Dr. Metablog

Another Brooklyn Memoirist: Martin H. Levinson

Autobiographers from Brooklyn divide, on the whole, into two camps. There are the discontented, who yearned from day one to get the hell out of the neighborhood as quickly as possible; and then there are the nostalgics, perpetually romanticizing those great days of spaldeens, stickball, and chocolate egg creams. Martin Levinson's privately-published memoir Brooklyn Boomer, Growing up in the Fifties (2011) is most decidedly of the latter group. But what a thin and disappointing piece of work it is!!  Gosh, were we all quite so shallow! Levinson's book displays no sense of life's complexities and contradiction and ambiguities. Perhaps it's because he didn't or wouldn't read -- no exciting trips to the Brooklyn Public Library in this sterile memoir. Nor even to the movie palaces.  

The best word for Brooklyn Boomer is, I'm sorry to say, superficial. Also padded.

Also unoriginal. 

Plus the account of public school "assemblies" is shamelessly cribbed from a 2006 entry on this very blog.

Othello (1604), Nora Prentiss (1947), Date Night (2011)

Many years ago, in what sometimes seems like an earlier life, I taught Shakespeare courses to both young and "mature" students. When we reached Othello, halfway through the semester, I would, of course, point out that the play did not take the traditional form of tragedy-- of a great man or king gone awry as in the case of Macbeth or Richard III. Othello instead introduced a formula that was innovative for its time but which has become commonplace in ours. Othello is a domestic drama in which a marriage falls all to pieces. I liked to tell my captive audience, only slightly facetiously, that the whole of life is divided into two parts: the comic, which begins with birth and ends with marriage, and the tragic, which begins with marriage and proceeds to death. A statement which is a kind of shorthand, simplified version of a cliche of criticism. Like many such abbreviations, this formula contains a dollop of truth. Othello in fact begins with a marriage -- or more accurately a defiant elopement -- and comes to conclusion with Desdemona strangled in her bed and her husband the Moor a suicide. It's the sole play of Shakespeare's that follows the strict marriage-to-death path, although Romeo and Juliet is comic until the secret wedding but becomes tragic afterwards, while the wondrous Winter's Tale begins with Leontes and Hermione already married and pushes through some desperate circumstances only to come to a miraculous comic climax with the restoration of a woman presumed dead and a glorious second-generation wedding. Both RJ and WT sometimes seem like two different and opposite kinds of plays condensed into one -- and yet are all the more triumphant for being so.

These musings were precipitated by the film that we watched a couple of nights ago -- Nora Prentiss (1947), which Wikipedia characterizes as a film noir, but which is better thought of as two films in one -- a film that starts as an instance of domestic drama or "bourgeois realism" or even soap opera and doesn't become a murder mystery until two-thirds along the way. In a limited sense, it's not unlike Shakespeare's hybrids, but alas does not successfully yoke or blend its disparate plots. As a result, the last section of Nora Prentiss, I'm sorry to say, becomes not intriguing but unbelievable and ludicrous. It's an odd and interesting film, although not a good one, but it's worth watching for aficionados of TCM not only for its manipulation of genre expectations but also because it is one of a large group of films that are so very common and ordinary in twentieth-century America where such enormous value is attached to a happy and fulfilling marriage -- and to the disappointment that arises when the marriage comes a-cropper. In Nora Prentiss, a midlife couple with a pair of kids, who live in an orderly picket-fence house, ought to be living a happy life, but, by golly, both husband and wife are discontented and bored. They are afflicted with the whole package of suburban anxieties. It's Cheever-land or Updyke-land: demanding children and divorcing friends, the stultifying daily routine, the unsatisfying jobs, the dull obligatory social events, and especially the lack of sexual excitement which is signified in these Code-burdened movies by the gulf between the twin beds and the sterile head-to-toe sleepwear and also by that pathetic chaste kiss before husband and wife turn away from each other as they extinguish the cute matching bedside table lamps. Gosh, it's a scenario that is familiar from dozens and perhaps scores of postwar (and later) films. 

Melodramatic Nora Prentiss follows the fortunes of steady-Eddie Dr. Richard Talbot, enacted by Kent Smith, who meets nightclub chantoosie Nora, played by Anne Sheridan. Flirtation turns into an affair, and the affair evolves into true love or at least into genuine sexual passion. But all goes from bad to worse when Talbot, instead of seeking a divorce from his stern unlovely wife, concocts a dumb whopper of a plot that makes Friar Lawrence's harebrained sleeping-dram waking-up-in-the-tomb plan seem brilliant in comparison. Talbot fakes his own death and disappears -- causing the film to turn police-procedural. And then, through a series of hard-to-credit mischances and gimmicks, Talbot finds himself in his newly assumed fake guise indicted for murdering -- oh no yes indeed! -- his very own self. Nora Prentiss by this time has metamorphosed into a film that by rights should be renamed City of Naked Death or Shadow of Evil Night. Even so, the film might have been salvaged had not so much depended on the acting skill of Kent Smith, who is perfectly fine in the first part of the film, but incapable of managing the switch from reliable doc to nervous fugitive. It's not entirely his fault: the role puts too much pressure on the actor. I doubt whether such a transition could have been handled by Roscius or Burbage or Garrick or Sir Laurence Olivier himself.

Here is a picture of Ann Sheridan and Kent Smith. Sheridan wisely holds on to her hat; Smith's chapeau dominates the scene; very 1940s. 

Here's another still. I am in utter disagreement with Kent Smith's pencil mustache. It's a mistake. He wears it when he's a straight suburbanite and shaves it off when he goes underground -- an infranasal situation highly out of synch with the psychological trajectory of the film; by rights, he should have been clean-shaven when he was domestic and hirsute when he was a criminal.

 

 

Just to bring these ramblings to conclusion, I should add that the evening after we watched Nora Prentiss, we gambled on a newish HBO film called Date Night (2011) only to experience a moment of extreme cultural convergence. Once again, a suburban couple (this time Steve Carell and Tina Fey) are stuck in a boring suburban marriage --  same sheaf of symptoms as in Nora P. They jointly decide to liven things up and before push comes to shove, they find themselves in a big city world of traditional noir tropes: mistaken identity, guns and gangsters, police on the take, a corrupt mayor, deserted dark buildings, death threats. Date Night even flirts with old archetypes: in order to renew themselves, the couple must pass through an underworld (not Hades this time, but the criminal underworld) where Acheron is played by a lake in Manhattan's Central Park). It's not credible, of course, but then, it's not meant to be so.

 

 

No mustaches this time, I'm glad to say. But just like RJ and WT, two films in one.

 

Words of My Life -- "Joint"

"Joint" is a word that in the course of my lifetime has engaged in some serious shape-shifting. When I first encountered the word, joint (derived from the Latin jungere, to join) was simply a place where two pieces of wood were glued together or where one's bones were articulated to produce a wrist, elbow, or knee. Mighty simple and uncomplicated, it would appear -- but even then "joint" had begun to accumulate variants. Rick Blaine's sentence in Casablanca was an early warning: "of all the gin joints in all the towns in the world, she has to come into mine."  A "joint" was apparently a nightclub or bar. "Gin joint" suggests that  "Rick's Cafe Americain" was louche or sleazy, and perhaps it was, what with all the crooked gambling going on and with the mysterious "letters of transit" stuffed into Sam's piano. But why "joint"?  It seems fanciful to suppose that a joint was a place where various people "joined" together, but I can't think of a more persuasive etymology.    

Another use of joint came to my attention in the late 1960's when I became seriously interested in Jacobean oak furniture. Here's a handsome "joint stool":   

A joint stool was the most ordinary kind of chair during the period when Shakespeare was wielding his quill. Why "joint"?  Apparently because it was a joined stool, and therefore of higher quality than one that was merely glued. A joiner was a skilled craftsman before mass-produced nails and screws became inexpensive and commonplace.

Shakespeare knew joint stools very well: "Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool," says the Fool to a joint stool. Fool humors mad hallucinating Lear by pretending that the joint stool is the king's daughter Goneril. Shakespeare, by the by, played many a variation on "joint," employing or inventing  such terms as "joint-servant," "joint-laborer," "joint-ring," "jointress," "unjointed," "injointed," "short-jointed," "conjointly," and "disjoint."

But even Shakespeare would not have imagined the transfigurations of the word in these our latter days. Nowadays, a joint is a prison, though I don't know why one would call it so when such colorful appellations as "hoosegow," "clink," "stir," "slammer," and "pokey" are all on the tips of our collective tongues. Nor would he have imagined "joint" as a marijuana blunt or spliff. He wouldn't have known but might have appreciated "joint" as a term for the male sexual organ.

All of which makes it possible, theoretically, to say, "I was in a joint, smoking a joint, figuring out how to exercise my joint."

As for me, I use the word "joint" everyday -- in the most useful phrase "joint card."

Other words of my life:  slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire, stopper.

Alou

I read Felipe Alou's autobiography, My Baseball Journey (2018). It's not a literary masterpiece, but nevertheless a solid book that "does the job." It's particularly valuable for its story of the brutalities faced by a black Dominican pioneer coming to segregated America in the early '50s. A good reminder of a part of our ugly racial history that is so easy to forget or ignore. In an afterword, Bruce Bochy calls Alou the "Jackie Robinson of South America." My Baseball Journey is also a good reminder of the daily hardships faced by the professional athlete. True enough that they're well paid, but also true that they're subject to injuries and decay and insecurity and have to fight for their job every day. There's no such thing as tenure in sports. Alou was smart and resilient and proud and enjoyed a career that can be justly celebrated -- but not all do. 

Here's my favorite paragraph: "I missed playing when I retired. Every retired ballplayer goes through the same things, the same thoughts and emotions. I still miss playing. To this day, I have dreams that I'm still playing. Sometimes I have nightmares where I"m late for a game or I've missed a team bus to the ballpark." I understand this sentiment very well; like many of my peers, I still dream that I'm either late for class or am standing in front of a large audience and have absolutely no knowledge of the subject about which I'm required to discourse for an hour. 

One weakness of My Baseball Journey: though Alou managed through the steroid years, and knew Barry Bonds and others, he gives the drug problem mighty short shrift. His book turns a blind eye toward that painful period.  

New Year's Resolutions -- 2024

It's that time of year once again -- time to get 2024 out of the starting gates with force and vigor. I'm all into self-improvement, as everyone knows. So here are my resolutions.

1). Sleep longer, and stay in bed later in the morning. No need to bounce out of bed. It's warm and cozy in there. Breakfast will wait a few minutes longer.  Related resolution: take more and better naps. Nothing more pleasurable than a lie-down after a satisfying lunch.

2). Eat more ice cream. We are fortunate to live in an age of ice-cream abundance and variety. I intend to take advantage of the circumstances.  And by ice cream, I mean Ice cream: no ersatz concoctions of soy, whale-oil, kefir, oatmilk, yoghurt, tofu, or coconut oil. Cream, as from a cow. 

3)  Walk more slowly. What's the rush?  Why is everyone in such a gol-durn hurry?

4)  Avoid responsibility. Let others do their share. At this point in life, there's no shame in shirking.

I hope this program is not too ambitious. I wouldn't want to fail at it and embarrass my friends and supporters. I'll do my best.

Another Brooklyn Memoirist -- Norman Podhoretz

To most readers of this blague, Norman Podhoretz is a nonentity, but for a while there, he was a big deal in certain intellectual circles. His youthful autobiography, Making It (1967), elicited howls of indignation. Nowadays, it's impossible not to read Making It retrospectively, because it's undeniable that the author, who began life as liberal or progressive, has metamorphosed, over the years, into a monster. He is now a full bore Trumpian fascist. In the Podhoretz universe, abortion is infanticide and homosexuality constitutes a danger to the polity. Although the child of shtetl Jews, Podhoretz is now stridently anti-immigrant. In 2010, he ridiculously proclaimed that "I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama." He has called the Trump presidency "a kind of miracle" and announced  that Trump is "a vessel chosen by God to save us from the evil on the Left." Such a sentiment is not just echo-chamber conservative twaddle: it's nutso insanity pure and simple.

How much of Podhoretz's wandering in the wilderness can be traced to his Brownsville Brooklyn childhood and youth is hard to say?  Making It is a most peculiar autobiography. It's beautifully written -- in the sense that the arguments are finely deployed and the sentences are lucid, sometimes even lyrical. But it's also clear that Podhoretz, from the start, was the kind of obnoxious guy who delighted in provocation. It's not uncommon for Brooklynites of his generation to wish to leave Brooklyn behind. Podhoretz is shameless about his ambition: he had "a vulgar desire to rise above the class into which he was born."  

Most megalomaniacal autobiographers want to be liked. Not Podhoretz. He strives to be disliked, even hated, and in this he succeeds. He had a fear of becoming an "inauthentic WASP" but that's exactly what he became. The further to the right he went, the further away from his mother's embarrassing Yiddish accent. A sad life.

The character in literature who Podhoretz most resembles is Johnny Rocco in Key Largo, who wants "more."  

• Johnny Rocco: There's only one Johnny Rocco.
• James Temple: How do you account for it?
• Frank McCloud: He knows what he wants. Don't you, Rocco?
• Johnny Rocco: Sure.
• James Temple: What's that?
• Frank McCloud: Tell him, Rocco.
• Johnny Rocco: Well, I want uh ...
• Frank McCloud: He wants more, don't you, Rocco?
• Johnny Rocco: Yeah. That's it. More. That's right! I want more!
• James Temple: Will you ever get enough?
• Frank McCloud: Will you, Rocco?
• Johnny Rocco: Well, I never have. No, I guess I won't. 

Podhoretz's "more" is similarly empty and was similarly dangerous.  

 

Books I Read, 2023

Ian McEwan, Black Dogs; Ian McEwan, Saturday; Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time; Ian McEwan, Amsterdam; Marcia Davenport, East Side, West Side; Thomas Halliday, Otherlands; Joseph Sassoon, The Sassoons; Jane Austen, Persuasion; Jane Austen, Mansfield Park; Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles; Jonathan Raban, Bad Land; David Thomson, Sleeping with Strangers; Michael North, The Baltic; Niall Williams, This is Happiness; James Vincent, Beyond Measure; Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove; Andrea Wulf,The Invention of Nature; Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield; David Hone, How Fast Did T. Rex Run?; Richard Klein, Cigarettes are Sublime; Claire Keegan, Foster; Howard Koch, Casablanca: Screenplay and Legend; Jeremy Dauber, Jewish Comedy, a Serious History; Caroline Pennock, On Savage Shore; The Best of Sholom Aleichem, ed. Howe and Wisse; Richard S. Laub, Two Acres of Time; Susan Rubin Suleiman, Daughter of History;  Rachel Brownstein, American Born; Mabee Weinstein, Ferns; Jane Austen, Emma (2x); Margo Jefferson, Negroland; Marsha Gordon, Becoming the Ex-Wife; Judith Hicks Stiehm, Janet Reno, A Life; Elliot Willensky, When Brooklyn was the World; Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life; Roger Cohen, The Girl from Human Street; Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place; James Sturm, The Golem's Mighty Swing; Ian Smith, Black Shakespeare; Robert A.M. Stern, Between Memory and Invention; Paul G. Bahn, Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art; George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia; Barry Manilow, Sweet Life; Jonathan Balcombe, Super Fly;  Eric R. Kandel, There is Life after the Nobel Prize; Barry Menikoff, Stone Mother; Norman Podhoretz, Making It;  David Scheel, Many Things Under a Rock; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory; Timothy Garton Ash, Homelands.

Another Brooklyn Memoirist -- Marty Glickman

 In the late 40s and 50s, Marty Glickman was the radio voice of the New York Knicks. As a basketball announcer, he was simply the best. Most of us from that era, especially Brooklyn guys, can still recall in our mind's ear his melodious, accurate and rapid-fire recreation of the game. "Gallatin to Braun on the left wing. Swish."

Until a couple of days ago, I did not know that Marty Glickman had written (in an "as-told-to" kind of way) an autobiography called The Fastest Kid on the Block (1996), and that, believe it or not, one copy of this book is among the holdings of the Michener Library of the University of Northern Colorado, in Greeley, Colorado -- and is now in my very own hands. A warm thank you to UNC and to Interlibrary Loan.

Glickman was not only an announcer; he was also a student at fabled P S 217, my own not-so-"alma" mater, which he attended from first through sixth grade. He was born in 1917 so that would be in the 1920s. He was, get this, the fastest kid on the block in my very own neighborhood. 

He was not just a voice but an athlete, best known as a two-way football player at Syracuse University. He was also a top of the class sprinter who once ran a hundred yards in 9.5 seconds (the great Jesse Owens held the world record at 9.3). In 1936, Glickman was scheduled to run the second leg of the 4 x 100 at the Berlin Olympics.  He was scratched at the last minute for reasons that are still murky, but Glickman's opinion, and mine is that Adolf Hitler didn't want a Jew to win a medal, so he had Goebbels whisper to Avery Brundage, who was the head of U. S. Olympic committee, that Glickman not be allowed to run. (Brundage was a notorious racist, misogynist, and Jew-hater, known as "slavery Avery." (There's an unverified report that Brundage spoke at the February, 1939, Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden; it would nor have been out of character for him to have done so.)

Glickman is philosophical about not being allowed to run in the Olympics. It would have been good to show his grandchildren his gold medal, he says. I myself am indignant for him.  

Once, when I was still a Brooklyn yoot, a rumor swept the P S 217 schoolyard that "Marty Glickman is going to be here this afternoon."  He appeared, but all that I can remember is that he spoke to a knot of kids. I remember nothing more.

Another Brooklyn Memoirist -- Barry Menikoff

I met Barry Menikoff a couple of times. The first time was at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California and the second time when he was a visiting professor here in Boulder. A Robert Louis Stevenson specialist, he was; I've had a fondness for RLS from my childhood, and I've read a substantial percentage of his voluminous works, so we had something to talk about. Menikoff was then teaching in Hawaii and mighty anxious to find his way back to the mainland.

I knew nothing of his childhood except that like me he was a Brooklyn boy. Then, a while ago, I heard through a mutual acquaintance that he had written a memoir of his childhood and youth. And so he has. It's called Stone Mother, and it's privately printed but available on Amazon, and it's a damn good book that might with a few judicious edits have been a successful commercial publication. 

I used to tell my friends that I was the most naive boy in the history of the known universe ever to arrive on a college campus. But now I have a competitor. Menikoff knew a lot of things -- principally how to survive the death of his mother and the disappearance and neglect of his father, so he was not without resources. Socially, he was behindhand, and in terms of books and intellectual life, he was nowhere. It was quite an achievement for him to get from Brownsville to Brooklyn College and then on to a successful career as a teacher and scholar. 

I think that what I liked best about this memoir is its honesty.  It tells the truth and by doing so creates a strong, credible picture of Brooklyn life back then,

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') were talented enough 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.  

Amnesia on Film: Black Angel

[Warning, metablogians: do not read the following paragraphs if you're planning to see Black Angel, a curious, interesting 1946 noir. Your viewing pleasure will be ruined by the following "all spoiler" entry.] 

Once again, it's amnesia, Hollywood style -- an alcoholic blackout that is granted a patina of respectability when a doctor calls it Korsakoff's syndrome. The plot in brief: a whiskey-soaked amnesiac (Martin Blair, played by Cornell's own Dan Duryea) has just plain forgotten that he murdered his bad-girl blackmailing wife.

I must say it's a difficult premise for me to swallow -- but is nevertheless the kind of oddity that's par for the course in the Hammett-Chandler-Woolrich universe.

To add to the complexity, forgetful Martin sets out to find the killer, and is hot on the trail when his memory suddenly returns -- and in a flash he realizes that he himself is the guilty party for whom he's searching. It's a mighty contrived and out-of-left field kind of revelation -- but I must confess that I fell for it. I was deceived by a series of red herrings and was surprised by the film's outcome. I rather doubt that most viewers will be as much a sucker as I was. 

Like many noirs, Black Angel gets off to a very fast start. Scarcely thirty seconds in, Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling) opens a bureau drawer and retrieves her nice ladylike pistol. I respect a movie that's thoroughly and instantaneously loyal to its genre. I wonder, though, whether future generations, studying those many black-and-white crime films of the 1940s and 50s, won't think that every chest of drawers, armoire, lowboy, highboy, tallboy, dresser, and chiffonier in Los Angeles or New York City harbored an easily accessible derringer, rod, gat, or piece.  

 

"Hereditary Meritocracy"

"Hereditary meritocracy" is a phrase, and a concept, that hits home. Reluctantly, I must concede that these words characterize my small corner of the American experience (at least in part).

"Hereditary meritocracy" is a pointed irony. It's obviously an oxymoron -- a contradiction -- in which an adjective that goes one way is sutured to a noun that goes another -- juxtaposing, as it does, unearned heredity to earned merit.  

Heredity, as it defines an individual, comprehends the talents or defects that happen to lie in one's genes. In the wider social sense, it refers to what is often called "ascribed status" or "ascribed value." You can be a marquis or a mogul because your father or grandfather was "well born" or because he made a ton of money -- not because you yourself ever lifted a finger. But to be a member of the meritocracy, you must have achieved something intellectual, financial, political, artistic, or whatever. Your own abilities, your own work. 

But heredity and merit are not as distinct in practice as they are in theory, as the phrase "hereditary meritocracy" indicates. The hereditarily rich and well-born have advantages that allow their offspring to "achieve" and prosper. Children of the advantaged develop, it's been shown, larger cerebellums. They attend better schools, enjoy a richer home life, have better medical care and are coached in music and art and athletics. Of course they then perform better on standardized tests, which is then interpreted as as a sign of merit. It's a better forecast of "success" to be rich with mediocre genes than poor with excellent genes and good work habits -- though it's hard for some of the privileged to admit this obvious fact.

And now to the point. I myself and my family have during this last century made our way into the "hereditary meritocracy." Although we're not particularly rich in cash, we're rich in family resources and intergenerational support. I believe that every one of my own parents' descendants, and there are now 24 of them, has or will graduate from college. We are almost uniformly "professionals":  accountants, lawyers, teachers, librarians, journalists. Not a one of us rolls cigars for a living, as did my grandfather. We're prosperous.

Should we be embarrassed or ashamed that we can provide a privileged life for our descendants. I don't think so, because we didn't step on anyone's heads to get here. We need not apologize for our successes in this new world. 

But we do have obligations. The first is to be aware of our good fortune and to realize that our successes owe as much to opportunity as to effort. (After all, with the same genes, we were stagnant and miserable for a thousand years in the "old country"). And then we must also make sure that we do not put barriers in the way of others -- or more positively, we must try to help others find themselves in the same comfortable niche that we have reached. It's an imperfect system, this "hereditary meritocracy," but it is far from the worst the world has known.

Where Have All the Native-Born 7-Foot Centers Gone?

Just about every NBA team now has a non-native 7-foot center on its roster. What's wrong with America -- can't we produce sequoia-size centers any more?  Except for Minneapolis-born Chet Holmgren, Oklahoma's incredible rookie, by jiminy they're all furriners. The last three MVPs, mirabile dictu, all big guys, originated elsewhere: Milwaukee's Giannis Antetokounmpo from Nigeria by way of Greece, Philadelphia's Joel Embiid from Yaounde, Cameroon, and Denver's Никола Јокић, more familiar to us 'Mericans as Nikola Jokic, from Sombor, Serbia. In addition, there's also awkward but effective Jonas Valanciunas on the New Orleans Pelicans, from Lithuania; GSW's Dario Saric from Croatia; Rudy Gobert, now blocking shots for Minneapolis (sharing center duties with New Jersey's big Kat) from France; Kristaps Porzingis, playing for the Boston Celtics (an exceedling lanky guy who seems to think he's a 7'3" guard) from Latvia; Chicago's Nikola Vučević, from Montenegro; Jusuf Nurkić, of the Phoenix Suns, formerly one of the "itch brothers", from Bosnia; Atlanta's Clint Capela, Swiss via Angola; Sacramento's Domantas Sabonis, who is a fine fine player but not as dominant as his father, Arvydas, from Lithuania  -- alongside his backup, Alex Len from Ukraine; the Clippers Ivaca Zubac, from Croatia; Houston's multi-talented Alperen Şengün, who leads the league in unusual diacritical marks, from Turkey; Portland's Deandre Ayton from the Bahamas; Pascal Siakam, playing for Toronto from Cameroon; Goga Bitadze from the other Georgia, playing for Orlando: and of course the latest teen sensation, France's Victor Wembanyama, from France. And I've probably forgotten one or two others.

Seven foot tall American centers, where have you gone? Why and wherefore? Diet? Environmental deterioration? Genetics? Disinterest?

It's not just a passing moment. Veteran NBA fans will remember Rik Smidt, Yao Ming, Hakeem Olajuwon, Dikembe Mutombo, Dirk Nowitzki along with such off the beaten track performers as Romania's Georghe Muresan and Sudan's Manute Bol.

Another Brooklyn Memoirist: Barry Manilow

The singer and composer Barry Manilow writes that he took three arduous years to produce his rather thin memoir (Sweet Life, Adventures on the Way to Paradise, 1987). I'm skeptical of his claim because his book has all the outward indications of the celebrity genre that might justly be called the "as-told-to's. It's written as a flow of "I did this, then I did that; I was great."  The dullest prose; I don't think there's so much as a metaphor in the entire book.  Gosh, I searched high and low for genuine feeling, for insight or learning, or for complexity of vision. No dice. How could such an unreflective, shallow being have achieved so much?  Been so popular, so highly regarded, so famous.

I can't say that I'm very familiar with Manilow's music, but I'm pleased to learn that he produced Bette Midler's debut album, The Divine Miss M. "Delta Dawn" and "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" were midlife favorites that I've been pleased to revisit today (with the assistance of officious Alexa).

Brooklyn influence? Manilow seems to be a bit ashamed of his origins. At age 20, he moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan. "As we drove away, I said to myself, 'Good-bye, Brooklyn. Thanks for everything. I'm never coming back.' And I never did."  The only clear evidence of his Brooklynity is that he named his beloved dog "Bagel."

Another Brooklyn Memoirist: Pete Hamill

Half of Pete Hamill's memoir sometimes seems to have dropped down from another universe or more precisely from an alternative civilization, while the other half depicts events and ideas that are as familiar to me (as they say) as the back of my hand. Although Pete and I are both Brooklynites and near-contemporaries (he was born in 1935, and I in 1939), our lives were o so similar and yet completely different. But that's the way things were in complex, composite 1940s Brooklyn.

The title of Hamill's memoir establishes the differences. It's well-named -- A Drinking Life (1994) -- and it is saturated with liquor and Irish bars and elbow-lifting and most especially with Pete's father's uncontrollable and disabling alcoholism. Yet just a few blocks over, in my part of Brooklyn, alcohol played no part whatsoever in my own family or my life in the neighborhood. I would not call an autobiography of my own An Abstinent Life, because we weren't teetotalers and there was always a glass of Scotch to offer to guests, but we hardly ever touched the stuff ourselves. It wasn't until much later in life that I came to realize that my father and I were genetically incapable of digesting alcohol. I've written about this peculiar phenomenon here.  

Equally in contrast was Hamill's early education. The poor fellow was enrolled at Holy Name of Jesus, a Catholic parochial school where one of his teachers was the "snarling vicious Brother Jan, a thick-necked Pole with a jutting jaw and bent nose" -- your classic sadist -- who derived his joy in life by whipping with a thick ruler the bare hands and butts of defenseless boys. I myself learned to read and cipher at P.S. 217, a public elementary. At 217, we had teachers both gifted and incompetent but no deranged monsters and no corporal punishment. I can remember being bored at school, but not terrified. Not terrified of the teachers, that is -- among the students we had our fair share of bullies and sociopaths.

Hamill's Park Slope family took Roman Catholicism seriously but he himself was not an enthusiast. Although he loved the costumes and the incense and the majestic hymns, and although he confesses that the loved the "cartoony name" of the Holy Ghost, he was, right from the start, an instinctive atheist. My Flatbush family proffered us nary a single drop of religious information or indoctrination or training. I myself had never attended a single religious service in either synagogue, church, temple, mosque or tabernacle until 2021, and then only because it was New Orleans and we heard that Ellis Marsalis had volunteered to improvise a few measures on the piano. Hamill was a atheist by dissent; I was one by inheritance. 

Nevertheless, Hamill and I shared a great deal -- mostly, I think, in the form of popular culture. Ring-o-levio, spaldeens, stoop ball. Where else but in Brooklyn was a "do-over" a "hindoo?" And baseball. Hamill remembers that an uncle confided to him that "the Dodgers are the greatest thing in the world." He delights in reciting a litany of familiar Dodger names: "Augie Galan, Dixie Walker, Ralph Branca, Joe Hatten, Henk Behrman, Hugh Casey." Except to a select few of us, these names are meaningless random syllables, but to those who were children at a particular time and place, they are poetry in its purest and most sublime form, each name a luscious mouthful of pure pleasure. Syllables that will forever bond Hamill and me to the end of the chapter. Syllables that transcend this transitory sublunary existence.

Like me, Hamill was a great lover and collector of comic books. Both of us savored heroes such as Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel jr. and the Human Torch and the Green Lantern and Plastic Man and the Sub-Mariner and Wonder Woman and Invisible Scarlet O'Neill. Hard to believe but there are those who think that Freddie Freeman is only an all-star first baseman, but Hamill and I know better.

And also like me, Hamill found his way the public library where he measured himself against Jim Hawkins and Edmond Dantes and Sydney Carton and D'Artagnan. Tough competition. 

Sometimes, Pete Hamill leaves pop culture behind and delves into his own personal psychology. Here's a paragraph of unusual sincerity and one that touches at least tangentially on my own experience. It appears in a discussion of the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. (I should mention that I read everything of Stevenson's that the McDonald Avenue Library possessed.)

 "I sensed (says Hamill) that I was my own version of Jekyll and Hyde. In my head, the Good Boy was constantly warring with the Bad Guy. I wanted to be the Bad Guy, tough, physical, a prince of the streets, at the same time I was driven to be the Good Boy: hardworking, loyal, honorable, an earner of money for the family. The Bad Guy cursed, growled, repeated dirty jokes and resisted Brother Jan, the Good Boy served Mass in the mornings and read novels in bed at night."

In retrospect, I realize that I shared  a bit of Hamill's doppelgangerism. In real life, I was a conforming Jekyll; but in my heart, in my soul, I was a fierce dissenter. Lots of anger, lots of unfocussed passion. I didn't much act upon my Hydeness, except for the occasional adolescent pilfering and the meaningless fights. But how else to account for the violent dreams -- especially the regularly-repeated nightmares where I bashed in the heads of unidentifiable adults with a heavy shovel?  And buried their bodies in my father's backyard garden underneath the hybrid teas? 

A Few Words New to Me

An "ongon," frequently depicted, it turns out, in Ice Age Mongolian art, is a type of shamanistic spirit. When a shaman dies, he becomes an ongon. My dictionary says that the plural of ongon is ongod, but the prehistoric art book in which I found this word prefers ongones. I doubt I'll have regular occasion to use the plural form, but if I did I would prefer the more familiar English-sounding version, ongones. The adjective entopic is the opposite of ectopic. Ectopic refers to something in its usual place and entopic means that it is its regular place, as, for example, your tongue is in your mouth. If it were elsewhere, it would be ectopic. In an entopic pregnancy, the embryo is in the womb, where, by golly, is just where it ought to be. A "psychopomp" (from Greek ψυχοπομπός, meaning a 'guide of souls') is an entity who carries the soul of a dead person to the underworld or to heaven, or wherever. I suppose that the familiar cartoon figure of a hooded, faceless man with a scythe is a kind of psychopomp, though I don't remember anyone ever calling it so. A "geoglyph" is a design in the earth created by removing soil and exposing the underlying rock. Here's a most famous geoglyph: 

A "spall" is a large flake of rock. "Pecking" is a process of removing material by hammering or bashing. A "cupule" is a small circular hollow pecked into a rock. A 
"plaquette" is a small flat stone bearing an engraved design.

 

All these beautiful words were encountered in Paul G. Bahm's comprehensive Prehistoric Art (Cambridge, 1998).

Another Brooklyn Memoirist: Robert A. M. Stern

I must confess that I had never heard of architect-entrepreneur Robert Stern until I read Martin Filler's NYRB review of Stern's recent autobiography -- which is called Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture. How could I have been so behindhand, so ill-informed?

Filler's evaluation of the memoir is sharp-elbowed. He plainly doesn't like Stern himself although he grudgingly grants that he was a successful dean of architecture at Yale. His critiques of Stern's buildings are unfriendly and a bit wicked: of Yale's two newly-constructed colleges, Filler claims that "first-year students might imagine that they've wandered into a themed Disney resort called Academialand." The Comcast Center in Philadelphia, he says, is of "surpassing banality"; the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas "resembles a branch bank in a suburban shopping mall." Moreover, Filler is is both scornful (and possibly envious) that Stern married into lavish wealth (his wife was a Gimbel heiress). Is it wit or is it bigotry to deride Stern's progression from a working-class Brooklyn Jewish family to a big time Manhattan success as a typical "rugelach to riches story?"

It was when I learned that Stern was a Brooklyn boy that my interest was provoked and I trotted over to the Boulder Public Library to procure a copy of Memory and Invention. I doubt I would have read the book from cover to cover except for its neighborhood relevance. Robert Stern, it turns out, was not only a local lad but he was born in exactly my year, 1939. He attended public schools and had hoped to attend Erasmus Hall High School, which would have made him my  classmate, but, he claims, he lived outside of the district and so was shunted to Manual Trades High School (famously featured in the grimy novel and film, The Blackboard Jungle). It was a surprise to me that he grants a sentence to one of his junior high school classmates, the "diplomat" Matthew Nimetz, whose name I remember from my four years at Erasmus but whose person, as far as I can recall, I never encountered. I have to doubt that Stern was districted out of Erasmus. Manual Trades was a school that students chose, like Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech. Stern misremembers. He probably decided to cast his lot with Manual Trades because it was reputed to be a "hands-on" school. It's doesn't much matter: he would have been just as unhappy at Erasmus. He craved Harvard and Manhattan and notoriety and money, and none of the local schools would have filled the bill, certainly not EHHS.

Although the lengthy accounts of Stern's buildings might enlighten and inspire a specialized readership, I myself found the book dispiriting. There is lots of information about commissions procured by sucking up to the mighty and a heck of a lot more about infighting among the high-flying architects than I needed to know. In addition, the book overflows with self-congratulation and is replete with assiduous and triumphal name-dropping.

It's not for me to judge Stern's achievement, but I cannot disagree with his contention that architects should be fully steeped in but not restricted by the architecture of the past. I gather that Stern is a "neo-traditionalist' and Filler, his reviewer-critic, a "modernist."  I cannot say how many buckets of talent (Filler would say "none!") that Stern brought to his game, but however many they are, they are only drops in an ocean of ambition.  

Despite it all, I was intrigued by Stern's Brooklyn childhood, especially where his history bisects (or veers away) from my own. His grandparents, like mine, are folks of eastern European shtetl origin who struggled without much success to adapt to the new world. They landed in Brooklyn, which Stern seems to have resented. He yearned for "the city," Manhattan. I myself did not sufficiently appreciate Brooklyn, and like Stern, I wanted out. Nowadays, it's embarrassing for me to recall that the one big idea of this Brooklyn "yoot" was to leave the old country, Flatbush, behind. Stern, on the other hand, is unembarrassed: "I disliked Brooklyn--it was a place to be from and get out of (his italics). The difference between us is that he knew that he wanted Manhattan; I didn't know what I wanted, I just wanted to go somewhere else, which I have managed to do, having spent most of my life in the mountain west and in green New England.  

Stern also knows what all of us old Brooklynites know -- that our once provincial and disrespected borough has become a bit hoity-toity. The realtors have taken over. Stern says that his childhood neighborhood "is now alternately called Windsor Terrace and Kensington, but at the time everyone just called it Flatbush."  Which is exactly my recollection. If you had asked me in 1950 what part of Brooklyn I hailed from, I would have said "Flatbush." But now the PS 217 catchment area is called Kensington or Ditmas Park, expressions that I had never heard until the last decade or so.

One curiosity about Between Memory and Invention: unlike every other Brooklyn reminiscence I have ever read, Stern never mentions the Dodgers. Quite a telling omission, I think, if you think about it for a moment. Nothing about either food or sex, either. An uncharacteristic Brooklyn childhood.

In a Lonely Place (1950)

In a Lonely Place is a carefully written, economically directed, suspenseful, and sometimes menacing piece of work. Filmed in 1949, released in 1950, it has aged very well. I've seen it four or five times over the years, and it improves with each viewing. Humphrey Bogart is true to his natural bent as a half-crazed, paranoid, violent screenwriter, and Gloria Grahame is utterly convincing as a smart, vulnerable and ultimately self-protective young actress. It's a noir-y film, very satisfying, with only an occasional misstep (such as the five inexplicable minutes allotted to Laurel Gray's --i.e. Grahame's-- butch masseuse).  

On this last time through, I was struck by an element of the film of which I had not taken sufficient notice. It's a distinctly post-WWII movie. Dix Steele (Bogart) had been a successful writer before the war; he was, we're told, a good commanding officer; but now he's erratic, crazy jealous, his sanity at knife's edge. The film does not offer an explanation for his decline. When he's shown pictures of the brutally murdered Mildred Atkinson, he exhibits no emotional response;  it's as though he's so thoroughly inured to violent death that he lacks fellow-feeling. The audience must infer he's seen too many such deaths. In the past, I hadn't sought a cause for his symptoms, but this time, it was transparent to me that although the writers don't dwell on the war as a cause, they assume that the 1950 audience will get the point. It's shell-shock or battle fatigue or what is now called PTSD. When I came to appreciate the film's 1940s ambience, In a Lonely Place became not merely an intimate psychological drama with noir overtones, but a trenchant commentary on WWII devastation and disruption. And therefore a more profound and richer work of art.   

I was curious enough about what is left unsaid in the film to look for a copy of the novel from which the film is drawn. It's Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place, first published in 1947 and now reissued in 2017 by New York Review Books (thanks NYRB!. Not a difficult search, because it was right there on a shelf in the Boulder Public Library.  

In a Lonely Place is a novel in the Chandler-Hammett-Gardner orbit. For those who love the genre, it might be a great read. For me, not an aficionado of mysteries or detective novels, it was, I'm afraid, a plod -- much marred by an arid, graceless prose style, with many a sentence so awkward that it pained both eye and ear. But just as I suspected, in the novel the WWII material is front and center -- and it's PTSD all right. The shocker, however, is that Dix Steele is not the Bogart-Steele of the film. Not even close. He's not a disturbed  ex-officer trying to adjust to the post-war world. Instead, he's a serial killer on the prowl for another victim. He's murdered his landlord and a former girlfriend, and a trio or quartet of young pretty women. He's a textbook misogynistic nutcase and therefore not nearly as interesting the film's complicated troubled Dix Steele.

I'm in awe of the brilliant transformation from book to script. The credit goes to two writers:  Edmund Hall North, who first "adapted" the novel, and Andrew P. Solt (a refugee born in Hungary as Endre Strausz) who wrote the screenplay. And of course to the director, the great Nicholas Ray.

(In the picture above, Dix's arm is around Laurel's neck. It should be an affectionate embrace, but he's too possessive. She's justifiably wary.)

The Anti-Bucket List

Here follows a list of some of the many activities that I definitely, excruciatingly, do not wish to perform before I kick the ol' kettle. My life is perfectly complete as it stands, and I feel no psychological pressure to engage in any of these anxiety-ridden ventures. Nope, all the pressure is on the side of safety, indolence and sloth. I'm mighty "fulfilled" just as I am. As fulfilled as I want to be.

I do not yearn to explore the depths of the Marianas trench in a submersible -- nor even go down a few hundred feet to view a shipwreck. I prefer the surface of the wine-dark sea, or better still, a quiet pond where, even if I'm a daring distance from the edge, my feet can still touch bottom.  

I do not want to take up diving into shallow rivers from rocky precipices. I'm not interested in being death-defying or picturesque. I can defy death just perfectly while lying on my couch. Also, no bungee-jumping, or, even more lunatic, jumping out of airplanes with a fickle parachute on my back. No thank you.  

I have no desire to smuggle weapons or drugs across the border or into Singapore or Iran. In fact, I don't think I'll do any smuggling at all. I consider my career as a smuggler, never flourishing, to be absolutely finito.

I do not need to take up a late-life career as a wild-animal trainer. No lions, tigers, bears. Though I do wish that I could do something about the broccoli-eatiing groundhogs.

I don't wish to train for a second career as a food-taster to the mighty. I wouldn't be good at the job; I'm chronically, almost terminally hypochondriacal. I would probably find poison in every forkful or sip --  and then display all sorts of bizarre symptoms. I especially don't want to be a food taster for people on Mr. Putin's shit list. No sirree.

I do not want to go dancing with the stars. Never, never, never, never, never (as William Shakespeare wrote in a slightly different context).  No televised tangos in my future.

I am not going to sign up for that trip to Mars. Or to the moon. Or anywhere that requires a pressure suit. I'm comfortable in my "relaxed fit" jeans and shirt.

Rapelling. I do not have the least inkling of a need to rappel. 

 

Words of My Life: Provider

I first encountered the word "provider" in its positive sense as a virtual synonym for "mensch": "he was a good provider; he took care of his wife and his kids and his aged parents and even his employees" (if he had any).

But nowadays the word has been stripped of its warm associations and has emerged as a cool or neutral term. I encounter the word most often when I need medical attention. A doctor is no longer a doctor; he's been renamed a "provider." I believe this usage to be the invention of the nefarious insurance companies that govern and distort our medical system. "Doctor" and "nurse" are praise-words, rich in significance. "Provider" has no resonance. It reduces your doctor to an index or reference number and is therefore of great utility to the bureaucracy. I can't imagine that a doctor, asked what he does, would be happy to respond,  "I'm a provider."   

The word "teacher" has, for many, a positive resonance. I was a teacher; I was not an "education provider" -- nor would I have embarked on a career with the aim of being considered such. 

I believe that nowadays the most common use of the word "provider" occurs in the internet phrase, "content provider."  And so the word continues on its long downward path.

Falling

I suppose I fell an uncountable number of times in the days of my youth, but to these floppings I paid no mind. I started to take note during my first year in Ithaca, when, a creature of sidewalks and "gutters," I fell splat on my face in the slopes and snows far above Cayuga's waters at least a score of times. Lithe and springy, I did not a whit of damage to myself.

Falling became a real issue in my life only when my father, at age 74 in 1978, took a header down a flight of basement stairs at 539 East 9. From that moment, his life changed rapidly for the worse. Whether his  arthritis was a consequence of the fall, as his doctors claimed (they called it "traumatic arthritis") I cannot say, but from that time until his death eight years later he was crippled with pain. His once athletic body wasted and shrunk, and his lively step devolved into a sad shuffle. For me, it was a warning and a precedent. Don't fall.

Nowadays, even though I'm older by several years than my father was when the arthritis finally took his life, and am most definitely marooned in what he liked to call "extra innings," I'm most aware that it is a fall that could do me in. I take precautions: not paranoid, I hope, but sensible. Some years ago I moved to a building with an elevator -- no more second floor bedrooms or basement washing machines for me. For our West Bradford summers, I've put up rope banisters where the ground is steep or irregular. I carry a stick when I walk on the paths or in the woods. "Three legs good, two legs bad." Even so, this past summer I fell twice. The first time, because a cemetery groundhog had dug a burrow next to a gravestone and grass had grown to conceal his hole. I'm glad the fall was a gentle one, because I would have hated to have gone down in local lore as the guy who died when he cracked his head on an old, lichen-covered tombstone. Too much irony, too much black humor.

My second fall was when a rope snapped -- so not my fault at all. The ropes that we used for a banister on a steep path leading from the dike to the waterfall garden had simply rotted out. I tumbled slowly and gracefully. We've now replaced that old rope with a new one so massive that it could secure an aircraft carrier.

Moreover, I've stopped going up on ladders -- not even kitchen step ladders. If a ceiling light bulb needs to be changed, I'll hire someone or beg a favor from a young person. I'm aware of the tragic story of a friend of a friend who lived in a house with a two-story entrance foyer. Though seventyish, he climbed a ladder to straighten a wall hanging and lost his balance. He lingered for a few days, but never regained consciousness.

Some friends of a decade or so younger than I came visiting yesterday. In the course of a lively conversation, I revealed that I shun step stools and ladders. One of the guys said, "I'm not ready to give up climbing on ladders." I said, "Why not, it's dangerous -- you can hurt yourself."  He said, "I'm too young. It's a matter of self-respect." To which I responded, "Fuck self-respect."

I asked my cardiologist what was going to kill me. She said, at your age, and with your state of health, the most likely cause is either an infection or a fall. Which I take to be good news of a kind. I can be vigilant about infections and I can be very cautious about where I set my feet. Especially so if I remember my "mature" vulnerability and if I keep in mind my father's history. 

Nevertheless, I'm beginning to feel that I may not be immortal.

Jane Austen's Emma; Harriet Smith's Ancestry

Both partisans and skeptics of Jane Austen's Emma will remember Harriet Smith, the young woman who becomes the object of Emma Woodhouse's officious matchmaking. Harriet's ancestry is explained by JA; she is "the natural daughter of someone" -- that is, she is an illegitimate child of obscure origin. Harriet's patronizing friend Emma imagines, without a shred of evidence, that the poor dear must be the daughter of nobility. She therefore interferes with Harriet's romantic prospects, first by discouraging an "attachment" to an upright and capable farmer -- and then by promoting relationships which we readers are taught to believe should be beyond Harriet's aspiration. JA, for all her satirical spirit, is not one to challenge the rigid class distinctions of rural Highbury. 

But then, at the very end of the novel, other options having led to disaster, Harriet and farmer Robert Martin are allowed to marry.  Almost as a coda -- an afterthought -- Austen reveals to us that 

Harriet''s parentage became known. She proved to be the daughter of a tradesman, rich enough to afford her the comfortable maintenance which had ever been her's and decent enough to have always wished for concealment, -- such was the blood of gentility which Emma had formerly been so ready to vouch -- It was likely to be as untainted, perhaps, as the blood of many a gentleman, but what a connexion had she been preparing for Mr. Knightley -- the Churchills -- or even for Mr. Elton! The stain of illegitimacy, unbleached by nobility or wealth, would have been a stain indeed. 

It's a curious and I think distressing revelation.

There's an unpleasant sneer in the dismissive phrase, "daughter of a tradesman" where "merchant" or even "prosperous merchant" might have been more generous. Moreover, the pregnant phrase "illegitimacy unbleached by nobility or wealth" neatly encapsulates the hypocrisy of a society that can condone a rich bastard but condemn a poor one. 

But what is most bothersome about the paragraph is what it omits. Although JA pull back the curtain on Harriet Smith's father, she does not bother herself to reveal anything about Harriet Smith's mother. Surely even an illegitimate child had one, and surely that mother, in addition to her pregnancy and childbirth, had a story of her own -- both before and after she surrendered her child. If Harriet's father can be revealed (even though he is not named), why then, why not her mother?  What is implied by this omission? That the mother doesn't matter -- she was merely "someone's" mistress or concubine. Or perhaps a prostitute. That Harriet's status in society has nothing to do with her inconsequential mother.

Or perhaps that JA, raveling the loose ends of her story, preferred to avoid a distracting complication.  

My own theory is that JA just simply forgot. Because fathers matter a great deal and mothers matter much less, it's not of any moment who was Harriet's mother. In psychological terms, JA is guilty of a perfect parapraxis -- and unconscious forgetting, canceling, or, in modern jargon, an erasing. Harriet's mother is not even erased -- she's utterly non-existent.

Sometimes what is not represented can be as revealing as what is included.

In Which I Do a Good Deed

We were sitting on a metal bench in front of the Boulder Public Library, resting up for the half mile walk home. It was unusually peaceful; families in and out, borrowing or returning their bags of books. Once in a while, there's a discordant note: a homeless, drugged, or deranged person, muttering or sometimes shouting incoherently, dragging a dirty blanket or wheeling a stolen supermarket cart or bicycle. But yesterday there was an event. A large young man, 40ish, had lost his child. He asked us, "have you seen a boy with a red hat." No we hadn't, but we said we'd pay attention. The poor distressed guy ran from place to place in the park and in the adjacent parking lot, shouting "Zack."  As he became increasingly agitated, so did I. Is there a worse feeling of powerlessness than when you've lost contact with your child. As he became more and more frantic, I remembered Florence Dombey and Mrs. Brown, and Etan Patz, and Leiby Kletzky. After a few moments, I said to LERM, "if the boy with the red hat had come out of the library alone, we would have seen and noticed him. He's got to be inside the library and I'm going to find him." I walked into the building and almost immediately heard some high-pitched crying from somewhere in the stacks. In a few seconds I located the boy (four-years-old, I would guess). I said to him, "I know exactly where your father is and I'm going to take you to him." I took the boy's hand and walked out of the library -- almost immediately to encounter the crazed parent coming our way. I released the child and in a second he was in his father's arms. Father and son consoled each other. I sat back down on our bench, knowing that I had done a good deed. It was a very satisfying, human feeling. After a brief while, we walked home uneventfully.

Our Classmate Janet Reno

My first visit in four months to the new acquisitions shelf of the Boulder Public Library turned out to be fruitful, for I discovered J. H. Stiehm's 2023 biography of Janet Reno: Janet Reno, A Life (Gainesville, Fl). Janet was a classmate ('60) at Cornell and also proceeded with me to Harvard, where she was one of 16 women in her law school class, and I was a undistinguished graduate student in GSAS. I knew her slightly at Cornell; she "sat desk" at Sage Hall, where I was a frequent caller. Our relationship never advanced beyond superficial chat and I was surprised as all get out when she re-emerged in 1993, having been appointed Attorney-General by President Clinton. She served in that position for eight years and made quite a mark. 

I've been on a project of reading the memoirs of members of my age-cohort, especially of those with whom I've crossed paths, even if ever so slightly.  I think that so far, Janet Reno is the only one of my acquaintances who's earned not just an autobiography, but a biography of her own.

I was particularly interested in the paragraphs about Janet's Cornell and Harvard years, but I'm sorry to report that those sections are notably thin and superficial. Stiehm's account make Cornell seem archaic and primitive -- out of a 1930s movie. It is news to me that "freshman wore beanies, sophomores had Cornell sweaters, juniors had blazers, and seniors had straw hats." Mere mythology. It's true, though, that there was considerable drinking at fraternity and apartment parties, but for what college was that not true?

Careless errors: Janet did not live at Dickinson Hall, she lived at Clara Dickson Hall. She did not study political theory with non-existent Professor Mario Anatti, but no doubt she did take classes with the distinguished scholar-politician Mario Einaudi.

Stiehm passes over in silence the most egregious moment in Janet's career -- when she was suckered into allowing villainous Ken Starr to expand his probe into Bill Clinton's sexual adventures. Either an apology or an explanation should surely have been in order.

Awkward Question

I was at the old-age home (sorry, "retirement community") last week -- a place that gives me the creeps even though many of my friends and former colleagues seem to live there happily. (I'm on the waiting list but I hope that I'll never be constrained to move in.)  I was there to share lunch with a 90-year-old friend. At the next table over (in the rather luxurious dining room) was a woman whom I knew slightly fifty years ago -- as a neighbor and as the mother of a Flatirons Elementary School tudent. She's 89, a widow, and still healthy, still attractive.

She (let's call her Ms. GK) initiated the conversation with this question. "Is your wife still alive?"  

It wasn't the inquiry itself that took me aback. It was the casual way in which it was asked, with no more emotional resonance than, say, "do you want raisins in your cereal?" or, "is it raining outside?"  

Which made me realize that Ms. GK --  and all her fellow denizens of the facility -- live in a world of "sole-survivors" where the deaths of spouses "were as plentie as Blackberries." Therefore, there is nothing noteworthy or remarkable for her to inquire about the status of a long time companion, especially when more than half of husbands and wives have already kicked the old bucket.

Nevertheless, the lack of emotion, the cold bloodedness, the absence of euphemism, of Ms. GK's question produced in me a "take stock" moment. Whether we are in or out of the institution, we are in the same ninth-decade world.

But I do hope that I myself do not become quite so matter-of-fact about the death of friends and family.

Cemetery struck by fallen tree

I'm more or less reconciled to my anonymity. Just not a famous dude. Not an "influencer." Haven't been covered by newspapers or reporters in a generation or two. But now notoriety has struck. 

Careful and diligent readers of this blague know that the old West Bradford graveyard -- a couple of acres of bumpy terrain -- abuts our Vermont property. And now they will discover that "our" cemetery has been featured in the Bradford Journal-Opinion (formerly the United Opinion). Here's the story: 

The picture is of such poor quality that it's impossible to decipher. The story isn't that easy to read either so here's a transcription: 

Cemetery struck by fallen tree 

by Alex Nuti-deBiasi

BRADFORD--The Bradford Selectboard voted last week to spend $3500 to carefully clean up the West Bradford cemetery after a tree fell last week shattering limbs and possibly damaging headstones and gravesites.

"It looks like a bomb went off," Donnalyn Burgess Lyon told selectboard members at the meeting on August 24. I'm beside myself."

Lyon has several generations of family members buried at the bucolic cemetery located on Hackett Hill Road near South Road. She visited the cemetery to trim the grass and care for the gravesites.

A reporter who visited the cemetery ahead of last week's meeting did not see any damaged headstones, but at least one heavy limb rested on a stone.

Lyon told a reporter she visited the cemetery on a weekly basis to care for plots and trim the grass around stones until she broke her leg. Now she makes it every couple of weeks.

Board members said it appears that the tree was located on an abutter's property but that the town should spend the money to clean up the municipal property before pursuing reimbursement from the abutter. They solicited a quote from Thomson Logging for the clean up.

"We want it taken care of and not cause more damage," board chair Meroa Benjamin said.

Hey, we're newsworthy -- and a diligent reporter is right there on the case. We're a little taken aback that Donnalyn's sensationalist remark that "it looks like a bomb went off" was reported without comment.  A bomb didn't go off; a tree fell.

Moreover, we object to the story's headline: the cemetery wasn't struck by a fallen tree; it was struck by a "falling" tree. Once it's fallen it doesn't do any striking.  

For the record, the tree was a big tooth aspen, which folks around here call "popple." It was huge, and it was thoroughly rotten at the base of the trunk. The wonder is, "it hath endured so long."

And also: the "abutter" has reimbursed the town for the cost of the cleanup.

The "bottlebrush buckeye"

As a youth, I spent many a happy hour in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. One of the plantings that I remember vividly was what I conceived of as a "wall" of bottlebrush buckeyes. It's been many a year, but what stands in my memory is roughly 40 or 50 linear feet of 20-foot-tall decorative shrubs in full flower.

So naturally, when I came to West Bradford, I tried to reproduce the effect. I just happened to have a perfect spot for a wall of buckeyes -- a fertile slope of the proper size and shape. In 1980 (plus or minus a year or so) I purchased two such plants from White Flower Farm in Connecticut and set them 30 feet apart, optimistically hoping that over the course of the years they would expand to fill in the allotted space.  

It did not happen. One of the plants lingered for a year or so before giving up the ghost; the other stood still -- grew a bit, then died back over the winter. Our Zone 3 Vermont weather proved to be too harsh for a plant that had thrived in Zone 6 Brooklyn. I resigned my self to the fact that my experiment with the bottlebrush buckeye was a failure.

But then perhaps 10 years ago, after decades of stagnancy, the plant began to increase in size. Global warming?  Wetter summers? Maturity? I can't say. And then this past summer, after forty-plus years of doing virtually nothing, the bottlebrush buckeye produced some flowers. And there they are -- long awaited and very welcome!

(The purplish plant in the background is Joe Pye weed, eutrochium purpureum, which thrives and multiplies without the least bit of assistance from me. And also a 20-year-old weeping willow and young Eastern cottonwood, which I set in place about 5 years ago.)

This past summer, dazzled that the buckeye produced its extravagant flowers at last, I gave it a few hours of care. Weeded it, pruned away the dead growth,  and gave it a small optimisitc dose of 10-10-10 fertilizer. I'm very curious to see what happens next summer. Could it be that my 40-year old experiment will succeed at last?

"At Home"

"And you're still at home," observed Mr. Henry, who had arrived to repair our on-the-fritz propane-powered clothes dryer. (Mr. Henry has been curating our appliances for a generation; he can diagnose a problem by a glance from several yards away, or perhaps he does it by magic. He's a kind of stove and refrigerator genius). 

"At home?" Mr. Henry had inquired about my age and I had confessed my longevity. "Confessed" is not exactly the right word. "Bragged," perhaps. I've reached the age when I don't mind if people ask about my years. I'm proud, I think, to have reached 84 and 5/12s still able to do a day's work -- when many of my friends and former colleagues have plummeted off the cliff or have moved to a "senior living" (formerly called "old age") residence.

But Mr. Henry's comment took me aback -- took me a few seconds to grasp. "Still at home?" Where else would I be? Ah, in an institution. 

I wonder about the difference between the 84-year-old person that Mr. Henry perceived and the 84 that I experience, internally, every day. To myself, I'm certainly not the geezer that I catch sight of in the mirror. Gray, paunchy, a trifle stooped. A bit unsteady on his feet. Even on my best days, I'm not as vigorous, even middle-age vigorous, as I once was. I tire easily and rest often. Work a bit, nap a bit. I no longer perform feats of strength, not only because my muscles have shrunk, but because I'm afraid of injuring my always-vulnerable back.  

I don't feel seventeen, but I feel myself to be myself. I'm competent. My brain, thanks be to all the gods and goddesses in the various pantheons, is still functioning well, though I'm troubled by "noun loss."  I know which plant is a delphinium and which a hyssop, but there are days when those nouns just disappear and can't be recalled. Same with the names of people. The recall system is as fragile as the dryer, but the storage system is working just fine (if I'm patient).  

I find that sometimes people who look only at my outside underestimate my abilities and give me credit and even praise for actions that I think of as routine. I find this phenomenon to be mildly insulting. It's no fun to exceed expectations when the expectations are so low.  At the same time, I know that the task that I can easily dispatch today, might be one that I won't be able to perform tomorrow. And yet I don't want to allow myself to be patronized or applauded for putting my pants on correctly, 

I no longer feel immortal. In fact, I feel mortality pressing in on me. I don't fear death, but I'm not ready for it. I'm enjoying life far too much. How I would feel if my various twinges and aches turned into chronic pains I cannot say. But for today the watchword is, press on!

My Summer So Far

It's the end of August 2023, and what an unusual summer so far. It's all about the rain -- constant, unremitting, monsoony.  Record-setting.  Last week we had three dry days in a row -- first time this entire summer. I've not once seen the stars. One of the great pleasures here is the shiny distinct Milky Way on a clear night -- but there has not been a single cloudless night in months. The pond, therefore, has been gloriously filled and the waterfall, characteristically only a trickle at this season, is still a veritable picturesque and noisy Niagara. We had a great blueberry crop this year, but not a single edible plum, perhaps because of the late frost. The vegetables have done well, especially the tomatoes and cucumbers. I don't know why I haven't seen a single cabbage butterfly this summer -- but I'm glad they've shunned us. Ditto the tomato hornworm. Is it the rain? We've had more tomatoes than we can eat even after giving away bagsful. LERM and I have had a great time, weather permitting, with the various flower gardens. Delphiniums and phlox have had especially good years -- and we've planted some new shrubs --hydrangeas and weigelas -- and extended the day lily borders. Mowing has been a challenge, because the grass grows so rapidly and there are so few days when it's dry enough to cut. As a result, when I do find an opportunity, the grass comes out of the machine in wet clumps and plugs. Unsightly, to say the least. NGP has not been impeded by the weather or by the surgery. He's out there every day tending to the forest and expanding his course. Not many guests (my friends are becoming too old to travel). BHP and his family were here for almost three weeks -a great pleasure -- but the daughter never appeared,.

And to think that last summer was so droughty that the well went dry.

I've done some reading but no writing -- not even on this blague.  

Still Another Republican Legislative Initiative

Alabama representative Ernie Yarbrough has introduced a bill called the Abolish Abortion in Alabama Act which reclassifies abortion as murder in the first degree. Pregnant women who abort a child, either surgically or through the use of drugs, would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. According to the Alabama Political Reporter, Yarbrough contends that "abortion is murder, and justice demands that our laws treat it as such."

Representative Yarbrough has been one the nation's foremost advocates of what he calls "medical freedom."  He has long opposed face masks and covid vaccinations -- or in fact vaccinations of any sort. He "believe[s] that no person, entity or government has the right to force its citizens to violate bodily autonomy. The right, blessing and freedom as individuals to make personal medical, health and wellness decisions ultimately rests in the hands of Alabama citizens." Abortion is therefore an intrusion into the God-given right of every embryo (or unborn child) to be born. "All of us, including fetuses, deserve to make these personal decisions without threat of coercion, persecution or job loss."

Representative Randolph *Randy" Holman (R-Phenix City) has submitted a bill that would take Yarbrough's policy position a bit further. Holman's bill would require the "re-fertilization" of women who were guilty of abortion. In most cases this would involve identifying the father of the unborn child and requiring the couple to re-fertilize.  Otherwise, says, Holman, even if a child-murdering woman is fined or jailed, she hasn't made restitution to society. Only "re-fertilization" will do the job, Holman says. He calls it "compensatory pregnancy."

If the father of the unborn child cannot be found, surrogates may be employed. Surrogate fathers would include members of the legislature who voted in support of the legislation.

Representative "Randy" Holman: