives. And while the writer is engaged in such scrutiny, he should also check to see that he has

D)  transferred important concepts from nouns and adjectives into verbs. And by verbs, I mean verbs of vigor--not copulatives, passives, or colorless neutral words like seem, appear, make, or do. I mean verbs with punch, or better still, verbs that punch. In revising a sentence, it's a good idea to determine whether it's the nouns and their modifiers that bear the brunt of the argument. If they are doing more than their fair share of the labor, then it is mandatory to reconfigure the sentence so that the verbs strain and lift and carry. A paragraph rich in colorful verbs is active and infectious and engaging; a paragraph loaded with nouns and modifiers can be clotted and static. Strong verbs keep things moving. They keep the plot in gear. They add grit and heft. And so does the related process whereby

E)  generalizations and abstractions are replaced by instances and examples. Let me provide an example. A friend, a large man who has always savored his sauce Bearnaise, wrote this sentence to me: "My doctor--an Asian woman who weighs about fifteen pounds--has been hectoring me about my reluctance to subsist on twigs and grasses." What an excellent sentence -- not just because of the colorful verbs ("hector," "subsist"), the ironic faux-hyperbole ("about fifteen pounds") or the fact that the sentence rises to a splendid climax, but because of the specificity of "twigs and grasses." A lesser writer might have, instead of "subsist on twigs and grasses," employed a bland formula such as "go on a diet" or "become a vegetarian." But by using the concrete "twigs and grasses" for the abstract "diet" or "vegetarian," my correspondent has not only caught our attention and amused us, but he has created a metaphor. "Twigs and grasses" is specific and visual and memorable. While these nouns stand for "diet" and "vegetarian," they also stand for whatever penumbra of meaning my friend's readers bring to the interpretation of these words. In my own case, it's a irresistible vision of a big guy metamorphosed into a large twitchy-nostrilled rabbit nibbling the bark of willows. Such is the paradox of the metaphor: the more specific the word, the more spacious the liberty of interpretation. Poets know this instinctively; that's why they're poets. But remember, writers: metaphor is only one of a bucketload of figures of speech. The astute writer does not limit himself to metaphor alone, but remembers to    

F)  use figures of speech of all kinds: pun, simile, alliteration, oxymoron, parataxis, hyperbole, understatement or litotes, irony, metonymy (where an individual stands for a class), synecdoche (where a part signifies the whole), aposiopesis -- I could go on and on!  It's the figure of speech that keeps things lively, that makes prose sparkle and that make readers, already enthralled with plot and dazzled by recurrent exciting climaxes, fully engage with the written word.  After all, writing has no value unless it attracts and holds the reader. And so it follows that a writer must, finally, 

G)  know and respect his readership. He must provide all the information that a reader needs to follow the argument. Yet at the same time, he must resist the temptation to be over-explicit. Let readers do some of the work. Let them complete the connections that the writer only suggests. It will keep them on their toes, make them feel intelligent, and retain their interest. And while they're so engaged, the writer might remind himself of another precept, which is to try to

H)  make syntax and logic work together. Get them on the same track. Put the main idea in the main clause, put subordinate ideas in subordinate clauses. Put the parenthetical idea in a parenthetical clause. Put parallel ideas in parallel clauses, but when ideas are not parallel, emphasize their incompatibility by using contrasting syntactic structure. Syntax is a tool. Sentences in which logic is chugging onward and syntax is all over the map can be confusing and even impenetrable. Alexander Pope said about poetry, "The sound should be an echo to the sense."  In prose, the syntax should be an echo to the sense; or rather, the sense should be an echo to the syntax; or even better, the syntax and the sense should take each other's hand and dance the same dance. And finally (and this time the "finally" is not meant to be misleading),

I)  scrutinize every word and see if it is necessary or whether it can either be omitted or made more precise. When in doubt, throw it out. Or amend it. It should be a maxim that in good writing, no one ever "walks down the street." And by "walks down the street," I certainly do not mean "walk down the street." "Walks down the street" is a metaphor for a colorless expression. Why should someone walk down the street, when he can totter, or saunter, or sashay, or hurtle, or trot, or swagger, or stagger, or promenade down an avenue, boulevard, lane, causeway, footpath, or promenade?  English overflows with words that are specific, evocative, and suggestive. Let's have fewer street-walkers and more sidewalk-promenaders. Keats said the the poet should "load every rift with ore," and so should the writer of non-fiction. But be careful not to overload; don't allow prose to slide toward the baroque. And at last

J)   feel perfectly free to ignore the canard that you were taught in grade school  --that every piece of writing needs a conclusion.  It doesn't.  As a general rule, avoid formal conclusions.

Upper West Side Then and Now

From 1965 to 1969 we lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Now we've returned for a month-long visit. In days of yore, we were the busy young parents pushing our baby carriage down Broadway. Now forty years more 'mature, we step aside as nannies maneuver the twins (without question there are both more nannies and more twins) around and past us.

And the eternal West Side -- has it also matured? Certainly it's a more prosperous neighborhood and a more crowded one. With scores of giant high-rise apartment houses added in the intervening years, it's become even more densely populated. Paradoxically, it's also safer. In the 1960s, received wisdom stated that to wander onto 85th Street or onto Columbus Avenue after dark was to risk death or at least a good mugging. Now the area is peaceful morning, noon and night, and newly-fashionable Columbus Avenue houses dozens of trendy ethnic restaurants. Forty years ago, it was foolish to venture across Central Park to the aristocratic East Side, where, it was rumored, there lived people who were fair-skinned and blond. Some areas of the Park, like The Ramble, were famously dangerous and were visited only by those who were itching for action. Now, single women jog without the least concern. We took advantage of the new freedom by taking frequent jaunts to the row of fabulous museums along Fifth Avenue. (In the 1960s, museums were difficult for West Siders to access but admission was free; today, they're easy to reach but the ticket prices are staggering.) In the good old days, West Side street-corners were gathering points for enterprising drug-dealers. On this visit, I didn't spot a single dealer or a single transaction. Moreover, the neighborhood used to be thick with policemen on patrol; this time, police are scarce and apparently unnecessary. Why the improvement in public safety? In a word, money. Only the rich can now afford to live on the Upper West Side, and rich people don't need to knock you down and empty your wallet. They have other fish to fry. 

There's a new feature of transportation: droves of briefcase-bearing suit-wearers are shuttled Wallstreetway in luxurious "private cars." Meanwhile, the subway is as efficient and as filthy as ever, but nowadays we pay not with tokens but with "metro cards." The New York Times, then 10 cents, is now $1.25; it has fewer columns, a larger font, and poorer writing. More changes: in yesteryear, a man shouting in public was very likely a paranoid schizophrenic; now a noisy talker has a gimmick in his ear and a cell phone and he's doing nothing more lunatic than snapping up undercapitalized mortgages. 

Dogs, here as elsewhere, are horribly indulged. One day we peeked into a "pet exercise" gymnasium and later were amused by a well-appointed van labeled "Pet Limousine." Although there are many more curs, there are fewer piles of canine poopery on the sidewalks; most dog-walkers make use of plastic bags. Thank you, dog-walkers.

Affordable supermarkets have disappeared and there are only specialty food shops where the prices are beyond astronomical. But where do the waitresses, cooks, cleaning ladies, nannies, cashiers, shop girls, bank tellers, kioskers, subway maintenance men, bus drivers, janitors, and policemen shop?  Where, in fact, do they live? Not in the neighborhood; not since the entire West Side went condo.

It's still a polyglot world, but there's much less Spanish and a lot more Russian, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic.

More novelties: there's a Duane Reade (sometimes two) on every street and there's a second crowded Starbucks visible from the Starbucks where you sit poring over your wireless laptop and nursing your gigantico skinny dry vanilla latte. In the 1960s, there were seven movie theaters within walking distance -- including the New Yorker and the Thalia, the mother churches of cinema worship. Now, there are none -- nor even a single dvd rental store. It's all Netflix and downloads.

There's been a phenomenal growth of personal services: not just the barbershops and hairdressers of old, but also whole galaxies of nail care shops. Who could have imagined that in the new millennium, fingernails would become the cornerstone of the economy? An economy of which I'm not a part; my nail care consists of occasionally biting off a sliver of stray keratin and taking a cosmetic nibble or two at the paronychium. I don't believe I've spent a nickel, lifetime, on my nails, nor do I intend to do so. Nope, no manicures, nor pedicures, nor medicures (what the heck is a medicure?) nor massages nor aromatherapy for me. Nor will I have my ears candled (a process that one medical website calls 'useless and dangerous") or my eyebrows threaded or any part of my body, public or private, waxed. It appears that every facial feature and every organ has an entire industry dedicated to its hygiene and its remediation. Is the upper West Side experiencing an outbreak of good health? Or a triumph of narcissism?

One final observation: since we lived here, many expensively-architected fancy-shmancy private schools have appeared. Meanwhile, public schools have been allowed to slide further into poverty. Ugly, concrete block buildings surrounded by chainlink fence and razor wire -- not temples of learning, but prisons.The gap between rich and poor, evident then, has become a chasm. Manhattan is safer and more livable than it was (at least for the prosperous), but it will not be truly healed until its citizenry moves beyond "private wealth and public squalor."

Jane Austen Nude

Today's posting is contributed by the art historian, Alan Saxe-Popette. 

Jane Austen's quiet private life has been thoroughly explored for events of emotional import. It is therefore a wonder that there has been such inattention to the portrait, identified some forty years ago,in which the novelist, nude, reclines on a green baize fainting couch. One would have supposed that writers of fiction and especially film directors would have seized on the opportunities that the portrait presents, especially since the only other surviving representation of Jane Austen is her sister Cassandra's amateurish, unflattering, and essentially asexual sketch. The Austen nude has faded inexplicably from view. Older readers of this blague will surely remember the mid-1960s flurry of journalistic interest, some of it nasty and anti-feminist -- a cover story in Time ("Did Jane Disrobe") as well as the scandalmongering reportage of Huntley and Brinkley.  But just like the revelations concerning Wordsworth's French mistress and like the notoriety that greeted Edith Wharton's pornographic short story Beatrice Palmato, the brouhaha over the Austen nude quickly evaporated.

The portrait itself, a full-length study in chalk and colored pencils, resides in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle, which is housed in Room 319 of the New York Public Library, and  may be viewed upon request. Perhaps it is unfortunate that the first account of the Austen nude appeared in the pages of the Keats-Shelley Journal, a publication sponsored by the Pforzheimer.  More scholarly attention might have been paid if the identification of the portrait had been announced in a journal of larger circulation, such as Nineteenth-Century Fiction or Romantic Studies.

The late R. W. Chapman, who knew more about Jane Austen than any scholar of his generation, resisted the idea that the portrait was genuine. His attack on its authenticity, published as an appendix to the revised edition of the Complete Works of Jane Austen, is scathing, but is rather a reflection of Chapman's Victorian prejudices than of the facts. Chapman was a traditionalist who believed that young females, even brilliant female novelists, should be, above all, decorous. His Jane Austen was a bulwark of conservative and hierarchical values and he would certainly not have recognized the modern revisionist conception that situates the novelist in an uneasy alliance with transgression and subversion. In private, moreover, Chapman was notoriously prudish. He is reported to have confessed to his great friend Kathleen Tillotson (herself a well-known scholar of English fiction) that "I just don't want to go to my grave thinking that I've looked upon dear Miss Austen's pubic hair."

In the 1960s, there was considerable resistance to the authenticity of the portrait, perhaps because, compared to Cassandra's prim drawing, the new rendering revealed a young woman in full beauty and bloom. Jane retains the familiar apple cheeks and the dark hair, but her eyes are knowing and forthright rather than subdued, and her long, glossy and loose black locks, secured only by a single cherry-colored ribbon, appear as they were described by Jane Austen's grand-niece, who recalled her aunt having "large dark eyes and a brilliant complexion, and long long black hair down to her knees." Opinions will of course vary, but many will find that in this portrait, Jane looks somewhat Italian or Gypsy or perhaps even Levantine. Her expression is eager, her waist slim, her legs short but shapely, and her breasts, despite their surprisingly large aureoles, magnificent.   

Misgivings about the portrait's authenticity survived even until the 1970s. But then it was established that the chamber in which Austen posed was the drawing room at Steventon that she shared with Cassandra. There's a useful description in Constance Hill's Jane Austen, Her Homes and Friends (1902). Hill, it is well known, had access to the Lefroy family papers. The Lefroys were important connections of the Austens. It was James Lefroy who wooed Jane and then inexplicably broke off his relationship with her and retired to Ireland. Jane's brother James Austen's daughter married a Lefroy; Jane's grand-niece Anna Lefroy, the child of this union, left a remembrance of her great-aunt's sitting room. "I remember," wrote Anna, "the common looking carpet with its chocolate ground that covered the floor, and some portions of furniture. A pointed press, with shelves above for books, that stood with its back on the wall next the Bedroom, & opposite the fireplace; my Aunt Jane's Pianoforte -- & above all, on a table between the windows, above which hung a looking glass, 2 tonbridge-ware work boxes of oval shape, fitted up with ivory barrels containing reels for silk, yard measures, etc." In the portrait, these two same oval Tunbridge work-boxes appear just to the left and behind Jane Austen's head; the keyboard of "Aunt Jane's Pianoforte" is in part visible to the right; the oval cheval-glass is exactly as Anna described it. Moreover, the ingenious young art historian Oksana Sartry, who, using powerful magnifiers, was able to identify the books in the press, discovered not only Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison and Robert Bage's Hermsprong, both novels known to have been much studied by Austen, but also a folio with the words "Volume the Second" inscribed on its spine. "Volume the Second" was the name that the novelist gave her manuscript collection of early works (which included the unfinished novel, The Watsons). With this confirmatory evidence, skepticism was at last dispelled. Austen's remark to her sister Cassandra (reporting on a day spent with James Lefroy), "imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking" took on new meaning.  And what did Jane mean when she wrote to her sister, "here I am once more in this Scene of Dissipation & vice, and I begin already to find my Morals corrupted."

What was the exact occasion for the portrait and why was it found among the Lefroy papers? There are two views. The first is that Jane sent it to James Lefroy as part of the courtship process: "here's what you get if you marry me." This explanation is certainly possible, but the greater likelihood is that it was a "revenge" portrait: "here's what you have scorned."

That the drawing has sexual content is undeniable, but it is absurd to think, as some have suggested, that Jane Austen would allow herself to be depicted in a post-orgasmic state. It is true that Jane's skin is rosy and flushed and that her plump nipples are erect, but the placement of her hand just above the tendrils of abundant black hair is traditional and would not seem to indicate that she had pleasured herself. Those who argue that Jane had recently masturbated seem, frankly, to have surrendered to prurience. I myself, after the very closest scrutiny, can discover no evidence whatsoever of what one writer has called "a clitoral cleft in arousal." Jane Austen was bold, but she would never, ever, have exceeded the bounds of modesty.

Why I Hate Machines

So I've been trying, by god, to figure out why the riding mower has been cutting on an angle, the right side leaving the grass higher than the left, and I've been crawling under the machine looking at the cutting deck from all angles and not able to understand the mechanism except it's obvious that it's not parallel to the ground, and my neighbor Ed was by and he's kind of a genius with machinery which I most definitely am not, and I said to him, Ed would you take look and see why the mower is cutting at an angle and he said, Well, here's one problem your left rear tire is flat which made me feel really dumb because I was so busy trying to understand the suspension system on the deck that I never even looked at the tire and I said, Flat, how can it be flat, I never run it anywhere but over the grass and he said, Well, look right there it's got a thorn in it, A thorn, I said, how can a thorn penetrate a Carlyle Super Tuff tire, and he said, Oh yeah they do that, but I can fix it, I'm busy today but I'll do it tomorrow I have a system you just push through what looks like knitting needle with sticky stuff on the end and pull it out, it will seal it right up, it's a tubeless tire isn't it? and I said Yes it is, and if you could fix it tomorrow that would be great, well next day he took the tire and tried it his way but he couldn't get it to hold air so he says Take it down to PTOs and they'll patch it from the inside, so I put it in the trunk of the car and drove to town and they fixed it and then I put it back on the axle, it has three small washers and one large washer and one of those spring nuts and I started the engine but by god the mower wouldn't move and I thought what the heck is going on here, I put everything back exactly as it came off and it was running just fine when I took it off so what could I possibly be doing wrong, I took the wheel off and put it on again and I still couldn't figure it out so I got in the car and drove over to Ed's, he was cutting wood but he stopped and I said, Ed, what's wrong with that lamb, why do you have him penned up all by himself and he said, you know how the lambs are always butting heads and pushing each other around, well I went out in the field and he was down, couldn't move a bit, so I took him home and I don't know whether his brains are addled or he's really hurt, I thought we'd better have him slaughtered but you can see he's doing better, getting up and eating so we'll hold off a day, and I said maybe he has a bad back like me, and he said, No, he's too young for a bad back, so I said, Well, maybe he has vertigo like you, which is not all that funny because Ed lost a week to vertigo last June, and he kind of laughed and said, Well, is your mower working now, and I said, Not exactly, the engine's fine and the belt turns but it's not moving frontwards or backwards and he said, How can that be, I'll come over and take a look so later that day he came by and sure enough it wouldn't move, so we took off the wheel again and studied it but I certainly couldn't figure it out and he couldn't either, everything looked good and perfect, we puzzled over it for a while and then he called the John Deere dealer in North Haverhill and the technician said maybe you lost the key when you took off the wheel and Ed said, O yes of course, we must have lost the key, I didn't think of that, and I said What the heck is the key and he said Well, in a lot of these machines the axle is broached which means there's a slot in it and a slot in the wheel and you have to have a key which is just a small piece of metal otherwise the axle will spin but the wheel won't rotate, so we looked all around for the lost key but couldn't find it and then Ed said, Look at your tire they didn't even mount it right, it's out of round, you'd better bring it back in and while you're there check if the key is in the shop somewhere, it might have stuck in the wheel because of the grease, so I took the wheel and put it in the trunk and drove back to PTOs and showed him that the tire was out of round, the owner was embarrassed about the bad job he had done and wouldn't even look me in the eye but he re-mounted the tire and when he finished I said, By the way, you didn't happen to find the key I lost it, and he said I'll look inside but he couldn't find it, so he said I'll make you another one which was nice of him though the key is only at most a 50 cent piece but it saved me from having to go to Napa Auto Parts or drive 30 minutes to North Haverhill to the John Deere dealer, so he made the part it took him only a couple of minutes, he had the stock he just had to cut and file a two inch piece, I brought it home and I put the key in the slot and put the wheel on, I had to use a board for a lever to get the rear of the mower up in the air and it was tricky because I held the board with my right hand and the wheel in the left but I managed alright and then I got on the tractor and started the engine and everything worked perfectly except that the tractor still wouldn't go either forward or backward, I took the wheel off and put it on again, but it still wouldn't work, so I walked over to Ed's and I said, Ed, I can't for the life of me figure it out, I got the key and it fit just perfectly but the machine still doesn't move, and he said It's got to work, it makes perfect sense, I said, Hey look, your lamb looks a lot better but why did you put a hog panel across your driveway, he said It's because of the dog, he's been getting out, tomorrow he's going to be snipped and that will quiet him down a bit, which is a good idea because the dog is far too friendly even to me and I don't particularly like the dog, he's a beagle mix, not as bad as their other dog which was a rescue dog a bulldog, very ugly in my opinion, which also got out and trotted over to the pottery down the road where he was  seen running off with the Murrays' Silkie in his mouth, a Silkie is a fancy chicken, they charged Ed a hundred and sixty dollars for vet bills and mental anguish, the chicken died anyway, so Ed got out his rifle and shot the bulldog and then dug a hole four feet deep, he said that all the way down it was nothing but powder, it's been that dry the last few weeks, anyway Ed came by again and we tried the machine and it wouldn't go forward or backward and I was about to surrender and load up the damn thing and take it back to the dealer when we lifted both back wheels off the ground and suddenly the axle which hadn't been turning even though the belt had been turning started to spin, it must have been something about the gears that didn't mesh properly anyway we put the wheel back on again and I started it up and by god it ran as good as ever but I had wasted a whole day fussing with the mower just because it had picked up a goddamn thorn probably blackberry which is in brief why I hate machines

Seventy-two Virgins

It appears to be the case that martyrs of a certain persuasion will be rewarded in the afterlife with the ministrations of seventy-two virgins. It would take a theologian of extraordinary skill to explain why acts of violence should be rewarded with sexual indulgence. I raise a far less knotty question: if the aim is bliss, then why virgins?  Why not women of experience and expertise? Benjamin Franklin, the most practical of our Founding Fathers, was dogmatic on this nice point: shun the callow in favor of women who've been around the block, because "every Knack... by Practice [is] capable of improvement."  I think that B-Frank would agree that there is something about the virgins-for-martyrs deal that's kind of, how shall I say, impractical or counter-intuitive or even, dare I say, kinky.   

Here's a second theological conundrum. What is the reward when the martyr is herself female? I must presume that she will be blessed with seventy-two male virgins -- if not, there's a very serious afterlife asymmetry. Not to reward females who give themselves to the cause would be a statement that the culture of religious martyrdom does not support sexual equality, which I can hardly bring myself to believe. But in the case of female martyrs, the matter of sexual expertise is further exacerbated. Specifically, of what conceivable value are seventy-two knackless male virgins? If we postulate that each male virgin is good for between ten and fifteen seconds of actual intercourse, it follows that they will be consumed at the rate of four to six every minute, which means that on average a martyress, however patient, would enjoy a sum of only twelve or so minutes of pleasure (setting aside time for re-mounting and repositioning), which is surely insufficient exercise to produce a meaningful let alone heavenly experience.   

Nor will it be all that great for the male virgin at the end of the queue who has to settle for sloppy seventy-seconds.   

Frost

When I lived in Cambridge in the first years of the 1960s, it was not unusual to encounter, on a warm winter afternoon, the poet Robert Frost walking slowly along Massachusetts Avenue. I'd watch him as he strolled over to Plympton Street and to the Grolier -- which was then as now, I imagine, the only all-poetry bookstore in America. One day I crept behind him to the shop and sat in a secluded corner, studying him as he browsed the shelf of new arrivals. With his leathery old skin and unruly iridescent white hair, he was an iconic figure -- famous not only among friends of poetry but among readers of Life and Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. When he "said" his poems at Sanders Theater (in late 1961 or 1962), he filled every seat and every standpoint of a large auditorium. He was an honest-to-goodness celebrity, a presence, a man who had created a body of work and had earned a reputation that no poet or cultural figure today can rival.

At JFK's inauguration in January of 1961, Frost commanded a national television audience. He started to read the poem he had composed for the occasion, but his 87-year-old eyes were blinded by the bright sunlight and he couldn't continue. There was a moment of embarrassment, and I remember cringing in sympathy with his struggle. But then he gathered himself and recited from memory, in a rejuvenated voice, "The Gift Outright." "She was our land more than a hundred years/ Before we were her people." It's an almost mystical but grandly patriotic poem about rude, unlettered colonials transforming themselves into a Nation. "Such as we were we gave ourselves outright.../ To the land vaguely realizing westward,/ But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, / Such as she was, such as she would become."

Frost died in January of 1963, just ten months before our young president was shot. It's almost impossible now to reconstruct the effervescence of the Kennedy years -- a brief exciting moment between the lukewarm bland Eisenhower administration and the interminable nightmare of Vietnam. Frost's "Dedication," the poem that he couldn't read at the inaugural, is not his best work, but its last lines catch the spirit of the time. The poet took his inspiration from the Rome of Augustus and of Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. "It is no miracle the mood is high," he wrote.  "It makes the prophet in us all presage/ The glory of the next Augustan age/ Of a power leading from its strength and pride,/ Of young ambition eager to be tried,/ Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,/ In any game the nations want to play./ A golden age of poetry and power/ Of which this noonday's the beginning hour." Frost proved to be a better poet than a prophet. Instead of a golden age of poetry and power, we've had, after the three horrible murders, a parade of fools: first the crook, then the senile puppet, then the congressional fellatio hunters, and now the smirking, dangerous dunce. 

Like the nation, I too am in steep decline. It used to be that I could memorize short poems with ease. Nowadays, it's a titanic effort of will. To forestall hardening of the mind, and in a desperate effort to keep my brain supple, I decided to memorize Frost's "Birches." It's when you learn a poem by heart that you truly appreciate it, and so I can now say with absolute confidence and authority that "Birches" is a poem not just for the age, but for all time. In point of fact, I've been bothering myself about how Frost will fare in civilizations as far into the future as Virgil and Horace are in our past. Will students of poetry be able to grasp the subtlety of "Birches?" The story, the plot itself, will pose no problem. Frost knows that birches are bent to the ground by ice-storms, but he would fancifully "prefer to have some boy bend them/ As he went out and in to fetch the cows." For the "boy," tree-climbing is a high art: "He always kept his poise/ To the top branches, climbing carefully/ With the same pains you use to fill a cup/ Up to the brim, and even above the brim." Frost then shifts perspective, and the fantasy that birches are bent not by ice-storms but by athletic youngsters transforms into a memory, a truth: "So was I once myself a swinger of birches;/ And so I dream of going back to be." He closes the poem with a vision in which he leaves the real world and starts life anew: "I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,/ And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk/ Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,/ But dipped its top and set me down again." Even though our descendants will read the poem in an extinct language and in an edition encrusted with explanatory footnotes, I'm sure that they'll understand its outline. (I imagine too that some future scholar will make his career by explicating the line "A boy too far from town to learn baseball.") But will anyone in 4006 A.D. be sufficiently conversant with everyday twentieth-century American English to recognize the skill with which Frost masks his deep insights into the relationship between the material and the eternal with art-that-hides-art colloquialisms? Or appreciate to the full the sly understatement of "one could do worse than be a swinger of birches?" The beauty and the profundity of "Birches" tease us who share Frost's language. What a challenge the poem will be eighty generations down the road! Moreover, Is there even the remotest possibility that our successors will be equipped to grasp how much of Roman poetry (Ovid especially) Frost distills into "I'd like to get away from earth awhile/ And then come back to it and begin over./ May no fate willfully misunderstand me/ And half grant what I wish and snatch me away/ Not to return." Frost possessed the genius to keep us in touch with our past and to connect us to our future.

I wish that I had talked to Robert Frost that winter day when he was trudging on. "How are you, Mr. Frost," I might have asked. Perhaps he would have smiled or said "Nice day."

That would have been a good thing to recall.   

The P. S. 217 "Assembly"

During the 1940s and early 1950s, when I was a pupil at P. S. 217, the school auditorium was given over to formal weekly "assemblies." Boys were required to wear white shirts and green ties (girls had a specified outfit as well, but in those days I was so unconscious of a) girls and b) their costumes that I'm darned if I can remember what was worn by the young ladies). Before entering the auditorium, classes lined up in "size places." P. S. 217 was particularly strong on "size places" -- a point of particular humiliation for me, because I was, as WS says about R of G, "so long a-growing, and so leisurely" that I was by far the smallest child in every class from first grade to eighth. After we found our assigned seats (boys in one row, girls in the next), our principal Miss Bildersee, a formidable and incredibly ancient woman with nostrils so huge and distended that an agile boy could go spelunking in them, would perform the mandatory reading from the Bible. Blessings on her fond old heart, Miss Bildersee regularly choose melodious passages from the book of Psalms. I was particularly struck by the eloquence of "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful," with its abrupt counterbalancing antistrophe: "the ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away." After the Bible reading and some announcements, there was usually a performance of some sort. Choral readings, the oddest of art forms, were far too frequent. I remember that I was once a member of a sextet of quavering sopranos who memorized and recited the patriotic World War I poem "In Flanders Fields." What in the world was a second-grader supposed to make of "We are the Dead. Short days ago/ We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,/Loved and were loved, and now we lie/In Flanders fields./Take up our quarrel with the foe:/To you from failing hands we throw/The torch; be yours to hold it high./If ye break faith with us who die/ We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/ In Flanders fields." (Such poppycock was received as true literary greatness. It would have been beyond utopian imagination that our teachers would have known or introduced us to the distinguished WWI poetry of Wilfred Owen or Isaac Rosenberg or Siegfried Sassoon or Edward Thomas.) Then our music specialist Mrs. Georgia Keiselbach would sit down at the piano and teach us songs, some of them also left over from the first World War:  "Keep the home-fires burning,/ While your hearts are yearning,/ Though your lads are far away/ They dream of home;/ There's a silver lining/Through the dark cloud shining,/Turn the dark cloud inside out,/Till the boys come home." And also: "Give me some men who are stout-hearted men/ Who will fight for the right they adore... Shoulder to shoulder, and bolder and bolder."  And: "Tramp, tramp, tramp along the highway/Tramp, tramp, tramp, the road is free...  We're planters and Canucks/ Virginians and Kentucks/Captain Dick's own Infantry/ Captain Dick's own Infantry," which I now know to have come from Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta (1910) and which provoked a great deal of surreptitious tittering because it had the word "dick" in it. In those unenlightened days we sang very many overtly religious songs: "White Christmas" and "Silent Night" and "Easter Parade." I much admired the tune of "The First Noel" but I had no idea what was meant by "born is the king of Israel" -- the only Israel I knew of was a recently-founded democracy. I loved the Thanksgiving hymn "We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing;/ He chastens and hastens His will to make known;/ The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing,/ Sing praises to His name; He forgets not his own" and many more stanzas, none of which I could parse or understand (still can't, in fact!). Another Thanksgiving song: "Over the river and through the woods/ To grandmother's house we go/The horse knows the way/To carry the sleigh...," which I found to be curiously disorienting because my particular grandmother lived in a tiny third-floor walkup on noisy and sweaty Coney Island Avenue. We sang the immensely mysterious Lord's Prayer (in the Schubert setting, I later discovered). Why did we so?  Were the heathens and Jews among us expected to convert on the spot? I much preferred the patriotic songs, although even they too were permeated with inexplicable theology. We were fervent jingos.   Not one, but two full stanzas of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic": "In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,/With a glory in His bosom, that transfigures you and me/ As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,/ For God is marching on." And two stanzas also of "The Star-Spangled Banner": "Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand/ Between their loved home and the war's desolation!/ Blessed with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land/ Praise the Power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation./Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,/ And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'" I preferred the rousing "O Columbia! the gem of the ocean,/ The home of the brave and the free,/ The shrine of each patriot's devotion,/ A world offers homage to thee" and "God Bless America" as well as the jingoist exceptionalism and cluttered syntax of "Our father's God, to thee/ Author of liberty/ To thee we sing./  Long may our land be bright/ With freedom's holy light;/ Protect us by thy might/ Great God our King." 

Here's a song we were distinctly not taught and did not sing: "This land is your land, this land is my land/ From California, to the New York Island./ From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters/ This land was made for you and me." We especially did not sing: "In the squares of the city  -- in the shadow of the steeple/  Near the relief office -- I see my people/ And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin' /If this land's still made for you and me."

December 17.  I now remember that we sang musical settings to two familiar poems. The first, Emma Lazarus's inscription on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Hey, that's my grandparents you're calling "wretched refuse." The second, Joyce Kilmer's horrid "Trees": "I think that I shall never see/  A poem lovely as a tree...  A tree who's hungry mouth is pressed/ Against the earth's sweet-flowing breast" etc.  This song was only palatable because it allowed us to say the word "breast" out loud. 

(Thanks to Steve and to Barry, graduates of P. S. 217, for jogging my memory;  thanks also to David [P. S. 102].

Graduates of P. S. 217 who happen to stumble onto this site: feel free to add comments or to forward this post to classmates with whom you might be in touch.)

Prayer Science

According to The New York Times (3/31/2006), the world of prayer science is all in a dither. A new study has apparently demonstrated that "prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery." The study was a big, expensive deal: ten years of work at a cost of $2.4 million (contributed by the ever-zealous Templeton Foundation, a powerful supporter of prayer research). The details are utterly and weirdly fascinating. "Researchers monitored 1802 patients at six hospitals who received coronary bypass surgery. The patients were broken into three groups. Two were prayed for; the third was not. Half of the patients who received the prayers were told that they were being prayed for; half were told that they might or might not receive prayers. The researchers asked the members of three congregations -- St. Paul's Monastery in St. Paul; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester, Mass.; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City -- to deliver the prayers, using the patients' first names and the first initials of their last names. The congregations were told that they could pray in their own way, but they were instructed to include the phrase "for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.'" The shocking result: "researchers found no difference between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not." Prayer, it would appear (or intercessory prayer as this variety is called), does not change things. 

I admire the dedicated men and women of science who put heart and soul into this project, but with all due respect, I must question both their conclusions and their protocols. For starters, the inference that prayer doesn't work is far too broad. Inasmuch as the scientists engaged only Christians to pray, all that they proved was that Christian prayer doesn't work. It's marvelously ethnocentric to suggest that just because Christians tanked, other religions could not succeed. It was Bailey Smith, the President of the Southern Baptist Convention, who authoritatively proclaimed that "God does not hear the prayer of a Jew." And yet, in a stunning theological upset, the scientific evidence now proves that God Almighty does not hear the prayers of Christians. But such a conclusion is itself far too hyperbolic. In actual fact, all that the study established is that God did not hear the prayers of three particular groups of prayer-providers. It's certainly a black mark against the Teresian Carmelites and their friends, and it will be a cold day in hell before they see another Templeton prayer contract, but there's nothing to say that Southern Baptists, even Bailey Smith himself, with his private line to the Almighty, might not have had more sway with the Great Jehovah.

If the researchers had not been so blindly and thoughtlessly ethnocentric, they might have solicited the prayers of people of various faiths, especially those praying to different gods. Or even better: they might have assembled disparate groups of prayer providers. In one set, for example, there would be a Catholic, a Jehovah's Witness, and a Hindu; in another, a Muslim, a Wiccan, and a Methodist; in a third, a Scientologist, a Baptist, and a Muggletonian. Although the number of possible permutations is intimidating, the cause is noble: to determine impartially which of these groups can best cut the prayer mustard. It's wrong to put the entire burden on Christians. Scientists need to mix and match the various religions so that they can discover the most effective synergistic combination, or as it might better be called, the appropriate prayer cocktail.

In addition, the study is guilty of flagrant mishandling of dosage. There was simply no control over the amount of prayer that was administered. Just as traditional medicines come in cubic centimeters, prayer comes in units of time. Let's say that one person praying for one minute yields one prayer unit.  Pending further study, there's no way to establish exactly how many prayer units a heart patient might need. For a bypass, fifty prayer units might be a minimum dosage, but perhaps twice or three times as many units might be necessary to alleviate the symptoms of a hallucinator of witches, extraterrestrials, or other supernatural beings. It's entirely possible that the prayers in this study failed simply because they didn't meet a minimum prayer-unit threshold. Moreover, it's important not to over-prescribe. For all we know, excessive prayer might precipitate iatrogenic illnesses. And it's also a question of efficiency: once an optimum dosage can be established, prayer providers can go about their business and not waste their time generating superfluous and expensive prayer units.

Moreover, prayer scientists seem to have given no serious consideration to the group power of prayer providers. Given the present abysmal state of prayer science, it's still unknown whether prayers are more effective when delivered by just one or a very few providers, or in large choruses. Jews seem to think that a minyan, or quorum, is ten, but hard science has not confirmed this number. It's therefore imperative to experiment with different size groups in order to establish a proper medical-minyan. This is not easy, or inexpensive, but it's essential.  It would indeed be unfortunate if it turns out that a thousand prayer providers are necessary to improve the condition of just one bypass patient, but good golly, the Ancient of Days works in mysterious ways, and it's not for us to question His prayer needs.

There are some other areas in which more scientific rigor is required. A)  different diseases: just because prayer didn't work for bypasses doesn't mean it won't work for scrofula. Perhaps some diseases are more prayer-responsive than others. B) fervor: prayer science has made the naive error of assuming that all prayer providers are equal. Yet the unalterable laws of random distribution determine that some people will pray more effectively than others. In point of fact, it's entirely likely that some prayer providers will be more effective with one disease than another. If I were a patient, I'd be mighty bent out of shape (and might even seek legal recourse) if I were assigned a prayer provider who had a proven track record with ulcers but who amounted to zilch for my hip replacement.  C) identification: prayer providers were given only the first name and initial of their prayee. But "Bob S." is entirely too vague-- there might be hundreds of "Bob S"'s all over the world undergoing bypass surgery at any given time. How the blue blazes is the Lord of Hosts supposed to know which particular "Bob S" is meant?  Fortunately, there's an easy solution to this problem. Prayer providers should continue to pray for Bob S., but just remember to add the last four digits of his social security or major credit card number. 

I'm not the only person disappointed with this study. According to the Times, "Bob Barth, the spiritual director of Silent Unity, the Missouri prayer ministry, said the findings would not affect the ministry's mission. 'A person of faith would say that this study is interesting,' Mr Barth said, 'but we've been praying a long time and we've seen prayer work, we know it works, and the research on prayer and spirituality is just getting started.'"  Bob B's assertion that "prayer works" is anecdotal thinking and has absolutely no merit whatsoever, but I can't imagine a single person who wouldn't agree with him that prayer science is "just getting started"-- and also that it has a long bumpy road to travel. Fortunately, the Bush administration invested over $2 million of our tax revenues in prayer research, with more in the pipeline, so some revolutionary breakthroughs in the spiritual sciences soon might be achieved.  We'll be waiting.

What We Read in the Fifties: The Return of the Native

In Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878), Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye are brimming with impetuous youthful lust. They meet at a deserted spot on Egdon Heath -- a “vast tract of unenclosed wild” in southwestern England. Here’s how Hardy describes their moment of passion:   

 

          “’My Eustacia.’

          ‘Clym dearest’

          They remained long without a single utterance, for no language could reach the level of their  condition: words were as the rusty implements of a bygone barbarous epoch, and only to be occasionally tolerated.

          ‘I began to wonder why you did not come,’ said Yeobright when she had withdrawn a little from his embrace.”

 

Instead of the eager hands and tongues that a modern novelist would supply, Hardy substitutes a sentence about the inadequacies of language. Even so mild an allusion to physical pleasure was shocking to Victorian moralists, who regularly rebuked Hardy for ‘vulgarity.’ Hardy’s last and best novel, Jude the Obscure, was derided as Jude the Obscene.

 

I myself had no idea that Hardy was a breaker of sexual taboos when I first read The Return of the Native in 1955. During the fifty intervening years, I’ve read almost every one of Hardy’s many books, some of them--Jude the Obscure in particular—repeatedly and with great admiration. Why did I not revisit The Return of the Native until this past week? The silly truth is that the novel was required reading in English class, and inasmuch as I was an alienated and unhappy high school student, I made it a point of honor to dislike assigned books.

 

There’s also a second and more substantive reason:The Return of the Native was truly disorienting for provincial city kids like myself simply because so much of it turns on landscape. The novel is all about the way various characters respond to Egdon Heath, a furze-covered “somber stretch of rounds and hollows,” that is isolated, extensive, unchanging, brooding, dotted with primeval pagan barrows, and populated by sheep, shepherds and heath-croppers. To understand Hardy’s Wessex landscape,I would have had to overcome two barriers: my appalling lack of imagination and my inexperience with geography. Perhaps some of my classmates could visualize Egdon Heath. Many of them came from families that owned automobiles, and had consequently voyaged beyond city limits. They had looked upon an expanse of land larger than a baseball field and upon feathered bipeds more exotic than the flocks of pigeons that guanoed the steps of the Newkirk Avenue subway station. 

 

Had I been less put off by unfamiliar scenery and less hostile to assigned texts, I might have recognized that sparse Egdon and my crowded concrete neighborhood had much in common. Both places were backwaters untouched by modernity. Neither offered much in the way of education -– either individuals who possessed any, or schools that were genuinely dedicated to providing it. My territory, like Egdon Heath, was a place which anyone who happened to prosper, even a little, speedily abandoned -- to the port city of Budmouth in Hardy’s world, and to “the island,” that is, the new prosperous suburbs of Queens and Nassau, in mine.

 

In the 1950s, I myself had only one big idea -- that there must be a world elsewhere. Why then did I not sympathize with Eustacia Vye, whose sole and only desire is to get herself away from Egdon?  She is as out of her element treading aimlessly on the heath as I felt myself to be when I bicycled an endless series of claustrophobic streets. More to the point, why didn’t I identify with the reddleman Diggory Venn? Diggory lives alone in his spring-van and wanders the heath selling reddle (a red dye used for marking sheep). If I had been capable of reading imaginatively, I would have taken Diggory to heart. He is Romanticism’s archetypical outsider and a character whom I should or could have recognized as a fellow sufferer. I too was solitary, introspective, and on a quest for knowledge, but these traits were not understood –- as I understand them now -- as healthy questioning but instead were stigmatized as psychological disability (“Why are you moping? Why is your nose always in a book?”) An understanding of Diggory Venn might have lent dignity and historical context to my private woes.

 

Even more to the point: there I was, awash with the imperious hormones of adolescence, and yet unable to notice that, although reticent about gropings and thrustings, The Return of the Native attaches enormous importance to sex. While I was mesmerized by the superficiality of Blackboard Jungle and suchlike novels, I somehow failed to observe that Thomas Hardy was very very serious about love and lust, loyalty and betrayal, passion and jealousy — and that The Return of the Native challenges its readers to acknowledge that sexuality was as dangerous as it was redemptive. Was there a more important lesson for me to have learned? Did my sixteen-year-old self catch the least glimmer of it? Not the slightest.

"Crosspatch, draw the latch" and Industrial Capitalism

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

                               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 meaning than poems of this kind usually contain.

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 or imagine 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 meager 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 asked 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.