Dr. Metablog

A Few More Unusual Words New to Me

A matamata is a species of turtle found in South America. It's odd looking, even for a turtle.

The word matamata is an example of a reduplicative.  It is of unknown etymology.

 

A kurgan is a tumulus or mound erected over a grave, at first in the southern Asian steppes (4th century BCE) and later throughout southeast Europe. I myself saw many kurgans in Bulgaria, but for some reason never learned the word. A saiga is a kind of antelope. A zander is a European fish similar to a perch. A chillum is a kind of decorated bamboo pipe "often sold in places like Haight-Ashbury and Greenwich Village." A punkah was, in the late but not-so-great lamented days of the Raj, a large swinging fan, operated by a servant called a punkah wala. Arrack or arac is an alcoholic beverage made from the fermented sap of coconut flowers, which sounds delicious but is probably not available at our local liquor store. The astragalus, more often called the talus, is a bone in the human foot. The word's similarity to asparagus is inadvertent but nevertheless amusing. A condyle is "a protuberance at the end of a bone." A swidden is an area of land cleared to farm by slashing and burning. Swidden, a truly lovely word, is derived from an Old Norse verb meaning "to burn"-- as well it should be.

 

Lamellar armor was made from small plates of leather or bronze. Here's a terracotta statue of a soldier wearing scute-like armor. 

 

A guimpe (pronounced gimp, apparently), was a short high-necked Victorian blouse designed to be worn under a low-cut dress. It would take a specialist to explain the difference between a guimpe and a fichu. A tarboosh is a variety of fez.

A bident is a two-pronged weapon, two-thirds of a trident. Here's a statue of Hades wielding one:

Could there be a linguistic relationship between bident and Biden? Not likely, because a "biden" was originally a maker of buttons.

Proverbs for a Latter Day

You can take the boy out of Brooklyn, but you can't take the Brooklyn out of the boy.  (Traditional)

The more you hold a baby in the first year, the less you have to hold it later on. (Dr. Catherine Lodyjenski, pediatrician.)

Don't skate to where the puck is; skate to where it's going to be.  (Wayne Gretzky)

Adolescence is not for sissies.  (EHP)

You can't coach seven feet. (Origin unknown)

Enough is as good as a feast.  (Traditional)

Enough is as good as a feast, and sometimes better.  (EHP)

"Both" is always an option.  (KM)

Everyone has a plan until I punch him in the mouth. (Mike Tyson)

Don't look back; someone might be gaining on you.  (Satchel Paige)

If you lose your man, go directly to the basket.  (Emanuel P.)

The only people who idealize the past are those who know nothing about it.  (EHP)

The longer something has been believed by mankind, the less likely it is to be true.  (EHP)

No one know what's going on between two people, even if you're one of them.  (EHP)

What's sauce for the goose is not necessarily sauce for the gander.  (EHP)

The secret of life is to turn routines into rituals.  (Origin unknown)

Nothing ever happens until it happens.  (EHP)

Babies rewire the parental brain. (EHP)

Everything made of wood was once a tree. (Origin unknown)

Your father is an enigma who takes a lifetime to decipher. (Origin unknown)

Never omit an opportunity to do a favor for a friend, and never be embarrassed to accept a favor from a friend.  (Emanuel P.)

Religion: my prince of peace can beat up your prince of peace.  (LERM)

No one owns anything;  the most you can say is that you have a lifetime lease.  (Emanuel P.)

You should be at least as polite to a wife or husband as to a person you meet on the street. (EHP)

Old age is not for sissies.  (Bette Davis)

You can't make old friends. (EHP)

You're immortal until the moment you die. (EHP)

There are no chocolate ice cream cones in the next world.  (LERM)

More Words New to Me

Calipash is the "gelatinous greenish material found underneath the upper half of a turtle's shell." Perhaps this word is well known to turtle-fanciers, but it's brand new to me. Calipash is "esteemed as a delicacy" but should not be confused with calipee, which is a fatty gelatinous light-yellow substance found immediately above the turtle's lower shell. Equally delectable, so say connoisseurs. Here's a dish of mixed calipash and calipee. I confess that it does not look delectable to me. Looks repellent, in fact, but each to his own.

The word calipash is a variant of carapace, the turtle's upper shell. The lower shell is a plastron.

Calipash could be served with pilaus, a Kenya spicey rice dish. One might, or might not, add beeswing to the menu. Beeswing is the "filmy translucent crust" that grows on port that has been bottle-aged.

Zenana is a word of Persian origin which refers to the part of a large house reserved exclusively for women; it is therefore equivalent to harem.  Here's a picture of a rich gentleman visiting a zenana.

 

Such a visitor might carry a yataghan, which is a type of knife or saber (a yataghan is sometimes called a varsak). He might also be accompanied by a dragoman or interpreter. And if he were in a generous mood, he might carry a cairngorm as a potential gift. A cairngorm is a jewel of yellowish smoky quartz. If he possessed 36 bushels of cairngorms, he would have a full chaldron of them. Would he also bring with him a narghile, a kind of hookah?

 

A pelisse once referred to a kind of jacket worn by cavalrymen; in this illustration, the pelisse is the furry item slung over Charles Stewart's shoulder.

 

Later, for unclear reasons, pelisse came to denote a fashionable woman's open coat.

 

Charles Stewart might also be wearing a spatterdash, a legging designed to keep the pants clean. Eventually, spatterdashes became smaller and tidier; so did the word for them, which was diminished to "spats." But even so unpretentious as a word as spats should not be vilipended (or spoken of in an abusive manner).

 

A fichu is an item of women's clothes designed to rescue the wearer of a low cut dress from immodesty.

 

A fichu would probably be made of silk rather than camlet, which is a fabric of goat or camel hair. 

 

A drysalter was once a dealer in glue, varnish, and dyes. In even older times, a salter bought and sold salt, while a wetsalter cured fish.

What We Read in the 1950s: The Philadelphian (1956)

Richard Powell's novel The Philadelphian has not worn well. It was a best-seller in 1956 and was made into a "blockbuster" film, starring Paul Newman, in 1959. We watched the movie (called, for some reason, The Young Philadelphians) on TCM and I was sufficiently intrigued that I ordered up the long-forgotten novel through our blessedly-efficient Interlibrary Loan. Gosh, what a disappointment! The Philadelphian is a pot-boiler, I'm afraid, very mid-century. It's got it all -- three-generations of rags to riches, heroic army service, blighted romance and cheesy sex, and a contrived climactic courtroom showdown. Powell's prose is flat, unstylish, at its best "journalistic," but marred by flights of tough-guy pseudo-Hammettian or Chandleresque prose: "He came slowly downstairs from the bedroom, with the pulse of blood hammering inside his skull like a rivet gun"; "Her head felt like a boiling tea kettle, and her thoughts kept escaping from it like steam"; "The applause had been a cheer for the underdog. Later it had developed that a wolf was romping around in underdog's clothing". Frankly, I'm surprised that the novel achieved such popularity in the years of my youth. Sorry to say but it's a trashy piece of writing.

The film is a bit better; more honest and more disciplined, hugely reliant on Paul Newman's youthful charisma.

Another Astonishing Feat of Memory

I've arrived at the age in which even a momentary lapse of memory is worrisome. Have I at last begun the ineluctable descent into senility? 

But then there's the contrary. When I happen to dredge up some bit of buried knowledge, I experience a rush of triumph. I feel it as evidence that I've put off the inevitable for another couple of weeks -- perhaps even months. And I preen and strut shamelessly. I become unbearable.

At the Phillips, yesterday, we came upon a painting by Giuseppe De Nittis called "Spring" (there's a pretty poor reproduction of it above). I glanced at the picture, and in a flash, without hesitation, announced, "that's a trullo in the left distance."  And I was correct -- my assertion confirmed by the scholarly description on the accompanying wall plaque.

What is a trullo?  It's a building, obviously, a kind of drystone architecture, common in Apulia, usually whitewashed and with a conical roof, often constructed as a temporary shelter for shepherds and other agricultural workers and occasionally for long term occupancy. 

But how does a Flatbush yoot recognize and immediately name a trullo at first glance?  I could be coy and say something like, "Oh, who doesn't know about trulli?" and leave my friends baffled and dazzled by my prodigious memory. 

But of course that would not be the full story.

Some seven or eight years ago, as turisti, we visited an Italian village called Alberobello in Apulia in southern Italy. Here's a picture:

It is, obviously, all trulli -- architecture that is striking and memorable. So it's not mysterious that I would instantaneously recall the building and the name. Not mysterious, but still rather impressive, I think. And temporarily reassuring.

My Gambling Life

When I was a Brooklyn schoolyard "yoot" (sixth or seventh grade I reckon), I impulsively bragged to a group of fellow ragamuffins, "I'll bet a buck that the Dodgers win the pennant." What prompted me to make so uncharacteristically bold a claim? Way out on a limb, I was. One of the guys in the gang immediately jumped: "I'll take that bet." So there I was, stuck. I backed off a bit: "I meant half a dollar." Against my better judgment, it was set down as a bet, even though he and I never actually locked pinkies on the deal. Then the Dodgers lost; so did I. My antagonist badgered me continually for his money. Eventually I paid him off with a 1950 Franklin half-dollar (a mint example of which is now selling on Amazon for $3751 -- you can look it up!). Even more painful, I must confess, is that the character who beat me was the loathsome kid about whom many years ago I wrote an entire blog post called My First Racist. You can look that up also.

I am sure that that half-dollar disaster was my first and only venture into the world of chance and hazard. My lifetime losings therefore: 50¢ (which of course was worth a lot more in 1950 than it is now). I had been burnt once, and once was enough to teach me a lesson. 

I'm not a risk-taker. I don't play cards, not even gin rummy for matchsticks. I don't care about the ponies and never even visited Yonkers or Belmont Park (where my ne'er-do-well uncle lost scads of moolah and came close to losing his wife and family). I've never been to Atlantic City or to Blackhawk. I don't bet on sports and have never even had a clear understanding of what it means to "cover the spread." I was in Las Vegas once, in 1963. We slept in sleeping bags in the desert and rolled into town early the next morning. At one of the many palatial casinos, I came upon addicted gamblers who'd been up all night playing the slots. They were dirty and tired and (is it too strong to say?) degenerate. Desperately in need of Gamblers Anonymous. It was not a glamorous scene.

Moreover, I've never played the numbers. I've never even purchased a lottery ticket.

My resistance to gambling isn't moral -- I don't think that gambling is inherently wrong or sinful. It's just my nature. I'm a frugal guy (some say "skinflint"; others say "cheap as dirt") who can't bear to throw money away.

I think there's a practical reason to resist gambling. Take, for example, the lotteries. They were illegal until a few years ago but now every state seems to sponsor one or more. The result is a huge transfer of money from people who can't afford the loss to the government. Lotteries are in effect a hidden regressive tax -- another subsidy of the rich by the poor. In addition, people who put their hopes in winning a jackpot are, I believe, less inclined to work for the progressive changes that our society needs. People who buy lottery tickets are more likely to become quiescent rather than active. They wait passively for their ship to come in. And it never will.

Now gambling has moved into an even more dangerous phase. Anyone who watches sports on the TV is inundated with ads that encourage gambling. They're omnipresent and unavoidable. It's another gift to us from the Supreme Court, which in 2018, struck down the federal ban on state authorization of sports betting -- a decision that opened the doors to the flood. A peculiar inconsistency: yes, freedom to gamble, but no, no freedom to do what you want with your own womb. And we today learned that gambling has invaded the university. In our state, in 2020, the University of Colorado made a $1.6 million deal to promote sports gambling on campus. A betting company sweetened the arrangement by offering the school an extra $30 every time a student downloaded the company’s app and used a promotional code to place a bet.

To be clear, it wasn't the "University" that made the deal; it was the semi-autonomous Athletic Department -- or, in actuality, the football team. It's an outrageous decision. A respectable university is now in cahoots with a shady industry to promote gambling on campus, and make money off the deal. What future opportunities for corruption with the nose of that particular camel under the tent of innocence!

One solution would be to lessen the emphasis on football. After all, our team is 1-8 so far this year in the Pac-12, having been outscored 374 to 138.  Perhaps Colorado should drop down a notch, say to Division III. We'd thrive, I think, against the lesser competition. But don't bet on it.

 

 

 

My Suicides

I seem to have plowed a path of destruction, suicide-wise, in my earlier years. 

In 1958, I studied "intermediate algebra" with a cheerful, well-regarded teacher named Ruth B. White. One Monday morning, she wrote her new name on the blackboard; she was no longer Mrs. White; she was now Mrs. White-Green. Her supportive students, I remember, applauded enthusiastically. But just as the semester ended and we pupils moved on to trigonometry, newlywed Mrs. White-Green, sadly and incomprehensibly, took her own life. What a shock and puzzle for a gawky innocent Flatbush "yoot." Why, I asked myself, should re-marriage lead so suddenly to suicide (if indeed the two events were at all related)? To me, this tragic occurrence was an early indication that human psychology was a heck of a lot more mysterious than cocooned me had imagined. And then, a few years later, in the spring semester of my second year in college, I enrolled for a course in medieval history with the very distinguished Professor Theodore Maroon. Just a few months after the class concluded, Professor Maroon destroyed himself. Moreover, the very next year, I surveyed early American literature in a course taught by Professor Stephen Emerson Black, who, the following summer, attached a hose to the car exhaust, shut the garage doors, and put an end to his existence.

I need to reassure myself that it was only a few, not all, of my many teachers who pulled the trigger after trying to educate me. Nevertheless, something of a pattern emerged. The trajectory continued in 1960, when, two months after he officiated at our wedding, cigar-chomping Rabbi Herschel Gray walked into Lake Yahnundasis in order to drown himself. Why? I had nary a clue; still don't, in fact. 

Several other people with whom I've crossed paths have also chosen to leave life behind. I remember dour Alfredo Naranja, a college acquaintance from Costa Rica or perhaps Panama. He graduated from Cornell, returned home, and immediately shot himself. I also remember handsome fair-haired Stanley Brown. He was a classmate at EHHS; the two of us studied four years of Latin in the same half-empty schoolrooms. He was not a close friend, though I clearly recall that we occasionally trudged home from school together. Stanley went on to Columbia, where, I was later informed, he graduated first in his class, which is no mean achievement. I wasn't surprised -- he was smart and extremely serious about schoolwork. Stanley then proceeded to Harvard Medical School. Cambridge was my home at that time as well and although our paths had not crossed in four or five years, Stanley telephoned me "out of the blue," as they say, and engaged me in conversations that were longer than I wished. I realize now that I was not as hospitable to him as I might have been. He was lonesome, I think. And then came the news that he had killed himself. I now wish that I had been more cordial -- but how was I to know that he was in such mortal pain? The story has a coda: Stanley's grandparents owned a delicatessen on Ditmas Avenue between East 7th and East 8th. Some years after the suicide, I stopped in at the store for a salami sandwich (or something) and encountered the diminutive elderly storekeepers -- a sad, crushed couple. I knew, or thought I knew, that they were mourning the death of their promising grandchild. Was it my imagination, or was my intuition correct?

And then in graduate school there was Arthur Blue. Arthur was a serious poet and budding scholar. I was a close enough friend that I was invited to his Episcopal wedding in, I think, Wellesley, Massachusetts, where, for the first time in my life, ceremonious kneeling was required of me. Arthur and I kept up an intermittent correspondence after I moved to New York and he to Seattle. I remember congratulating him on the births of his two daughters. But then one December, I received an end-of-the-year card from Barbara Scarlet-Blue, which contained a most memorable sentence: "Of course you have heard of Arthur's suicide." Well, no, I hadn't. I was later informed that Arthur had turned on the gas at his summer house on Vachon Island, where he had been on a solitary vacation. Barbara offered no theory to account for Arthur's act, but now, fifty years later, I suspect, without evidence, that he had sexual identity problems with which he could not cope. If so, he would be another casualty of the commonplace bigotry of that era. Arthur's death is a suicide to which I am not reconciled, and never will be.

And I must also remember Mary Crimson, wife of famous Shakespearean scholar Reginald Crimson, who, depressed, slit her wrists in the bath. It was an absolutely devastating act for Reg and his many friends and admirers.

And then there are the young people, the next generation, who made irreversible decisions when they were far too young to do so. There's the horrible story of Carol Pink, a daughter of friends, who jumped off a balcony in Lincoln Towers in Manhattan and landed, twenty stories below, on the roof of a yellow taxi. Apparently, she tried to grab her brother and pull him down with her, but thankfully she did not succeed. And Alice Magenta, daughter of Hill neighbors, who killed herself in her late teens, a disaster made more excruciating because her elder half-brother had done the same deed few years before. Their parents never recovered from the twin losses; but why should they?  Another young person was twenty-two year old Francesca Crimson, the daughter of a pair of famous artists and herself a promising photographer; another plunge from the roof of a tall building. And also, the teen son of my longtime colleague Richard Purple, who did himself in with drugs, though his religious family chose to believe, against all the evidence, that it was an accidental overdose. 

I respect suicides, even when I don't understand them, because I believe that everyone has a right to do what they want with their own selves. But I am saddened beyond ordinary sadness when very young people take their own lives. If an adolescent or twenty-something boy or girl told me that they had suicidal thoughts, I would say "almost everyone has a few bad years; almost everyone is miserable during adolescence. But almost every one of these unhappy beings turns out to live a productive, useful and essentially happy life. Give it a few years; don't make a precipitous decision. Hold on; hang tough; trust me, it's going to get better."

Obits

Like many of my peers, I've lately taken to reading the obituaries. When I was a youthful fellow, I took pleasure in announcements of births and weddings and anniversaries. No longer, alas; nowadays it's nothing but deaths. Reading about the departed is not a habit of which I'm particularly proud. It's an unsavory fixation upon the newly dead -- and is slightly ghoulish to boot. Yet daily checking of the obits is not without a positive side: often it's exhilarating to read about those amazing folks who have survived wars, dictatorships, displacement, injury, and disease to live accomplished and joyful lives. Obituaries are confusing.

It's not that I search out the obits -- they intrude upon me willy-nilly, like it or not.

For one, there's the New York Times which every day memorializes a couple or a dozen famous persons -- some of them people of my exact age cohort -- who have made a mark, for good or ill, in this our shared life. How does one properly respond to such departures?  With empathy, certainly. But also, not infrequently, with a touch of reluctant (and embarrassing) survivor-superiority.

I must admit that I'm frequently dazzled by these eminent people's list of accomplishments, even if I haven't the least clue about exactly what they have achieved. My own life has been, it would seem, so dominated by hearth and home, so narrow and provincial that I cannot always appreciate the eulogized. Often they have distinguished themselves in areas of expertise that have completely passed me by: computer technologists who have created portals and platforms that will always lie beyond my ken, physicists who have shed light (incomprehensible to me) on dark mysteries, superstar rappers, mvp's in sports that I didn't know existed, billionaire entrepreneurs with their 35,000 sq. ft. homes and their stupendous megayachts, generals and spies, etc., etc., etc. It's astonishing how little these famous folk have touched me; how little overlap there is between their worlds and mine. Clearly, I've inhabited an impermeable bubble.

If so, why do I care, why do I read their obits, why do I bother to applaud or (secretly and guiltily) pooh-pooh their contributions?

But hey, I can't blame it all on the Times. Every second month, I receive an e-mail notice from the college that I attended, back there in the 50s, that lists the recent deaths of my classmates. Only a few years ago, it was a trickle, now it's a flood. While nothing forces me to open the electronic envelope, nevertheless, I do so, "attracted" as David Copperfield once said about Uriah Heep, "in very repulsion." Nor must I read the obituaries of members of the graduate school through which I slipped, barely noticed, sixty-years ago. Do I remember these people? Rarely, even despite occasional parallels in our careers. In addition, I follow the obituaries in the local Daily Camera. People I know, or, given my fifty-year residence in this fair city, those to whom I am connected by a couple or three degrees of separation. Sometimes I am shocked by the death of a person whom I hadn't heard was ill, or who died suddenly in a bicycle crash or a fall from a step stool. Such revelations deeply disturb a Sunday morning. And yet, is it so horribly wrong for me to congratulate myself that it was not I but that other guy who was mowed down by a speeding truck on Canyon Boulevard? (I had just crossed at that same spot a day before, uneventfully. Luck of the draw!)

Does it matter that the obits that I read are not truly representative of my contemporaries? They are accounts of people who have made something of themselves, lived useful and noteworthy lives. I can't help thinking about the others: the ones who slunk off the planet quietly -- those who were drunkards or druggies, or who were seduced by some weird religious cult and disappeared into the desert, or those who gave up the struggle and took their own lives, or those who retreated. along with their six scrawny cats, to a dirty SRO on the upper West Side (except when they venture to the street to harangue passers-by with their idiosyncratic religious theories).

Even the obits that do come to my notice don't tell the whole story. They're curricula vitae that 99% of the time are entirely laudatory. The ancient tag "de mortuis nihil nisi bonum" is rigorously honored. The notices don't state what everyone knows -- that the dearly departed was a notorious skinflint who squeezed the last nickel from his tenants and his employees, stiffed his partners, and regularly harassed his former friends with nuisance suits. They fail to mention that an apparently upstanding citizen was also a neglectful father who eventually ran off with his peroxided mistress and a Harley, or that he was known to the neighbors as the guy who poisoned the Labrador retriever of that nice elderly couple down the street. Or who was fired because he showed up plastered once too often. Sometimes it's what's left out that's most revelatory. Obits should be read with care; I don't always remember to do so.  

But to tell truth it's not the obituaries themselves that bother me --it's my own ambivalence and confusion. Why the fascination with obits? Is it the same impulse that causes commuters to stop and stare at the wreck on the highway? Could it be that I enjoy, genuinely enjoy, reading about the deaths of my fellow creatures? And if I do so, what sort of morally defective person am I?  Do I suffer from an incurable case of schadenfreude -- a delight in the misfortunes of others? Or is it even worse -- mere undiluted gloating? For truly, I am forced to admit, there is something almost triumphant about reading an obit. "He's dead, but I'm alive." How pathetic and reprehensible a feeling -- and how transitory!  When I am in a generous mood, I know that when I read an obituary, I daren't gloat, but should rather mourn the common fate of all of us poor fragile mortals. "Death is certain, sayeth the Psalmist." "No man is an island entire of himself." Although I might gloat today, tomorrow I too will be as dead as a doornail. Another bucket, mine, will be kicked. And yet I do not always experience the fellow-feeling that I would like to admire in myself. If I'm not a bad person, I'm certainly not always a good one. No question but there's a chasm between what I feel and what I am convinced that I should feel.

Some obituaries present special problems. For example, I am immediately put off when the the obituary begins with the foolish new age euphemism, "he transitioned.... "  Such a phrase hardens my heart, I'm sorry to admit. Let's face it; he didn't "transition." He died. But I'm equally saddened by the obituary that announces that "he went to live with the Lord." Such pathetic self-deception.

But the hardest moral problem for me occurs when I come upon the obituary of a person I genuinely disliked. There aren't many of them; I'm not a hater. But still, it's very difficult for me to find genuine empathy for someone I truly loathed. It's wrong for me to rub my hands in triumphant glee because that nasty s. o. b. is gone forever? I would prefer not to be the kind of person who dances on graves.

World's Ugliest Building

The world's ugliest building, or at minimum a top competitor for the title, is located just a block or so down the street from our present abode. Too damn close, in fact, because it broadcasts its miasma of aesthetic gloom directly at me. It's a large ungainly brick cube -- windowless, characterless, featureless, probably designed by an untalented deadwood kind of guy who drew his inspiration from a childhood of toying with Legos. "A doctor can bury his mistakes", said Frank Lloyd Wright many years ago, "but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines." Vines is what this shameless structure needs -- thick ropes of kudzu and lianas, whole Jurassic jungles of them -- but no such luck.

It's a CenturyLink building nowadays, but for what purpose it was originally created is unknown to me. CenturyLink is an "internet provider." No doubt its insides are more beautiful than its outside. How strange! Magnificent images and lovely turns of phrase, unknown and invisible to its neighbors, portal in and portal out! 

I can't get a good picture of the entire building, but, please, take a good luck at this street-side ornament: 

It's a (gasp!) recreation or luncheon area for employees to enjoy their leisure. But notice the furniture: could there be anything more uninviting in all of North America than the cast concrete table and benches?  And against the wall, unconcealed, a decoration of some sort of gas-regulating apparatus. Perhaps to be used as a foot rest! The bars suggest that the architect must have recently visited either a zoo or a prison, perhaps both. An employee who actually made use of these facilities must necessarily imagine him/herself to be an inmate on public display. Keep those neighbors out! Keep the employees locked up! (Which must account for the fact, that although I've lived nearby for 13 years, I've never once seen a denizen with a book in hand or observed a drop of coffee sipped or spilled. And why?  Perhaps it's

the admonitory sign, which, along with the locked metal door, says it all. Who should be prosecuted? Trespassers or architect?

 

Vines! more vines! 

Amnesia on Film: The Majestic (2001)

Alas and alack, I've now known far too many folks who have endured serious memory problems. As a consequence, I seem to have developed an interest in amnesia not only in real life but also in fiction and film. There are many many books on the subject and Wiki offers an astonishing list of 234 Hollywood amnesia films -- some of which, judging by their titles, do not appeal to my mature taste and which I promise never to view -- including such not doubt remarkable productions such as Raft of the Dead, Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City, and A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon.

I sometimes imagine that there are fewer actual cases of loss of memory than there are films on the subject.

Literary amnesia is a recent obsession; while the ancients had their Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, I can't recall amnesiacs wandering lost around Athens or Rome. Shakespeare never wrote an amnesia play, though at one point Lear, who's had a rough go of it, asks "Who is it that can tell me who I am?"

I suppose that we moderns put amnesia front and center because we are concerned with the integrity and the continuity of the self. Loss of memory threatens us; no memory, no identity. But let us not forget that amnesia is a cheap and easy all-purpose convenient and superficial no sweat plot device. The formula: loss of memory = mystery; restoration of memory =  anagnorisis. Very little thinking required.

The Majestic is an eccentric unsatisfying fairy tale that provides the usual car crashes but also lost love, the FBI, HUAC, and an art deco movie theater -- all in the Capraesque context of small-town standards versus big-city corruption. Pete Appleton, played by an uncharacteristically subdued and expressionless Jim Carrey, falls into what is depicted as a total global amnesia. He lacks the least glimmer of his past life. In "real life," any human forced to cope with such an experience would suffer from anxiety, shock, disorientation, fear, and worry -- but not so in this slice of hollywoodiana. Amnesiac Pete is calm and patient, because he is rooted not in our communal vale of woe but in a movie tradition where amnesia is ordinary and effortless. Don't worry, folks, he'll recover his memory by the last reel. No big deal. And he does.

Once again, amnesia is a disease like none other. 

Where My Grandchildren Play Soccer

Stunning, is it not? Just at the west side of our fair city, set against the first manifestations of the Front Range. Six well-tended fields, scores of players and many, many parents and grandparents (among them me, on sunny Saturday mornings). I can't imagine a more idyllic and peaceful scene. 

Do Luke and Caleb and Asher appreciate the glory of their situation? Why should they, after all? It's what they've always known; they take it for granted that soccer should be played in such lovely and prosperous surroundings. Later on, they'll come to know more about the circumstances of less fortunate people.  

It's hard for me not to compare Foothills Community Park with the P S 217 schoolyard of my own childhood. Ours was a representative "playground," no better or worse than would be found in any other middle-class or working class neighborhood. No grass, just solid concrete from one chain-link fence to the other. It was where we ran races, played "two-hand touch," flipped baseball cards, played punchball, stickball, basketball, softball, boxball, box baseball, handball, and any other game that could be improvised with a pink spaldeen. There were, as I remember, four basketball backboards and rims, arranged as two full courts. But one of the backboards was missing, the pole having disappeared many years ago and never replaced. Another of the poles had been set in the ground at an angle of perhaps 80 degrees and never corrected. It was useless. And then the two other baskets, on the Newkirk Avenue side, were set in ground that was not level, so that the basket was 9' 6" or so if you shot from the left side and 10" 6" on the right. Maybe this was a benefit; it helped us master trigonometry.

The P S 217 schoolyard was crowded. Various sports overlapped and shared the fields. If you were playing basketball, you had to watch out for line drives off the bat of one of the softball players. This taught us to be alert.

I did not feel at all deprived or "underprivileged" -- it was life as I knew it -- but I'm mighty glad that my grandchildren enjoy the luxury of grass and space and peace. In the words of the great Sophie Tucker, "I've been rich and I've been poor, and, believe me, rich is better."

Nostalgia

The word "nostalgia" has a curious history. It was coined in the late 17th century by attaching Greek άλγος (algos - pain) to νόστος (nostos -homecoming). Originally, nostalgia carried a strongly negative signification: "intense homesickness" -- "the depressing symptoms...  that arise in persons when they are seized with a longing to return to their home and friends." Then, for reasons that are not on the record, sometime during the first part of the last century, the meaning of nostalgia shifted and became much more positive. It's now a good word: "a wistful yearning for the past." A useful word.

Nostalgia is a familiar phenomena that all can recognize: the savoring of a pleasant memory from earlier in our lives. It seems that nostalgia contains within it a bias toward or even a falsification of the past. It's implicit in nostalgia that things were better "back then." For example: I am a member of a Facebook group called My Flatbush House from Years Ago. Its contributors routinely idealize their childhoods. Reading their posts, you'd think that the Flatbush of our youth was if not the the classical Golden Age at least the Garden of Eden. "I loved my Brooklyn childhood." "I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything." "I grew up in the 40s and 50s! We were so lucky to have known those days." "Much simpler times, more real and human-sized." "There was no fear, everybody felt safe; we played out in the streets, unsupervised, until it was suppertime." "We walked to and from school in every weather." "Going out meant playing games in the street." "I feel so blessed to have lived such a wonderful free life." "The fragrance of roses was everywhere in July (why don't roses have perfume anymore?)"

"Ou sont les neiges d'antan?"  "Those were the days, my friend,/ We thought they'd never end." "Rocky Top you'll always be/ Home sweet home to me."

Of course I also remember the good times, but I can't embrace such unalloyed, uncritical celebrations. Yes, I can savor some pleasant moments in my seventy-years-ago life. But I also recall that the 1950s was the era of "juvenile delinquents" and gang wars, back alley abortions, ethnic strife, "broken homes," heroin, segregation, overcrowded chaotic schools, imminent nuclear holocaust and "take cover" drills, McCarthyism, polio, the Korean War, Stalin, and Walter O'Malley.  

It's fascinating that the English language does not have a word for an antonym of nostalgia. One of my sources suggests "cynicism." But I'm not a cynic;  I'm an intermittent and realistic anti-nostalgist.   

And why, when I lie insomniac (as is my too-frequent custom), do I not savor the odor of those ever-perfumed Coney Island Avenue hybrid tea roses but instead am tormented by nightmares of fear, humiliation, awkwardness, embarrassment and loneliness. My childhood was pretty good one, thanks to my attentive parents. So why do I obsess about the bad times? Have I gone full curmudgeon? Or am I simply more honest than my cohort of Flatbush contemporaries?

In The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, Shakespeare explores nostalgia and its opposite. Two old guys, Shallow and Silence, reminisce. 

SHALLOW: I was once of Clement's Inn, where I think they will talk of mad Shallow yet.

SILENCE: You were called 'lusty Shallow" then, cousin...

SHALLOW: On that very same day did I fight with on Samson Stockfish, a fruiterer, behind Gray's Inn. Jesu, jesu, the mad days that I have spent. And to see how many of my old acquaintance are now dead.

SILENCE:  We shall all follow, cousin...

SHALLOW:  Death is certain. Is old Double of your town living yet?

SILENCE: Dead, sir.

SHALLOW: Jesu, jesu, dead. He drew a good bow; and dead. He shot a fine shot...  And is Jane Nightwork alive?...  Nay, she must be old; she cannot choose but be old; certain she's old, and had Robin Nightwork by old Nightwork before I came to Clement's Inn.

SILENCE:  That's fifty-five years since.

And then comes the correction, the anti-nostalgist.  

FALSTAFF:  Lord, lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying. This same starved justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth, and the feats he hath done about Turnbull Street;  and every third word a lie.... He was the very genius of famine, yet lecherous as a monkey,... And now is this vice's dagger become a squire and talks as familiarly of John o' Gaunt as if he had been sworn brother to him, and I'll be sworn he never saw him but once in the tilt-yard, and then he burst his head for crowding among the marshal's men.

And on and on, at great amusing length.

Shallow and Silence indulge their nostalgia;  Falstaff sees thing differently, but whether he is a realist, a cynic or a curmudgeon is open to interpretation.

Insightful Comment

Before I forget, I would like to put on the record the most memorable student sentence that I received during my entire 50+ years of teaching literature:  "After Gregor Samsa was transformed into a large insect, his lifestyle changed."

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!

Rah-Rah

Promenading last Friday on the semi-famous Boulder Mall, we stumbled upon a Certifiably Big Event.

Ours is a college town where the three major religions are marijuana, massage, and football. On the evening that precedes a Saturday home game, the Mall is turned over to a football rally--a gigantic and noisy one. Have any of my regular readers or stray internet pilgrims ever been to such an event?  It's quite an echt American experience: the uniformed marching band -- all epaulets and brass and drums, the perky cheerleaders, a float featuring sports heroes of yore, the hundred gladiators themselves (all much taller and thicker than ordinary human beings) along with chants and rousing speeches. Tons of school spirit and not a shred of irony.  

The next day, despite the ginned-up enthusiasm, our team was blown out by UCLA, 45-17.

Rallies are not my kind of event. I'm constitutionally allergic to rah-rah and for the last couple of decades I've been boycotting football.

Why no more football for me? In truth, football was never my passion. I hardly ever played the game -- only a little "two-hand touch" in the schoolyard, so I'm not surrendering much by proscribing a sport that is a danger to everyone's physical well-being. There are too many dreadful injuries, especially head injuries. Too many retired players afflicted with dementia. A few days ago, surfing the channels, I accidentally glanced at a few minutes of a NFL contest. Even in that brief stretch, a cornerback was badly battered and carried by stretcher into an on-field ambulance. To me, it looked like it could be a broken neck. I'm sorry that I paused to watch; it will be along time before I do so again.

And I've always been resistant to Rah-Rah. Rubs me wrong; always has, right from the start.

The local mall rally caused me to remember my first days at Cornell, 66 years ago. I was a most naive freshman (now "freshperson" or "first-year") and had not a glimmer of an idea about college life -- none of my family or friends ever having enjoyed such an experience. Completely at sea. My peers in the freshman dorm insisted, you have to go to the rally. I had no idea what a rally was but if going to college meant going to rallies, then why not? I knew no better and tagged along with my new acquaintances. So there it was, just like last night on the mall. The band, the cheerleaders, the athletes, the rah-rah exhortations. One after another the speakers (were they coaches?), told us how hard we were going to cheer tomorrow for dear old Cornell and victory. We sang Cornell songs, the lyrics to which were handed to us on a mimeographed sheets of paper. It was far too enthusiastic for me -- too patriotic I guess one might say. I was not true to my school. How could I love Cornell or think fondly of my alma mater. I had just arrived, for goodness sake, and hadn't even finished unpacking. The insisted-upon emotion seemed contrived and artificial and I resented the pseudo-nostalgia. I don't like being subsumed into a crowd. I respond negatively when I'm exhorted to cheer or wave or sing. It all seems dangerously close to the unthinking obedience of nationalist politics. 

And then, next day, came the game itself. Dutifully I trudged to Schoellkopf to watch our guys encounter Princeton. I remember nothing about the contest, not even who won or lost. But I can still feel the cold September drizzle -- and I know that I caught a stiff cold. In my four years in Ithaca, it was my first and only football game. 

I soon learned that Cornell had much to offer beyond the rah-rah. It took a year or so, but eventually I found my people.

The Ocellated Turkey

Turkeys, I was recently surprised to learn, come in two distinct species. The familiar one is the "wild turkey", Meleagris gallopavo, the big bird that in broods of twenty or so, wanders around my house and garden, eating seeds, insects, acorns and apples and occasionally leaving behind a fancy feather or two. 

They're new to the neighborhood. Until about twenty years ago, I had not seen a single turkey; now, they're everywhere. And bold. Or perhaps just indifferent to me.  

And then there's the second kind of North American turkey. It's rare -- found, nowadays, only in the Yucatan peninsula. It's the "ocellated turkey,"  and it's one heck of a fancy bird.

 

Ocellated? I was puzzled, stymied by this unfamiliar word. But then I remembered that an "ocellus" is an architectural term. An ocellus is the circular opening at the top of a dome, familiar to me from its celebrated use in the Roman Pantheon. "Ocellus" is obviously the diminutive of Latin "oculus," eye. It follows that an "ocellated turkey" is so called because it displays circular markings on its feathers, like a peacock (although none of the pictures of turkeys that I found on the internet revealed eye-like decorations. Many shimmering colors, however.

 

It's remarkable that the range of the "ocellated turkey" coincides with the habitat of the ocelot. Could such a turkey, if attacked and killed by an ocelot, be considered doubly ocellated"? And if, in its death throes, it thrashed and quivered, could it be said to oscillate?

Herman Wehmeier; Pitching 1950-2022

For three days last month we stayed in a BNB just across the Connecticut River in New Hampshire. The place is owned (or perhaps only managed) by a family bearing the surname Wehmeier. It's a rare name, but one not entirely unfamiliar to me. Like any member of my baseball-obsessed generation, I was immediately put in mind of the only other Wehmeier who's ever crossed my path. I refer of course to Herman Wehmeier, of famous memory, the right-handed pitcher who played fourteen seasons of major league ball, mostly for Cincinnati and the Phillies. His career, from 1945 to 1958, coincided with the period of my greatest interest and enthusiasm for baseball -- the years in which I studied Dodger box scores with an assiduity that I never granted to algebra or Latin.

Herman Wehmeier was a solid pro, but not a Hall of Fame quality pitcher. His lifetime W-L was 92-108 and his cumulative ERA was 4.80. He made it into the record books because he led the league in Walks Allowed three times, in Wild Pitches twice, and in Hit Batsmen and Earned Runs Allowed once apiece. 

When looking over his stats, one particular number stands out. Herm started 240 games in his career and pitched an astonishing 79 complete games. He finished one out of every three games that he started! A remarkable achievement from the perspective of 2022, is it not?  A new world of "closers," "set-up men," "openers" and precipitous yankings.

Among active pitchers, Max Scherzer, who might be my nominee for pitcher of the decade, has, in 14 seasons so far, pitched just 12 complete games. In his best year, 2015, he had just 4. Jacob deGrom, who is as talented a pitcher as baseball can boast, has started 207 games in his career so far, just 4 of which he has completed. The present leaders in complete games are veterans Adam Wainwright with 28 and Justin Verlander with 27.

Robin Roberts, one of the best pitchers of Wehmeier's era, once pitched 28 complete games in a row, one of them lasting 17 innings. Lifetime, Roberts started 609 games and completed 310. 

Herm Wehmeier

 

Are Baboons "Spirtual'?

A friend is intimately acquainted with a primatologist. She (the primatologist) has spent many a year, almost a lifetime, studying baboons. She has lived with them and claims to have been accepted as one of the troop. She travels with them when she can. I'm impressed by her dedication. I wouldn't want to travel for more than a couple of days with a group of human tourists, let alone energetic lower primates. My one encounter with baboons, in a  rest area in South Africa, was unpleasant. The baboons were noisy and aggressive. Sub-Yahoos.

The primatologist told my friend the following  story. She was accompanying a troop of baboons on a trek from one feeding place to another. They came to a river that they wanted to cross. They all stopped, sat down on the ground, waited silently for about thirty minutes. Then they all arose as one and proceeded to wade across the river. 

My friend said, and I quote verbatim, "it was a spiritual moment." 

To which I immediately responded, "I don't know exactly what you mean, but I can tell you that never in a thousand years would I interpret such an event as 'spiritual'."

All of us around the table were polite, so the conversation moved on to more fruitful topics and did not become contentious.

But later, I thought, what did he (and the primatologist) mean by the word "spiritual."  And the best that I can come up with, is that they both deduced that the baboons engaged in some sort of prayer--that they paused to solicit divine intervention before setting out on a hazardous adventure.

I'm not even slightly sympathetic to that reading. In actual fact, just between us, I think it's kind of dumb.

I can think of many a reason why a congregation of baboons might assemble themselves and take a moment. Perhaps they were assessing the flow of the river. Maybe they were waiting for the current to become less strong. Or perhaps they were looking at the other bank to see if there were predators hiding in the underbrush. Or, most likely, they were simply tired and were gathering their strength.

I think that my friend wanted to believe that baboons are spiritual, because it follows that if baboons can pray to a higher power, then there's something natural and universal about belief in a deity, even if it's the Great Baboon in the Sky. Conversely, I am just as convinced that baboons are smart enough to look around carefully before taking the plunge. No supererogatory hypothesis required. 

To me, the natural and material explanation is completely obvious -- although I must admit that the primatologist who offered the spiritual explanation and the friend who repeated it are both scientists of considerable repute.

Contradictory Assertions

We stayed at an inn in Lyme, New Hampshire called "Breakfast on the Connecticut." Good location, decent accommodations -- but they don't serve breakfast. Which reminded me of the famous sign in front of the Fairlee Diner on Route 5 in Fairlee, Vermont: "Open Seven Days a Week. Closed Tuesday."

Wood Words

I suspect that I know more about wood than most laymen, partly as a consequence of Uncle Al owning and operating the sawmill for all those years. And then there's my own independent enthusiasm for trees: planting and transplanting, gathering and saving seeds. Nevertheless, The Age of Wood by Roland Ennos presented amateur me with a truckload of brand new information. It's a book that re-tells the history of civilization through the use of wood and wood products. A very good book, well worth the perusal.

Moreover, Ennos introduced me to a number of savory new words -- words that no doubt I should have known and which are probably known to true woodophiles but that are novel to me.

For example: the newfangled word anisotropy, which is defined as the property of a material that displays different traits along different axes, as for example lumber, which is much easier to split along its grain than across it. Because wood is anisotropic and so tough sideways, it has many uses that it wouldn't have had if merely isotropic.

Anisotropy, as a collection of sounds, does not appeal to me as much as some of Ennos's gritty, oldfangled words. I am happy to make the acquaintance of the word bodger, which is a wood carver or turner, but specifically a person who makes chairs out of beechwood. What a wonderful word, though, I confess, difficult to work into the conversation. Also hard to insinuate into the daily exchange is futtock, which is a curved piece of timber forming the lower part of the frame of a wooden ship. Futtock should not be confused with its near-neighbor puttock, which is a kind of kite, and a word which Shakespeare uses as an insult. Both futtock and puttock sound vaguely naughty, perhaps because of their proximity to buttock. I also like strake, which is a continuous band of hull planking, and which sometimes sports a rove, which is "a groove along the lower inside edge of each strake." I admit that I had never heard of nacelles, which are the outer casing of an early wooden aircraft engine. I imagine that nacelles are as obsolete as wooden airplanes, as is monocque, a type of construction in which the outer skin carries a major part of the stresses. Who knew?  I was familiar with the word sheave but I didn't know that it also is the rotating wheel inside a pulley. A duogong is part of the network of wooden supports in traditional Chinese wood-frame buildings. 

A trullo is a traditional Apulian drystone hut with a conical roof.

I have actually seen such buildings with my own eyes, but I either never learned or had forgotten their name. A chalumeau is a single-reed wind instrument, a forerunner of the clarinet. Some disrespectful people call a chalumeau a mock-trumpet. A cruck is a piece of curved timber which supports the roof of a building. Steills are, believe it or not, "one of the deep pools or steills in the Tweed," though why the Tweed should have specific word for its pools is a mystery to me.  A tomol is a plank-built boat invented by the Chumash people of southern California. It was "the single most technologically complex watercraft built in North America and as such deserves to be better known." Sometimes "tomol" appears as "tomolo." Both spellings are strange and splendid.

A "Ditmas Park" Novel

From my birth in 1939 until I fled to Ithaca in 1956, I lived on East 9th Street, in a section of Brooklyn that had no other name than "Flatbush." But all is flux, as Heraclitus said in a very different context, and now the undistinguished neighborhood of my youth has been upgraded to pretentious "Kensington."  Moreover, the adjacent section of Flatbush through which I early morning shambled to fabled Erasmus Hall H. S., consisting of a large stock of handsome old Victorian homes, has also been re-christened. It's now "Ditmas Park."  

Ditmas Park is where Emma Straub's novel, Modern Lovers (2016) situates itself. It is, she claims, "the only neighborhood in New York City that felt like the suburbs."  A sentence of praise or an instance of wicked irony, one might ask?

Suburb or not, Modern Lovers does not take place in the Flatbush of my youth. Yes, streets retain their familiar names (Rugby, Argyle, Stratford, Newkirk, Ocean Avenue). In fact, one of the modern lovers, a fiftyish wife and mother, works out of a real estate office at the corner of Cortelyou Road and East 16th Street, exactly where old Mr. Hart used to repair the fragile gears of my three-speed. But all is yuppified. None of the children in this novel go to PS 217 or PS 139 or Erasmus (in fact, these anchors of my old neighborhood go unmentioned). Instead, the young 'uns attend expensive "Whitman," an elite private academy. The young lady who is at the center of the story has both a 'mum" and a "mom" -- a circumstance that no doubt occurred 70 years ago, but no one would have talked about it, at least openly. It's Flatbush, all right, but where are the Italians and Irish and the Jews?  A decade ago I toured PS 217 and couldn't help being struck by the "diversity" of the student body -- Turks, Syrians, Russians, central and south Americans, Asians both east and south, and of course Afro-Americans. These folks don't appear in Modern Lovers. Nor do the ubiquitous Hasids. No wonder Emma Straub likes the slice of Brooklyn that she describes as suburban.  Here's a Brooklyn novel that's more Updyke-y than Fuchs-y.

Modern Lovers tells a warm, approachable, sound, humorous-to-slightly-satirical story. It's modern, in the sense that the lovers aren't young and aren't searching for mates; instead, they're middle-aged and trying to repair troubled marriages. I don't doubt that Modern Lovers hits some readers' bull's eyes --  even if it misses my tired old target. For me, it was a story of considerable sociological interest -- an instance of how the decades have transmogrified my Flatbush into hip Ditmas Park.

At the end of the novel, the entrepreurial ladies start a new restaurant, Hot and Sweet, which bakes perfect apple turnovers and supersedes that old frayed  Cortelyou Jewish deli.

Dodge City Nincompoops

The rip-roaring conclusion to Dodge City (1939), is marvelously dumb. The bad guys, led by really nasty villain Jeff Surrett (Bruce Cabot) have jumped out of the burning railroad car and onto their horses. They are going to make a getaway, we assume. But for some reason, the six schmegeggees don't ride away from the railroad tracks. Instead, they continue exactly parallel to the tracks, allowing Wade Hatton (Errol Flynn) to get out his rifle and pick them off, one after another.

All that the black hats needed to do was to hang a right and ride off into the brush, or just rein up, and let the train go by. The train is on a railroad track.  But no. Not these guys. They keep on riding alongside the train until they're all shot. End of movie, but not the end to my astonishment. I'm baffled that the director, Michael Curtiz of all people, allowed such a brainless ending. 

Also: Errol Flynn, with his anachronistic 1930s mustache and condescending smile, was so goody-goody and upstanding that I felt a strong urge to piss on his leg.

 

Starokonstantinov

Ukraine has been invaded and whole cities have been obliterated by the Putin dictatorship. It's tragic. Once again, I'm overwhelmingly grateful that my grandparents chose to pack up and leave the blighted Ukraine. It's a decision that has looked better and better with each passing year.  

My father's family came from a Ukrainian "shtetl" called Starokonstantinov, or Alt Konstantin ("old Constantine"). As a youth, I overheard but did not understand conversations in Yiddish about a place that my grandparents called (phonetically) Xusantine-gebernia, where the X stands for a non-English deep guttural fricative. Seventy years ago I paid little attention to my eastern European ancestry. Now I'm fascinated.

Where is Starokonstantinov?  What is a "shtetl?"

I've just read Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern's new (2014) and highly pertinent history, The Golden Age Shtetl (an oxymoronic title if there ever was one). Y P-S defines a shtetl as "an East European market town in private possession of a Polish magnate, inhabited mostly but not exclusively by Jews, and subject to Russian bureaucracy." Starokonstantinov, he claims, was a "quintessential shtetl." "My" ancestral shtetl lies in the western part of Ukraine, about 50 miles south of a line drawn between Lviv and Kyiv. Nowadays, it has a population of about 30,000 souls.

I know that my grandfather's people lived in Starokonstantinov from the middle of the nineteenth century, but I have no idea when they first arrived -- it might have been years or centuries before. The town itself is not an ancient foundation. It enters history only in the late 16th century when a Polish noble named Konstanty Ostrogski built himself a castle (which still survives) and took ownership of the surrounding area. Starokonstantinov was a "private town" -- meaning that it was owned by the Ostrogski family for several hundred years. In its first years, Starokonstantinov was included in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1569 it became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1793, and for many years, even after my ancestors had struck out for the new world, it was a possession of the Russian Empire. Now it's in the independent Ukraine, and hoping to remain so.

The history of Starokonstantinov is marked by a series of tragedies prior to the one now in progress. An early disaster was the Battle of Starokonstantinov in 1648, which was a key event in the Chmielnicki Massacres of 1648-49. Eastern rite Cossacks broke into the fortified town and killed all of its 130 Jewish families and as many Polish Roman Catholics as they could find. During the early part of the 18th century, the Haidamack massacre of Uman by Cossacks spilled over into other Ukrainian shtetls, including "mine." And then beginning in 1881 came the series of pogroms -- anti-Jewish peasant riots provoked and tacitly supported by the Russian officialdom. In Starokonstantinov, there were 6611 Jews in 1847 and 9212 (61% of the total population) in 1897. (There would have been two more if my grandparents hadn't seen the light in 1895). During the Nazi occupation in 1942, virtually all the remaining Jewish population (6731 in 1939) was murdered. It's a troubled, tragic history.

I'm not sure what it means to say that a town was wholly owned by Polish nobility. Did the Ostrogskis own all the land, or the land and some of the buildings? Did they administer the public works? The churches? Did they possess the surrounding farms?  Did they own, until they were freed in 1861, the serfs?  Most likely, each shtetl had its own particular form of ownership (the late medieval world was anything but standardized). Y P-S does not explain; perhaps he assumes it's common knowledge.

Starokonstantinov occasionally makes an appearance in The Golden Age Shtetl.

I had not realized how active my ancestors might have been in the vodka trade. "In Starokonstantinov, the possession of Countess Rzewuska, about fifty [Jewish-owned] inns and taverns yielded 67 percent of the town revenues." (Query: how and when did the shtetl pass from the Ostrogskis to the Rzewuskis, who were a very prominent and wealthy Polish family)? As far as I can tell, the "town revenues" went directly into the hands of the Polish overlords. In 1827, "Starokonstantinov Jews realized the that their efforts to prevent the draft of men for twenty to twenty five year terms in the Russian army [had failed], and the Jewish populace turned against their own kahal elders and attacked their houses." "Local police had to summon an additional army unit to suppress the outburst." (The "kahal" was a committee of prominent Jewish citizens who were the nominal governors [under Polish supervision] of the Jewish population.) In the first half of the nineteenth century, the divorce rate among Jewish couples in Starokonstantinov, was 16 percent. In larger cities, it was even higher (in Letichev it was 47 percent). Y P-S attributes the surprisingly high rate of failed marriages to the relative freedom of Jewish women and to the breakdown of traditional constraints as the Jewish population became increasingly urbanized. A major fire in Starokonstantinov in 1835 hastened the shtetl's decline. Russian travelers found Starokonstantinov and especially its roads deplorable. "A Russian army officer observed that Starokonstantinov is dirty beyond any measure: but 'if we bother ourselves to learn the reasons for this situation, we would perhaps find out that even the Jews, whom are usually blamed, have nothing to do with it.... To drive through the streets of the town is a real challenge, as there is no pavement. Stones once paving the road have long sunk into the soils. When it is raining, they do nothing but prevent movement.'" Mud season in Starokonstantinov must have been an annual challenge. Nevertheless, Starokonstantinovites were readers: a merchant estimated that in the shtetl there were "about 20,000 books, mostly prayer books, bible and bible commentaries, tractates on the Talmud and the Kabbalah." Y P-S thinks that this number must be a great exaggeration. But it's on the record that a merchant named Pinhas Yosef Bromberg from Starokonstantinov brought twenty Hebrew books with him while traveling on business to St Petersburg. 

My great-grandfather was a participant in the commerce of Starokonstantinov. According to my father, he was a "factor."  A "faktor" (Yiddish from German) was essentially a middleman. My ancestor had a horse and a wagon (perhaps, I allow myself to fantasize in a moment of self-aggrandizement, two horses and two wagons). According to tradition, he mostly dealt in grain, but factors such as he bought and sold whatever was available: wood, coal, ribbons, calico, mirrors, bolts and screws, vodka and wine. They did much of their business at fairs and Starokonstantinov was famous for its very prominent fair.

A Brooklyn Memoir

I read Imagining Robert, My Brother, Madness, and Survival by Jay Neugeboren for neighborhood and neighborly reasons. Its author is a 1955 graduate of fabled Erasmus Hall High School (I was class of 1956). Much of the story takes place in the area of Brooklyn now called Lefferts Gardens. Walkable, or at least bicyclable, from East 9 Street.

It's a sad tale. Younger brother Robert went seriously off the psychological rails in his late teen years. Older brother Jay relentlessly chronicles his brother's lifetime of struggles. It becomes clear that modern medicine does not offer any remedy or hope to people with Robert's illnesses. The system relies on  ineffective drugs and ineffective therapies and what amounts to involuntary imprisonment. It's a painful, discouraging history.

And it's also a good and moving book. Very sincere and very emotional. I confess to dropping an occasional tear.

And yet I don't know whether it's right to expose a loved one to such public scrutiny. I myself wouldn't have made that choice. But I empathize with Neugeboren's tale, inasmuch as I know from personal experience that therapies for some forms of mental decay are no better now than they were during the Darkest Ages.

Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (1963-2022)

I read James' Portrait of a Lady in 1963 but never again until last week, so there had been a gap of almost three score years. During the interim, glaciers have melted, continents have subducted and conventional notions about what constitutes a "lady" have shifted quite marvelously. 

After such an interval, it's not disgraceful for me to confess that I remembered very little of the novel and that even major plot points came as a shock and surprise. Moreover, I re-read the novel with a bit of prejudice, because I had recently learned that Theodore Roosevelt once met James and dismissed him as "a miserable little snob." If I hadn't been alerted by Roosevelt's back-of-the-hand slap, I would have recognized that Portrait of a Lady generates enough snobbery to power a nineteenth-century locomotive from Rome to Florence even hauling the book's entire cast of frequent travelers. It's a class-ridden novel in which lesser sophisticates are out-snobbed by superior sophisticates. Despite this unfortunate failing, Portrait of a Lady is a rather wonderful piece of writing.

Let me further confess that I brought a second and more deeply-rooted prejudice to my re-reading. In the early 1960s, when I was a graduate student of "English and American Language and Literature" at a New England university, Henry James was at the apex of his critical reputation. He was "the Master." In fact, an appreciation (or devotion) to James became a sort of ticket of admission to the coterie of the literary elite. A touchstone. If you (that is, me) were able to appreciate and adore James's extraordinarily subtle judgements and discriminations and his sustained and intricate analyses of the velleities of social interactions, why then, you were one of the elect. But if you were baffled by his niceties and sometimes could not divine what the heck he was going on and on about, why then you weren't what James calls in Portrait "a person of sensibility." And if you weren't a person of sensibility, why in the living heck were you studying literary history at a university that had been home to establishment sophisticates since 1636?

Not a James devotee, I managed to slip through the system without the disgraceful lacunae in my preparation coming to anyone's attention. And until this past week, I managed to keep my distance from Mr. Henry James. 

But I may have made a mistake to have done so. I'd still say that Portrait of a Lady isn't up there in the stratosphere with Bleak House and Middlemarch, but it's still a darn good novel. It's not conventionally exciting; in fact, it's talky and static in the extreme. Nothing much happens. Isabel Archer talks with Henrietta and HJ analyses the conversation. Then someone goes to Gardencourt and has a long conversation with Lord Warburton. Then Lord W meets Countess C in Rome and they talk. Then Madame Merle, who, we are told, was born in Brooklyn and therefore ought to have known better, has a long conversation with Isabel Archer. Then someone meets someone else in a museum or a train station or a restaurant and they have a long conversation -- once again dissected by HJ. Then they ride the rails to Florence and talk. Meanwhile Ralph Touchett is slowly dying and will continue die (and talk) for another five hundred pages. These various conversations are often oblique, with the most important points omitted or merely implied (to be grasped by persons of subtlety and sensibility). It's all so slow that I sometimes felt myself yearning for a good solid knife fight or at least a lengthy car chase. When Isabel finally tells enigmatic villainess Madame Merle that she doesn't want to see her ever again, I longed for her to spit it out with a a good round "fuck off" -- but no such luck.

And yet as mysteries are revealed in the last third of the novel, Portrait becomes undeniably exciting. Much is familiar; it seems as though James recapitulates the marriage of Dorothea Brooke and Eddie Casaubon in the misalliance of Isabel Archer and the "sterile dilettante" Gilbert Osmond. And also borrows the Pansy plot from the story of Honoria Dedlock. But I came to these insights, if they are insights, only in retrospect; while reading the novel, I was surprised and intrigued.

I strongly object to the ending of the novel, which seemed to violate the trajectory of the plot. Surely Isabel has earned her freedom. To me, her continued bondage to propriety it seems cruel to both the character and to hopeful (but deceived) readers. Cruel, in fact, to the point of sadism. No doubt the conclusion tests a reader's sophistication, and no doubt if I read the voluminous commentary that the novel has engendered, the apparent cruelty of the conclusion would be be explained and justified. But I won't read about the commentary. I'm obviously not a "person of sensibility" and I prefer to remain unimproved, unenlightened, and pissed.

What I Wore to the Oscars, 2022

Friends and relations have been clamoring to know what I wore to the Oscar ceremony this year.  So here goes:

My ensemble: plaid wool shirt by Woolrich; trousers by Lee ("Extreme Comfort" cut -- smoky quartz color); white cotton "Gold Toe" socks by Costco; shoes by Hoka (orthopedic inserts by Dr. Scholl); leather belt by SlideBelts; foundational undergarments by Fruit of the Loom and Carhartt. Denim jacket by American Apparel. Accessories: eyeglasses by Kirkland Signature; hearing aids by Phonak. Traditional baseball cap by Otto ("one size fits most.")

 

Hair by SuperCuts.

 

Once again, I'd like to thank all the little people -- my fashion consultants, suppliers, and supporters -- for their imagination and hard work. I couldn't have done it without the entire team.

 

Note.  Full disclosure: in fact, I didn't attend the actual awards ceremony. This ensemble is what I wore to watch the Oscars on TV. Well, that's not entirely true either. I forgot to watch the Oscars. But I did wear the outfit.

Senior Romance

Young 'uns, I don't know that you entirely grasp the glamor and mystery of maturity (which in some jaded circles is called "old age.")  Let me tell you, the
golden years are just chockablock full of sensual romance of a kind that you might not now appreciate. 

Just the other day, for example, we were both instructed to make another visit to the phlebotomist (it seems hardly a month goes by that some specialist or other doesn't need to inspect a sample of our personal sanguineous fluids). 

Being economical people, we scheduled our appointments for the same time, same place.

Her blood draw was in anticipation of a knee replacement; mine for routine monitoring of my half-a-dozen annoying senior conditions.

So there we were, side by side, in adjacent cubicles, stripping our sleeves for the venipuncture.

I ask you, is there anything on earth more romantic than a senior couple experiencing simultaneous blood draws. Rapture, rapture! Joy and jollity!

In a merrier world, the instant of venipuncture would have been accompanied with an orchestra of swelling music, perhaps Brahms. And there would have been candles; next time this happens, we'll surround ourselves with a whole Liberace of candelabras. Dozens of long stem red roses. Beakers of Veuve Cliquot '42.  An applauding audience of family and friends. 

It would have been even more thrilling if my technician hadn't taken three tries to hit the mark. "Your vein rolled," she said accusingly, compromising ever so slightly the transcendent moment.

A Heart-of-Flatbush Novel: Big Man (1966), by Jay Neugeboren

Of the many Brooklyn novels that I've read this last while, Big Man, by Jay Neugeboren, comes closest to home. Neugeboren was newborn in 1938, just a year before me, and he attended fabled Erasmus Hall High School, most likely graduating with the class of 1955 (I was '56). It's a mark of my ignorance of modern American letters that I had no idea that my near-classmate was the author of 24 books, most of them novels. Big Man was Neugeboren's first novel. 

Close to home? Here are couple of sentences that will shiver the nostalgia timbers of wistful ex-Erasmians. 

I walk down Church Avenue, past the Kenmore Theater. Across the street the old church, used to cut classes and sit in the graveyard....  In front of Garfields's Cafeteria all the guys hanging out with their broads and their puffed hair.... Guys with Erasmus jackets on. I keep walking. Past the firehouse and the Holy Cross schoolyard.

Wow, it's a guided tour of the old neighborhood as it was in the 1950s. Who from Erasmus hasn't sprawled on the steps of the Dutch Reformed Church?

The novel revolves around the 1951 basketball scandals, which were world-shaking news at the time. A number of New York City college players (CCNY, St. Johns, Fordham, LIU) fell into the clutches of shady gamblers and were paid to shave points.  A few were indicted and convicted. I wrote a few melancholy and disillusioned paragraphs about the scandals some years ago -- here.

In Big Man, Neugeboren tells the story through the eyes and mouth of a character named Mack Davis, who had been an upcoming star but is now, because he missed a couple of baskets, stuck in a dead-end job at an automated carwash. It's an ambitious conceit and a promising plot. Big Man, I regret to say, is not a very artistic piece of work, but what the heck! Neugeboren was only 25 or 26 when he wrote it and had had only a few years to recover from uninspiring Erasmus Hall English classes. 

I confess that I was uncomfortable that Neugeboren wrote the novel in a black voice. I don't object in theory, because there's no earthly reason why a white novelist can't impersonate a black person, any more than male novelist can't speak as a female (or vice versa), or a young writer speak in the voice of an old. So wny was I troubled? I think it was because the voice that the novelist invented didn't seem genuine. It seemed "literary" -- as though the Davis character had been heisted out of a  blaxploitation film. Occasional inadvertent lapses in the dialect were particularly painful to my ever-sensitive ears.

Big Man reminds me how central basketball was to my adolescent life. I think if I had spent as much time and effort on my schoolwork as I did practicing my foul shots I might have been somebody. But I think I learned as much about life from basketball and its scandals as I did from any other 1950s phenomenon (such as the antics of "Tailgunner Joe" McCarthy). I'm grateful to Jay Neugeboren for preserving an important piece of my history and especially for bringing the old neighborhood right to the forefront.

When Eleanor Roosevelt Visited 539 East 9 Street

It should be remembered and recorded that in October of 1960, Eleanor Roosevelt herself visited the home of my parents --my childhood home (539 East 9 Street in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn).

I myself missed the occasion, alas. I was then living in Massachusetts, undergoing the first disorienting days of graduate school. But I know the story. 

During the 1960 presidential campaign (John F. Kennedy versus "Tricky Dick" Nixon), JFK's Catholicism emerged as a divisive issue. It's hard to believe what a fuss was made about his religion, especially nowadays, when no one bothers themselves that Joseph Biden is not only a Roman Catholic, but a serious one at that (JFK's personal commitment to his religion was, let's say, nominal).

Among Jewish voters, some of whom had grown up in Brownsville or Williamsburg or the Lower East side where Jewish-Irish conflict was a fact of life, there was a great deal of resistance to voting for JFK. And other Jewish voters, harking back to the old country, remembered Catholics as their antagonists and were hard put to vote for a candidate of that persuasion.

It fell to the task of Mrs. Roosevelt to persuade these reluctant voters that they could and should cast a ballot for Kennedy. At the time, there was no one in America who had more credibility with Jewish populations than she. It was well known that Mrs. Roosevelt had lobbied her hesitant husband for more lenient policies toward "displaced" Jews

I don't know how it came about that our living room was chosen as a site for Mrs. Roosevelt to meet with voters. I suspect that it was through my mother's extensive contacts with members of the League of Women Voters, an organization of which she was a stalwart volunteer. I know that my mother assembled 50 or so voters, almost all Jewish women, and seated or stood them in our very crowded second floor living room. Mrs. Roosevelt arrived, and as my father said to me later, she "dragged her ass" up two flights of stairs, spoke for 20 minutes, presumably in that upper-class nasal twang for which she was famous, answered a couple of respectful questions, and then limped back down to her car. And went on to the next venue. And the next. (She was 76 at the time, and not in great health.) Apparently she followed this same arduous routine for months.

That's how elections are won.

Eleanor Roosevelt died two years later, in 1962. 

 

I'm proud that our home hosted Mrs. Roosevelt. It's too bad that 539 East 9 was demolished in 1988. It deserved a better fate, especially since there was a day when it was graced by one of the previous century's finest human beings.

 

For more on 539, click here.

Sid Luckman's Cortelyou Road Childhood Home

Of course everyone knew that Sid Luckman was from Brooklyn and that he had attended Erasmus Hall High School and Columbia University before becoming one of the first superstars of the National Football League. To football fans, he was as renowned a home-town boy as Sandy Koufax was to followers of baseball. But until I read R.D. Rosen's new biography of Sid, called Tough Luck, I didn't know that football's first T-formation quarterback was a neighborhood guy, and that his modest childhood home was just four blocks off the route that Stephen Lewin and I took every morning for four years to EHHS. And that his house was just around the corner from the Sears department store where I spent the summer of 1957 pulling down $1.25 large an hour.  

The above is a modern picture, drawn from googlemaps. I suspect that the house is not much changed from the way it appeared in the 1930s but that the bars on the windows and front door are later additions. According to Zillow, the House of Sid is 1664 sq. ft. and is now priced at c. $750,000. I'd bet $2500 was the number in the 1930s, when the Luckman family was in residence.

Shouldn't there be a bronze plaque on the property?

It's a measure of the chanciness of the old neighborhood that Sid's father was convicted and imprisoned for a gangland murder and that he died in Sing Sing.