Dr. Metablog

Representative Markwayne Mullin Back in the News

Four years ago, I listened to a radio interview with Markwayne Mullin, a new member of the House of Representatives from eastern Oklahoma, and was absolutely flabbergasted. Astonished and dismayed, I wrote a few paragraphs about him. Here''s what I said then: "It wasn't that he was inarticulate or stupid. It was that he was so utterly smug, so absolutely and entirely certain of himself. He has no doubts. He knows exactly what ails the country -- too much government -- and he knows how to fix it -- lower taxes, less regulation, more free untrammeled capitalism. He does not seem to be aware that the United States of America is a big, complicated, multi-faceted country. Markwayne Mullin possesses all the arrogance of ignorance, in spades."

And here he is, Representative Markwayne Mullin, smiling in front of the mandatory flag.  

I went on to report on Mullin's views, which were the usual list of utterly unoriginal, thoughtless, simplistic tea party talking points. I concluded by offering the hope (or might I say it) the prayer, which was "that Markwayne Mullin, who as he begins his congressional career is superficial to the very core of his being, will come to Washington, meet some folks from different parts of the country and from different ethnic backgrounds, learn a little about the world, come to an appreciation of the complexity of things, and grow up to be a useful broad-minded compassionate public servant. It's not impossible, but it's not going to happen until Mullin realizes that he doesn't know everything about everything, and that the practices that made Mullin Plumbing such a success may not be the same practices that will promote the general welfare over all of the US of A. I'm hopeful, but frankly, I'm not at all optimistic."

Well, the calendar has shed a few leaves, and it's come to pass as I feared. Representative Markwayne Mullin has no more brain than earwax. He's learned nothing.

He's back in the news: 

"An Oklahoma congressman is facing scrutiny after a video posted Monday showed him telling constituents at a town hall that they do not pay his salary.

“You say you pay for me to do this? That’s bull crap. I pay for myself,” Rep. Markwayne Mullin told constituents at a town hall in Jay, Oklahoma. "I paid enough taxes before I got here and continue to through my company to pay my own salary. This is a service. No one here pays me to go.”

“Pays you to go where?” a constituent objected.

“This is a service for me, not a career, and I thank God this is not how I make my living,” Mullin responded.

“Oh please, then don’t run,” a constituent said."

As I understand the exchange, Mr. Mullin believes that inasmuch as the taxes that he paid before he became a congressman exceeds the salary he now draws, that he has limited or no responsibility to his constituents. Not at all a persuasive argument, because like the rest of us, Mullin's taxes go to the defense department and to HEW with a few dribs and drabs left over for social programs and only a trickle for paying for the House of Representatives

But that's not the heart of the matter. The important question is this:  why the heck is Mullin in congress? Obviously, he hates the job and and even more obviously he hates his constituents. He has no respect for government.

Perhaps it's time for Mr. Mullin to reconsider his career. What everyone wants in a representative is someone who will inform himself, be sensible, broad-minded, be able to work with all parties, and be respectful of his constituents. Mr. Mullin fails on all counts. Let's assume he's a good plumber. Look, Oklahoma needs  good plumbers. Please, Mr. Mullin. Do the work you were called to. Markwayne, go back to where you came from, fix those pipes, and stay away from government. Please, don't run again. You've done your bit; let someone else take a crack at it.  

Sexual Dimorphism -- What's the point?

By all rights I should have been attending to the intricate areas of my face while shaving, but I lapsed into a reverie. My obsession of the moment--the beard. Why? Why in the world do human males grow hair on their faces? What's the point? The beard is completely valueless except to Gillette and Schick and now Harry. 

If the beard had a genuine function and if it honestly kept a person warm in winter, then for what reason would evolution deprive the gals of equivalent protection?  

Do bearded males garner a larger share of the nubile maidens than the shaved and beardless? Or a disproportionate share of the wealth? I know of no evidence that they do so. The fact that most men shave their beards argues that beards lack power or function. 

It's sexual dimorphism without purpose or logic. My guess--and it's only a guess--is that the beard-gene clung to a gene with a useful male purpose a couple of hundred thousand years ago and never let go. Accidental hirsuteness.

I suppose that there are times when sexual dimorphism can be useful. Those magnificent manes sported by the lions of the Serengeti certainly make a formidable statement--noli me tangere and by the way remember to keep your paws off the the ladies in my harem. I can see that--but then, the males of the enormous extinct European lion managed without a ruff, as do Bengal tigers. 

The gorgeous display of the male peacock is exuberant but inessential--more subtle birds manage to signal their gender and their availability without such a prodigious waste of resources. 

I should be relieved that it's only the beard that I have to worry about. Imagine if by some quirk of evolution, males of my species grew a big rack of antlers. Way more inconvenient than a mere beard. What a bother!! I can easily imagine myself lodged in a narrow doorway, or lying in bed trying to find a comfortable position while the antlers scratch the headboard, put holes in the pillow, or poke the eye of the beloved. 

Perhaps an advanced civilization would demand that we disbud the antlers at birth? Or we might go the other route and celebrate a magnificent set. We might have evolved into a society that decorated or colored or polished the antlers. "How are you wearing your antlers this winter?" "Natural brown, I think, this year, but with golden highlights." Chains of "Mr. Antler" or "Antler King" shops ("discount on sharpening this week only"). And for guys declined into the vale of years--prosthetic antlers. 

Better a beard than antlers. Definitely.

Deepfried Oreos

On the main street of Estes Park (Gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park), a sign outside the restaurant advertised "deepfried oreos." I was both flabbergasted and thunderstruck, not believing my eyes. But here's the evidence:

Just above ice cream and below "funnel cakes" (but that's another story). Is it a hoax, or can there be such a thing? Absolutely, there's many a google-entry on "deepfried oreos." Several different recipes, one more hideous than the next. A piece of cuisine americaine that had somehow escaped me all these many years. 

One of my waggish friends writes: "I should confess that the last time my wife and I were in Paris, we sampled the deep fried Oreos at a little café on the rue de Rivoli. The sommelier suggested a hearty Cabernet to take the edge off the sweetness of the dish and the wine worked beautifully with the cookie filling, an amalgam of flavors that made our senses tingle." I of course was skeptical of his story. No knowledgeable sommelier would recommend a red wine because it was well known that deepfried oreos were best served with champagne or gatorade.

Is it possible that deepfried oreos could become part of the cuisine of old Europe? Will it be the case that in every Italian village, just between the macelleria and the quaint pasticceria there will be an oreofritteria? A mom-and-pop oreofritteria using recipes that have been in the family for centuries -- but in danger of being taken over by the big American chain, a subsidiary of -- who knows what -- called Signor Oreofritto. A terrifying prospect all around.  

Gender-blind Casting?

Last Saturday, we hiked to the multiplex to hear and watch the Met's HD performance of Idomeneo. Once again, the opera did not disappoint. Early Mozart and glorious, especially the rousing choruses, while soprano Nadine Sierra was a luminous Illia. A silly story, of course, but for once there was a happy ending--a young man and a young woman, of different heritages, were allowed to marry--hurrah. Not without the forgiveness of a god--in this case, Neptune, who could have saved everyone a lot of trouble if he had been quicker to act but unfortunately didn't bother to theophanize until the passing of four hours (including extended intermissions) and three long acts of melodic anguish and dread.  

Nevertheless, I was troubled. "And what was it this time, Mr. Malcontent," you ask.  

It was the "trouser" role. The "hero" of the opera, Idamante, the guy who gets the girl, was played by Alice Coote, a soprano, a middle-aged woman not at all "boyish," but full-figured, prominently bosomed, and generously hipped. She was costumed as an ancient Cretan soldier, with an ineffective corset under her corselet and with a circle of what looked like old-fashioned elongated leather shaving strops or giant bookmarks hanging from waist to ankle. But her outfit did not fool me, even though I'm very good at suspending disbelief. Trust me, I can suspend like crazy.    

And I know that there's no point going to the opera if you can't suspend disbelief. One would think that once you accept the idea that the performers are going to aria at each other whenever they are together and aria at the audience when they are alone, and that they are followed wherever they go by a 100-piece orchestra, you can believe anything at all. But I have to admit that I boggled at Coote/Idamante and that I was sufficiently distracted that my pleasure in the opera was compromised, diminished. At the climax, I thought, "oh no, don't let them kiss." (They didn't, when they should have, and would have, if Idamante had been not a soprano but a tenor or baritone -- is it possible that the director was as squeamish as I.)

Idamante is customarily (but not always) played by a soprano because the part was originally written for a castrato, in this case Signor Vincenzo del Prato (no doubt known to his buddies as del Prato the castrato, or perhaps, as gli italiani would say, del Prato il castrato). I suppose that it is considered "authentic" to sing the part in the register in which it was composed. But why not transpose it down an octave and give it to a handsome tenor. Yes, it would be different, but to my eyes, much better. After all, authenticity has already been compromised --  Alice Coote is no Vincenzo del Prato. Nor do I hear even the most enthusiastic supporters of "period" performances call for a restoration of castrati.  

Shakespeare's women were played by boys. But even the new Globe, with its fetish for ancient ways, does not insist on a boy Cleopatra or a boy Juliet. And all to the good, in my opinion.  

And Now He's Come out of his Coffin to Advise Trump!!

I wrote the following long ago, republished it once. Here it is, relevant again.

What Doesn't Dick Cheney Commit Suicide?

Why doesn't Dick Cheney put a bullet in his brain? It would do him (and his reputation) a world of good. What could possibly stand in his way? Once he sprinkles the ratsbane on his porridge -- and, of course, leaves behind a detailed and humble letter of apology --  he will begin to free his soul of sin and to enjoy some peace of mind. When he has fallen on his sword, his lackeys and toadies will be able to claim that although he was a black-hearted knave, at least he wasn't a shameless black-hearted knave. They can try to persuade us that although he was egregiously and dangerously wrong, he was, like another suicide, Othello, "great of heart." But if Cheney continues in his surly, obstinate, unapologetic lip-curling silence -- why then, he'll go down in the books as an unrepentant demi-devil like Iago ("From this time forth I never will speak word"). 

Cheney has brought disgrace upon our beloved nation and upon himself. Using faked spy data, he suckered the ignorant, feckless Decider and almost the entire Congress into invading Iraq. His war has been a monumental disaster. "Full of scorpions [should be] his brain." At this moment of writing, Cheney is guilty of killing 3260 American soldiers and maiming (by official count -- who can possibly guess at the truth?) 24,314 others. If Cheney has even the most rudimentary of consciences, on it lies the heavy burden of 60,000 to 100,000 Iraqi souls. The Dickster has cost America $414 billion dollars, loss of prestige and the squandering of oceans of good will. Like Anthony, he "has lived in such dishonor/That the gods detest [his] baseness." But Antony took the proper course. When Cheney dispatches himself -- "after the high Roman fashion," let's hope -- he'll have taken the first step toward rehabilitating himself and the nation. For him not to do the deed would be ignoble. 

Dick:  I know that you're hunkering in your bomb-proof shelter. I know that you're up late at night, sleepless with guilt. You're cruising the internet, perchance googling "Cheney + suicide," and you're wavering in your purpose. Dick -- take my considered advice. I'm thinking of your place in history.  At this point, "you have no friend,/ But resolution and the briefest end."  You'll immediately feel better. It's a no-brainer. Go for it.

April 10.  Spike Schapiro comments:  "Dr. M. -- I've read your exhortation to suicide. You are, as usual, falsely optimistic. Cheney can't off himself because a) he's shameless and b) he's a total coward, and c) he has no self-knowledge and d) he can't point a shotgun. You cite the precedents of Othello and Anthony but they're both great spirits and therefore irrelevant. Cheney is a slug. Moreover, Cheney can't be "great of heart" -- he has no heart of his own --it's either a transplant or some mechanical contraption." 

April 4, 2014  Why is this man still alive?  Allowed to give interviews?  Is there no justice in our sublunary world? 

December 22, 2016  Only a silver stake in his heart is going to do it. Mirrors, garlic. Too late for prayers.

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

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

                               Crosspatch,

                               Draw the latch.

                               Sit by the fire and spin.

                               Take a cup,

                               And drink it up.

                               Then call the neighbors in.

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

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

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

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

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

Elsa Morante on Mussolini

Elsa Morante, the distinguished Italian novelist, spent the war years in what might be called internal exile, holed up, hungry, with her friend and later husband Alberto Moravia in a one-room hut in Sant'Agata (both Morante and Moravia were half Jewish). After Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were arrested and shot, hung upside down for all to see, Morante wrote about her countrymen that "all of Mussolini's faults were either tolerated or encouraged and applauded. Thus a people who tolerate the faults of their head of state are complicit with these faults. But if they encourage and applaud them as well, it is worse than being an accomplice, it makes them an accessory to these faults." Mussolini was, according to Morante, a mediocre man, a crude man, a man outside the culture. But Mussolini was also a perfect exemplar of the Italian people who, she claimed, were such that they would rather given their vote to a strong man than to a just man, and if they had to choose between their duty and their profit -- even if they knew what their duty was -- they would choose their profit.

It is difficult not to see an analogy to our beloved country at this election season.

Welders Versus Philosophers

I asked some friends how they understood Senator Marco Rubio's very blunt statement that "Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers."  I received a variety of answers.

My linguistically conservative friends asserted that we obviously need grammarians more than either philosophers or welders, because Rubio doesn't respect the difference between "less" and "fewer." I admit that "less philosophers" clanks on my sensitive inner ear; nevertheless, I don't think that it's wise to hold presidential candidates to high standards of usage. It would be enough for them to grasp the issues. No one I know is so very prescriptivist that he or she will vote for the candidate who knows the difference between less and fewer. I confess to a longing for a more perfect language from our leadership, but traditional  grammar is too much to ask, especially since it's evident that our electorate easily acclimated to the barbarisms of bushlingo.     

Others of my friends took issue with Rubio's unabashed materialism. They parsed his statement to mean "welders make more money than philosophers and therefore we should have more welders than philosophers." Welding is better than philosophizing because it makes the bucks, gathers the green. If this is what Rubio meant, then his argument is not only crass but wrong. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics proves that both graduates with a philosophy degree and professional philosophers (meaning professors of philosophy) enjoy much larger salaries on average than welders. But even if welders did outearn philosophers, Rubio's argument would still be monumentally vulgar. I don't know anyone who, if push came to shove, assigns value strictly on the basis of earnings. Do we not value men of the cloth, social workers, nurses, small farmers, G.I's, smoke-jumpers and sometimes teachers more than we value pornstars and slumlords? Einsteins more than reality TV celebrities? And as much as we respect the crafts -- electricians, plumbers, tractor and auto mechanics -- we also know that it is not the craftsmen but the philosophers who now as in the past are going to help us think our way out of our plight. Just as Locke and Hume got us out of Aristotle and the Bible and into the age of reason, and Darwin laid the foundation for all the advances of the last hundred and fifty years in biology and medicine, so we now need someone, desperately, equipped with deep learning and an insightful brain, to generate the ideas that will get the new messy electronic world, bedeviled with fundamentalists/terrorists, into some kind of intellectual order. Welders are good, especially when you want something fastened to a steel I-beam, but philosophers have their place as well. Rubio is just too downright short-sighted for most of us. We know that money ain't everything and we want our statesmen to know it as well. Rubio's assertion that welders do more valuable work than thinkers participates in bottom-line American anti-intellectualism. We're a can-do practical people; we can see what welders do. Who knows what the heck those airy liberal philosophers do at those lefty universities? Can they fix a fuse? Can they meet a payroll?

Another bunch of my friends objected that there's no reason why a person can't be both a welder and a philosopher. Why set limits on human versatility?  As it happens, I have in my own family a fellow who makes his living with his brain but who also builds his own furniture, can wire a house, and has, strange but true, taken up welding. But I think he'd be the first to admit that he's not a pro at any of these crafts. We live in a world of specialists and it's hard to be perfectly skilled at two crafts, let alone a craft plus metaphysics or epistemology or logic. I understand the longing for the philosopher-welder, but I don't think it's a realistic wish. It's utopian, prelapsarian, perhaps even Marxist. After all, it was Marx who developed the vision of post-capitalist communist society "where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, [where] society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, philosophize after dinner, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or philosopher" (German Ideology [1845]). This is Marx at his least practical. I suspect that his hunters and fishermen would return empty-handed, his herdsman would find that his cows never come home, and his part-time philosophers would boggle over some elementary error in logic or language. So no dice to the philosopher-welder, I'm afraid. Not a starter, Karl.

What I myself would want to ask Rubio is this: how does it happen that there are not enough welders?  Rubio puts his faith in the perfect workings of the free market. In theory, the market should have solved the problem of the missing welders by raising their salaries to make the job more enticing. And similarly, it should have lowered the wages of philosophers to dry up the supply. Wait a sec!!  Is it possible that the free capitalist market is not doing its job. And if I or Marco Rubio propose that we establish more community colleges and offer potential welders training in their craft at little or no cost, are we not interfering with the proper working of capitalism and the free market? Picking winners and losers, in the dread phrase.  t's centralized planning, almost socialism to do so-- certainly anathema to the wing of the party to which Rubio belongs. Riddle me that.

Bottom line:  it's helpful for Rubio to advocate for more welders. It's not helpful (nor a credit to his candidacy) to set up a false antagonism between welders and philosophers. Below the bottom line:  a democratic electorate need thoughtful voters (let us call them philosophers). Welders need to be philosopher-enough that they don't let themselves be snookered by some demagogue who himself is bookless and factless and history-less. It's a challenge to identify a thoughtful candidate when one of our major parties is offering a full slate of empty but noisy barrels.

Some Numbers

Last night there was no moon and no clouds. It was so bright and clear that I couldn't resist going out to take a gander at the stars. It was, once again, a brilliant and dazzling spectacle.

I can never remember whether there are two hundred million or two hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. Both numbers are so beyond my ability to grasp that I wonder whether it even matters. But after marveling at the expanse of stars, I returned to the computer and did the research. It's true and astonishing: there are between 100 and 400 billion stars in our home galaxy. (The astronomers, I have to say, give themselves quite a bit of leeway.) And then I was reminded that there are an estimate hundred million galaxies in the known universe.

I was feeling mighty small, mighty intimidated.

After a while, I went upstairs to dip back into the book on human anatomy that I'm struggling to read. Here's a fact that I should have known, but didn't: there are six trillion cells in the human body. More or less.

That's a a lot of cells. And a lot of stars. If a trillion is a thousand billion, then there are a ten thousand times more cells in my own personal body than there are galaxies in the universe, which is an interesting but not particularly important statistic. 

I feel as though there is some important conclusion that I should draw from these numbers, but honestly I have nothing much to say beyond the usual awe -- that ordinary feeling of insignificance and impermanence. It's not exactly news that I am merely a heap of cells in an obscure corner of a tiny planet of an undistinguished star in a medium-size constellation.  

And yet, sitting by the pond this sunny afternoon, watching a pair of companionable ducks slowly swimming one after another, I have to say that this particular transitory conglomeration of cells has been enjoying a mighty fine day.

Missing Mallard

Yesterday, and for the last week, there were two mallard in the pond: a buff-brown female trailed incessantly by a shiny green head. Courting, if not already nesting. But today there's just one, the female, and she's swimming round and round, quacking, quacking. What happened to Mr. Mallard. Where is he?  Eaten by fox or coyote or hawk?  Flown away to look for another, greener pond? Lost? On a business trip?

I feel for her.  

June 9:  This morning, no mallards. Neither the one nor the other. Modern romance. Isn't it always the way?
 

Winter Love

My daughter's nephew-in-law, Zach Appelman, is a talented actor setting out on what might very well turn out to be a terrific career. (His ascent would be more rapid if he would take his aunt-in-law's father's advice and change his stage name to Zach Barrymore or Zach Zellweger, but the young man has too much integrity to comply with aged opportunistic wisdom).

Zach recently played Hamlet at the Hartford Stage in Connecticut (Hartford Courant: "a career-propelling performance that at times takes your breath away"). I spoke with Zach at the recent family Thanksgiving and he told me that the director of this Hamlet, Darko Tresnjak, made an effort to emphasize the play's comic passages. It was a good idea, I think, because Hamlet is both in reading and performance an intermittently hilarious piece of dramatic art. But, added Zach, sometimes the audience laughed at moments that he did not anticipate. He cited an example in the so-called "bedroom scene," where Hamlet assails Gertrude for marrying Claudius. Hamlet's rebuke of his mother is harsh and dislocating. About her marriage to Claudius, he says  

You cannot call it love;  for at your age

The hectic in the blood is tame, it's humble

It waits upon the judgment.

These lines apparently caused quite a commotion among the seniors in the audience. It is not hard to imagine why. Hamlet, for all his sparkling intelligence, is callow. He has youth's ignorance about middle-age sexuality -- as the silver-threads-among-the-gold demographic must certainly have recognized. How could Hamlet (or perhaps even young Shakespeare, a mere thirty-five when he wrote the play), know that desire and passion increase in middle-age as impetuous adolescent oestrus and fumblings are superseded by mature appreciation and achievement.

I doubt that Shakespeare meant Hamlet's lines to be funny -- there's no room for humor in the rhapsody of words that the prince directs at his mommy. Nevertheless, a modern sophisticated and wrinkle-deep-in-time audience cannot help but titter at Hamlet's grotesque misjudgment.   

These observations on sex in youth and age were still percolating in my waiting-for-wisdom brain while I re-read, for, what?  the fourth or fifth or sixth time, Anthony Trollope's excellent 1857 novel, Barchester Towers. My attention was caught, this time through, by one of Trollope's digressions, very pertinent to the topic of autumnal love, and which I now transcribe in a slightly reduced version and which I think is well worthy intense study, especially by my readers of certain late-hectic ages.

"It is, we believe, [says Trollope] common with young men of five and twenty to look on their seniors -- on men of, say, double their own age -- as so many stocks and stones -- stocks and stones, that is, in regard to feminine beauty."

(Let me interject that for "young men of five and twenty", think "Hamlet." And when Trollope talks of "feminine beauty," let us recognize that the phrase is a  euphemistic Victorian surrogate for issues of human desire and sexuality that conventional taboos made it impossible for Trollope to address forthrightly.)

"There never was a greater mistake [continues Trollope]. Men of fifty don't dance mazurkas, being generally too fat and wheezy; nor do they sit for hours together on river banks at their mistresses' feet, being somewhat afraid of rheumatism. But for real true love, love at first sight, love to devotion, love that robs a man of his sleep, love [and here Trollope begins to quote from the famous passage in Love's Labor's Lost] 'that will gaze an eagle blind, love that will hear the lowest sound when the suspicious head of theft is stopped, love that is like a Hercules still climbing trees in the Hesperides, we believe that this best age is from forty-five to seventy."

Forty-five to seventy, ladies and gentleman. Just the age of the men and women in the Hartford playhouse who snickered at Hamlet junior's incomprehension of his mother's passions. 

And then Trollope brings his excursus to conclusion with a great sentence in which he both disses and dismisses immature youthful ardor:

"Up to that age [i.e. forty-five] men are generally given to mere flirting."

 As perhaps Hamlet flirts with Ophelia.

It's intriguing that Trollope recognizes that men of seventy summers may still be ardent lovers and appreciators of the flesh. If he had been a little older and more experienced, he would have increased his estimate to seventy-five, perhaps even eighty. After all, eighty is the new seventy, is it not?  Or he might even have acknowledged that it ain't over until it's over.

Trollope was only forty-two when he wrote Barchester Towers, so perhaps he knew that he was only capable of mere flirtation with Rose Heseltine. But he was 67 when he proposed, in the nasty dystopia The Fixed Period, that 68 was the age at which all men should be required to give up the ghost. The Fixed Period is a novel which, at least to this septuagenarian, provokes not titters but guffaws. Poor Anthony T. had become so terribly sour, so unlike the Trollope of Barchester.

Three Perspicuous Comments on "Books."

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

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

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

Another Gosse-Pearlman Xmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucinda Roanoke

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advice for Parents, Part I

On the telephone, The Daughter (as she sometimes calls herself) was fussing about her teen and tween children. "I'm on the warpath (her metaphor) about the mess. I'm tired of cleaning up after them. Right now T. has left a pile of her homework on the kitchen floor. She's at ballet for two hours. What do I do?  Walk around it or clean it up. Why does she do this?  And O. has left half a sandwich and piece of apple on the table. I failed to train them when they were young and now it's hopeless."

Every parent in North America, and perhaps every parent in the known universe, might make the same complaints.

I tried to console The Daughter. "If you'd like to take ten minutes to vent, I'm here to listen."

She vented for thirty seconds, then fell silent. Frustrated.

I said, "Here's the way I think of it now. You lose every battle, but you win the war."

"Explain," she muttered.

"It's obvious. When you and your brothers were growing up, there was some sort of conflict every day. One of you didn't show up for dinner. Whoever was supposed to take the garbage out, 'forgot' to do it. Someone would get into a screaming fit at someone else over nothing significant. Quarters would be stolen out of pants pockets. Some inches of liquor would mysteriously disappear. Sassy words would be spoken to parents and parents would be devastated. Someone wasn't sleeping at the house where he or she said he or she was going to spend the night. Mileage on the car speedometer would increase without explanation. There were horrible scenes when someone was asked to do the most minimal of chores.

And yet, despite it all, despite the fact that every day I lost the battle, I won the war. Each of you turned out to be what my own father used to call 'solid, taxpaying citizens.' You've all doing good works. All living upright, moral lives. All creating healthy, functioning families. All of you are excellent parents. The grandchildren are thriving.

So in the long run, I won. Lost every battle, won the war."

The Daughter said, "Blog it."

Nineteenth-Century Romance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scoff as you will, ungentle readers.

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

It's a world that we have lost.

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

 

Youth and Age -- Tennyson's Ulysses

It wasn't until I reached college that discovered poetry. My comic-book super-hero and baseball-infused brain was until then, poetry-wise, an almost complete tabula rasa. I say "almost" because at eight or nine eight years old I had memorized two great classics of American literature: "Casey at the Bat" and also the poem by Grantland Rice about Tinkers, Evers, and Chance. In additon, I knew the ubiquitous stercoraceous distich the first line of which is "Here I sit, broken-hearted" and a related gnomic verse that begins, "No matter how much you wiggle and dance." Then in 1956 I left Flatbush for higher education and took a course in English Literature. The rest, as they say, is history. It was sonnets and love poems of any kind, and rich luscious liquid poems by Marlowe and Keats and Hopkins that entranced me. The more intellectual poems were too taxing for my immature head. Lycidas, which I now know to be the best poem in the language, was utterly impenetrable for at least a decade, although I admit that I immediately responded to its music: "With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves." 

One of my teachers sagely observed that certain poets and certain poems were for youth, some for maturity, and some for old age. "You may no longer like then what you like now." Which has come to pass. And as an example of poetry for the latter years, he adduced Tennyson's "Ulysses." "This poem may not mean much to you now, but it will some day, if you live long enough." I remember that I was much taken with the touchstone line "Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy" but I thought that "Ulysses" was far too much about a really old guy trying to cheer himself up and I did not see it holding a place in any future I could envision. 

Well, folks, I've now arrived at the so-called golden years, or, more properly, the endgame, or extra innings (which in some sports is called sudden death) and guess what? "Ulysses" has returned, front and center, exactly as was predicted 50+ years ago. It's right on target. 

Tennyson's Ulysses is Homer's adventurer a generation older, kinging it in Ithaca, but bored, unchallenged, and unstimulated. "It little profits that an idle king,/ By this still hearth, among these barren crags,/ Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole/ Unequal laws unto a savage race,/ That hoard and sleep, and feed,/ And know not me."

To put it vulgarly, Ulysses plans to bust out of the old folks home. He's been a warrior, a hero, and a roving explorer. He "cannot rest from travel." He needs to search "beyond the utmost bound of human thought." He leaves Penelope, and he leaves the government of Ithaca to his bureaucratically-minded  son Telemachus. The last lines of the poem, the leave-taking, are most stirring:  

                           Come, my friends

"Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides,

And though we are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Yes, I know -- the diction is a little antiquated and artificial, the urge to get away a trifle too vehement. But nevertheless I'm moved by the resilience, the perserverance. Though tear-inducing, the poem is anything but lachrymose. And it's accepting: "that which we are, we are."

It's lately become the fashion to interpret "Ulysses" as a poem about capitalism and imperialism. In this reading, Ulysses is just another white male, off to conquer and colonialize The Alien Other. Or to see it as a poem about male priviliege: he's a bad husband, abandoning the family. Or to conceive the poem as a structure of ironies, in which Ulysses doesn't realize that he undermines his own suppositions. There's a tad of truth in these arguments, as there always is, because Tennyson was caught up in a Victorian striving that he didn't fully or consciously assimilate. But frankly, I feel sorry for readers who can't hear the verve and excitement in Ulysses's expansive view of things. 

Moreover, it turns out that Tennyson was absolutely correct to proclaim that there is a time in life when "not to yield" is an act of daily heroism. 

Mannahatta

Eric Sanderson's Mannahatta (New York: Abrams, 2009) reconstructs Manhattan as it would have appeared to Henry Hudson when he sailed the Half-Moon into the harbor in 1609. The glory of the book lies in its illustrations.  Here's a conjectural reconstruction of old Manhattan island:

And here's a clever juxtaposition of ancient and modern:

In 1609, the island of Manhattan was home to between 400 and 1000 Lenape Indians. They lived on fish, shellfish (leaving behind extensive middens), deer and other wildlife, on fruits and berries. They practiced some small-scale farming of corn, squash, and beans. Sanderson estimates that the Lenape had lived on Manhattan for 10,000 years, or 400 generations.

Why so few people? The land was fertile, the seas abundant, the weather not particularly harsh. While the Lenape sat still in Manhattan, advanced civilizations were created by the Mayans, the Aztecs and the Incas. Along the banks of the Mississippi, the city of Cahokia rose and fell. And yet the Lenape never domesticated a single animal beside the dog and left behind no pottery, weaving, or metals. They remained stuck in the paleolithic. Why, I wonder. Perhaps things were too good.

On the other hand, the Lenape lived in harmony with the island for a very long time. What are the odds that our present civilization, which has totally transformed Manhattan in 400 short years, or just 16 generations, will last one tenth as long? 

 

February 24:  Still curious about the want of population growth or technological development among the Lenape, I read C. A. Weslager's The Delaware Indians, A History (1972) (Lenapes were called by their Anglo name, Delaware, for many years). Wenslager does not suggest that the Lenape ever achieved larger populations. Nor does he point to any archeological evidence of cultural achievement. Still, I'm mildly suspicious that there may be more to the story.  We know that Verrazzano contacted the Lenapes 90 years before Hudson sailed into the harbor, and no one knows what diseases he might have introduced.

Three Observations on "Books"

Charlie Dressen: "You  know something? I never read a book in my whole life... I can read newspapers and magazines. But I never read a book. You think I should?"

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

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

Two Good Reasons Not To Eat Raw Slugs on a Dare

Reason A.  Because slugs are hideous and disgusting. 

                    

Reason B:  Because slugs eat rat droppings which can carry a lungworm parasite -- a nematode called Angiostrongylus cantonensis -- which causes fatal brain swelling. According to the NYTimes, a 27-year-old Australian man "has been hospitalized for more than a month after eating the slugs on a dare."

“We hope this will help to remind others to avoid eating raw slugs," said a spokesman.

Advice for Married Folk

Reposted from January, 2007, and just as pertinent now as it was then:

High on the list of The New York Times' "most e-mailed articles" is one that's catchily titled "What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage," by a writer named Amy Sutherland. Apparently it's a well-regarded, influential essay. I think it's misleading and wrong-headed, and I think that couples who heed its advice will soon find themselves not in a happy marriage but in one that's sterile and empty.

Amy's column is at this address, and will be available unless and until the strapped and greedy Times decides to put it behind a paid wall. A summary: poor Amy is perpetually annoyed by Scott, her husband of twelve years. He loses his keys and asks her help finding them; he keeps her waiting at restaurants; he "hovers around her in the kitchen asking if she has read this or that piece in the New Yorker." She's tried nagging, but it doesn't work. As it happens, Amy is writing a book on animal training and she's watched people "do the seemingly impossible," such as 'teaching baboons to skateboard" and "hyenas to pirouette on command." She decides to adopt the animal model and "train" her husband. "If he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper, I'd thank him. If he threw in two, I'd kiss him." She rewards "approximations." She uses "least reinforcing syndrome" in which the trainer doesn't respond in any way when an animal does something wrong -- just stands and stares. When Scott loses his keys, she ignores his pleas for help, and eventually he finds them by himself. By the end of the article, Scott has changed. "After two years of exotic animal training, my marriage is far smoother, my husband much easier to love."

What's so awful about this advice? Let's take the shirts-on-the-floor crisis. Amy can imagine only two methods to deal with this problem. There's nagging, which she now rejects, and there's re-training. But there are other responses. The first is for Amy to gain a bit of perspective. Marriage isn't about whether the dirty shirts are in the hamper or on the floor. People have had long and happy marriages without resolving such issues. Amy seems to assume that getting her way about the shirts is crucial. But when she and Scott married, they agreed to love, honor, and respect each other; they didn't agree that every single shirt would immediately find its way into a hamper. Perhaps Amy should re-think her priorities and try to keep the larger picture in view. Secondly, Amy can't seem to imagine any ground between nagging and animal training. But there is -- there's an enormous territory. There's discussion, negotiation, and compromise. Amy: "It bothers me that you expect me to pick up your shirts." Scott: "I'll try not to drop them. I'll pick them up myself." Amy: "And I'll try not to make such a big deal out of it."

When Scott comes into the kitchen and wants to read to her from a New Yorker article, Amy could say, if she had any imagination, "Oh, good. Scott wants to involve me in his intellectual life. He wants to talk to me." But she doesn't see it that way; she wants him out of the room so she can "concentrate on the simmering pans." But what's important about marriage, or about life? Is it the pans, or is it the conversation? Once again, Amy has it all wrong. She cares about her cooking, and getting the soup exactly right, more than she cares about the marriage. It shouldn't be beyond her ability to stir and to listen at the same time; it's been known to happen. Amy is, let's face it, a bit of a narcissist. She wants to make Scott into an extension of herself; she wants to subordinate the marriage to her own convenience.

Readers and friends, here's my opinion. If your spouse comes to you and says, "I've lost my keys, I'm distressed," you should stop whatever you're doing and you should start searching. When you do so, you're treating your spouse with respect and you're taking your marriage seriously. And if you happen to misplace your own keys, it's perfectly fair to ask your spouse to help find them. Because sometimes finding keys is a team activity. I'll go even further: sometimes it's less important to find the lost keys than it is to search for them together.

But you should engage yourself with the problem of the keys, or the shirts, only if you want a relationship of equals. If you think that it's so important to train your spouse to stay out of your damn kitchen, then go ahead and follow Amy's advice. But you might wind up with not with a husband or wife, but with a pirouetting hyena or a skateboarding baboon.

Amy and Scott: here's some valuable advice. It comes to you courtesy of Mr. Hart, who lived a couple of houses down from us. He died at age 90, in the same month as his equally aged wife. The Harts had been married for 60 or so years. "What's the secret of a long, happy marriage," he was asked. He said, "find out what your wife wants and make sure that it happens." Which is, if you think about it for a moment, only a variation of the traditional golden rule and of its even more practical cousin: "do unto others as they want to be done unto."

Things I'll Miss

I'm reconciled to the idea that death comes to all, but nevertheless, there are a few earthly things that I'm genuinely going to miss.

Is there anything more wonderful, when you've been out early in the morning in the rain or in a heavy dew, and your feet are wet and cold, than returning home and putting on clean, dry socks, especially those excellent white cotton ones that they sell at Costco?  Definitely a moment that makes life worth living. And also: purchasing, opening and playing a new music cd -- preferably one that you've thought about acquiring for a long time. Another: watching young healthy athletic people run down the street, especially women with long ponytails a-bobbing. Also: the perennially pleasurably sound of a bat (wooden, not aluminum) connecting with a high, hard one. Rum raisin ice cream. A well-made glazed donut. The sight of the first soft, red peony of the year just as it breaks the ground. The waxy pink flower of the tamarack, always a surprise. My Swiss Felco #2 hand pruner (which our cousins across the sea call it a secateur), a friend for many seasons, which fits my hand perfectly and which if you give it an occasional oiling and sharpening, cuts absolutely true. The sound of rain on an uninsulated metal roof -- and also like the clickety-clack and pinging of the roof on a cloudy day when the sun comes in and out and the roof alternately expands and contracts -- it's an all-percussion symphony. The old downtown of an old city that I'm visiting for the first time. A one-year-old boy or girl learning to walk, at the stage when the strides are of unequal and inconsistent length, the child hovered over by admiring young parents, she with a hand outstretched, he recording the moment on tape; the child the center of the universe, thoroughly doted upon, as is exactly appropriate. A deep, luxurious weekend afternoon nap, so profound that when you wake up you don't know, for five seconds, where you are or what day it is. A sleep so deep that somnus imago mortis kicks in;  nothing more satisfying: the kind of thing that makes a guy want to live a few more years.

Brain Chemistry, Macbeth, Nihilism

Our understanding of the human brain is mighty slim.  As a consequence our therapies for insanity, for head injuries, and for dementia are primitive.

When John Donne was dying in 1633, his physicians tied pigeons to his feet. Present-day medicine offers remedies for Alzheimer's sufferers that are no more effective than pigeon tying. Brainwise, we linger in the dark ages (which, by the way, has now been rebranded as "late antiquity"). Or the early medieval period.

Not to say that nothing is known about the brain. There have been advances.

To bring myself up-to-date, I read The Tell-Tale Brain by V. S. Ramachandran, a book which has been making a stir in pop-science circles. Ramachandran's sensible thesis is that there are structures in the human brain that are either undeveloped or that simply don't exist in the brains of apes. To posit so is simply common sense. Human beings do things that apes don't: they study themselves in the mirror, they compose and play piano sonatas, and they think about their place in the universe.  

Ramachandran is an ingenious experimenter but he gets beyond his depth when he waxes philosophical -- which he does far too often. Here's an example of the kind of thinking that rubs me wrong.

"I get chills," says Ramachandran, "whenever I hear Macbeth's immortal soliloquy 'Out out, brief candle!/Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.'"  He says that "these  words are one of the most profound and deeply moving remarks about life that anyone has ever made!"

I don't question Ramachandran's chills, which are his own business, but I'm bothered by his unthinking Bardolatry ("immortal solilquy"; "profound";  "that anyone has ever made").  Poor Will doesn't need any more reverent cliches to be shoveled upon him. He's already buried under heaps of them.    

Bardolatry such as Ramachandran's obstructs thinking. What does it mean to say that Macbeth's soliloquy is "profound... about life?"  Let's go to the tape.

When Macbeth says these words, he's under the spell of the witches, who are "instruments of darkness."  At their suggestion, he's murdered his king, murdered his closest friend Banquo and Banquo's son Fleance, and he's "savagely slaughtered" Macduff's wife and children ("All my pretty ones...  All my pretty chickens and their dam/ At one fell swoop"). Moreover, he's committed uncatalogued atrocities innumerable: "Each new morn/ New widows howl, new orphans cry." His brain is "filled with scorpions" and just before he utters the soliloquy that gives Ramachandran the goosebumps, he learns that his wife, burdened with guilt, has done herself in. Macbeth is not in a good way. 

Macbeth is not a role-model and his philosophical ruminations are neither insightful or profound. Quite the opposite. Though Macbeth is undeniably eloquent, he's become a shallow nihilist. Life, in fact, is not "a tale told by an idiot" and in Shakespeare's late-medieval religious universe, only someone in the throes of the deepest despair, and certain that he is damned for all eternity, would think so. Macbeth has learned exactly the wrong lesson. So, apparently, has Ramachandran.

Gosh, great literature can sometimes be dangerous, can't it?

It's no secret that the universe with its billions and billions of galaxies will go on very well without us.  Shakespeare, like everyone else, knew that when looked at from the strictly scientific point of view, human beings are no more than "many a thousand grains/ That issue out of dust."  But just because we're tiny and it's enormous, we're not compelled to admire the despairing and empty philosphy to which Macbeth subscribes.

Not while there are red wheelbarrows, winter love in dark corners, and "little nameless, unremembered acts/ Of kindness and of love." 

Reposted: Antimylarmonofilamentarianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Old Lesson Learned Once Again

A good friend, a distinguished biologist, asked me to read his cancer manuscript.   

When I read science books (popularizations, for the most part), I usually do so with only half a brain. I'm lazy; I skip the hard parts. But because I was being asked for a serious opinion, I read this book closely. In all honesty,  It hurt my head. The hardest chapters were those on the workings of the cell. I last studied cells in high school biology class with Miss Goetschius.  It was 1957, before there was anything known about DNA.  We copied elementary pictures of cells from the textbook. "You don't know how to stipple," Miss Goetschius complained. There's a thousand times more known about cells than back then in the dark ages, and I haven't gotten any smarter. 

Cells are spectacularly complicated  -- no wonder it took billions of years for them to evolve. Once the single cell had achieved a level of efficiency, the rest of evolution -- even including us -- was piece of cake.

Reading about the lives of cells and about cancer (which is what happens when cells go wrong) confirmed and strengthened my ideas about life and death.  Life,our life, is almost entirely an accident. It's an accident that cells incorporated pieces of bacteria to form mitochondria; it's an accident that they agglutinated in the way that they did to form multicellular creatures; it's an accident that we're here. But more than that: the success and the deterioriation of the cells that make us are part of the same process. The end of life is implicit in its inception. Cancer is exactly as natural as breathing. 

It's trivial;  t's what everyone knows, it's what we've always known. It's a cliche: "death is a natural part of life." And yet it's strangely comforting. Whatever comes next -- cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's -- is perfectly natural. Of course it will lead to death. But it's also life.  

Muff and Spot, Once Again

Every little once in a while, a mountain lion creeps into the fold and snares a lamb, a calf, or a German shepherd. At even more infrequent intervals, a mountain lion attacks a human being (usually a child).  Whenever there's a human-lion interaction, there comes a deluge of letters to the local newspaper demanding that the authorities exercise “lethal control" over the big cats. Killing catamounts is neither hard nor dangerous. They were hunted nearly to extinction in the nineteenth century. Dogs chase the animal up a tree. The brave hunter takes aim and fires.

But Is it a good idea to extirpate the mountain lion? In the United States, there’s an average of one death by mountain lion a year. Here in our county, there’s been one such death in the last hundred years. One is a very low number, especially when, in the country as a whole, snakes cause a dozen deaths each year, lightning claims seventy-five, bee and wasp stings a hundred. Dogs, when they’re not out hunting mountain lions, account for between twelve to twenty deaths a year – a couple of hundred a decade-- many of these, it's sad to say, infants in the crib. Given the numbers, It’s hard to believe that calls for the extermination of mountain lions aren’t motivated less by facts than by fear.

Domesticated dogs are responsible not only for a dozen to a score of deaths, but also for an estimated 4 to 7 million (that’s right, million!) cases of dog-bite a year, almost 800,000 of which require medical attention. Dog bites cause 368,000 emergency room visits, or (do the math!) one thousand such visits a day.  The social cost of dog bites is estimated variously, but the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta claims that the direct medical costs of dog bites per year is $165 million, with many more millions in ancillary expenses. 

Mountain lions, which are relatively harmless, inspire terror, but dogs, which are far more dangerous, are our sacred cows -- loved, in my opinion, beyond all propriety. It’s hard not to cringe when otherwise sensible people – good decent people --tell me in all seriousness that Towser is a full member of their family, or that Fido is about to undergo surgery to replace a hip -- an operation the cost of which is more than the annual medical budget of whole villages in Africa or Asia. The run-of the-mill doggie in America enjoys a better diet and better medical care than half of the human beings on the planet -- a thoroughly indefensible skewing of resources. Dogs are not human beings, and it’s immoral sentimentality to treat them as such. It’s embarrassing.

The ancients, following Aristotle, divided their possessions into three categories: an object was an instrumentum mutum, an animal was an instrumentum semivocale, and a slave was an instrumentum vocale.  By eliding the differences between humans and animals, the Greeks and the Romans made slavery both easy and natural. Aristotle's notion underlay serfdom.

I used to worry that people who treated animals as humans would be tempted to treat humans as animals. But it's not so; the people I know who are sentimental about animals and "animal rights" are extraordinarily sensitive to human rights -- but then, perhaps my sample is skewed. All of my friends are sensitive to human rights; if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be my friends.

I wonder whether the love of dangerous dogs and the fear of the cats who are by and large indifferent to us isn’t an instinct acquired slowly over the last half million years. Our ancestors, armed, at best, with flint-headed spears, spent countless millennia at the mercy of feline predators larger, more powerful and more terrifying than 100-pound mountain lions (the extinct European lion, panthera leo fossilis, was taller, stronger, and and a foot and a half longer than the modern African lion). It was only some 50,000 years ago that an ancient Einstein conceived the idea of domesticating wolves and selecting their population for useful traits. Humans and proto-dogs started to cohabit; dwellings and caves came to be littered with coprolites. Co-evolution began, and over the course of time, dogs and humans came to be sensitive to each other's traits. Those early dogs were our first allies on this lonely, hostile planet. They could raise a ruckus when a couple or three lionesses prowled about the entrance to the cave.

We're indebted to dogs and so we tolerate their bad habits.  By the same token, we have inherited from our ancestors a primordial fear. Hence the over-hasty cry to exterminate the mountain lion. 

Predictions for 2011

I've been inspecting the entrails of slaughtered oxen and also observing the flights of birds.  I've studied the movements of planets and tea leaves.  I can now announce my predictions for the coming year.   

1)  there will be unusual weather patterns in North America;

2)  a famous Hollywood actress will sue for divorce;  moreover, another (or possibly the same) Hollywood star will become pregnant; another (or possibly the same) actress will gain and/or lose a great deal of weight; 

3)  a well-known athlete will be accused of taking drugs;

4)  a politician will be involved in a sex scandal;

5)  questions will be raised about America's food supply;

6)  there will be either a monsoon, an airplane crash, or a capsized ferry in Asia--perhaps all three;

7)  there will be fluctuations in the stock market;

8)  there will be turmoil in the Middle East;

9)  a religious leader will be involved in either a financial or a sexual scandal (perhaps both);

10) the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will not end. 

You read it here first.  Not for nothing that I've acquired the reputation of an inspired mystic, or shaman, or something.  Nostradamus redux. 

Milagro 51, Ciencia 49

A Chilean newspaper, El Espectador, has reported the results of a poll of its readers. When asked about the recent rescue of the thirty-three Copiapo miners, 49% of readers attributed the success to "ciencia" while 51% judged it a "milagro." A miracle?  It what universe?  What could they be thinking? The rescue was all hard work and ingenuity and high speed percussive drilling. There's nothing the least bit supernatural about such a triumph.    

Nor does it do any good to blame those primitive superstitious Chileans. Americans would have divided  similarly -- with a higher score for "milagro" in our ultra-benighted South and a somewhat lower score in the only semi-benighted North. Even on my very own Facebook page, a number of friends of "friends" (not my own "friends" I'm glad to say), posted exultantly, "This proves that God is real."  No it doesn't -- it proves only that the true believers have no use for evidence or reason. Why does the great signifier in the sky get the credit for the rescue but no blame for the collapse that caused the disaster. And would the god-enthusiasts have abandoned their belief if the men had died. Not a chance. They would fallen back on the old bromide, not for us to question the will of god -- or employed some other kind of trapeze artist illogic.  

A miracle! Humbug! If a superman-like hand of god had come down from the heavens and drilled the hole, I would vote milagro also. Otherwise, ciencia.     

What is a miracle, anyway?  I thought that David Hume finished off miracles a quarter of a millennium ago. Miracles are not "unlikely events," he said.  "They are events that are contrary to nature." The mine rescue may have been a long odds situation, but it wasn't unnatural. It was entirely in accord with what we know about the world and human psychology and the ciencia of mining. (Hume capped his argument by saying that there can be no such thing as a miracle, because if it happens, then it's not contrary to nature. It is nature.) 

But all of us use the word "miracle" very loosely. I may know, with one part of my brain, all about eggs and sperm and DNA, but I still feel that it's something of a miracle whenever a baby is born. Although it's a common miracle -- billions strong --I'm awed by each and every newborn. As I am by the Chilean miners and their rescuers. I'm awed, I'm relieved, I'm joyous, I'm dazzled, but most of all, I'm proud of the compassion, the resilience, and the intelligence of my fellow human beings --and there you have my understanding of the word "milagro."

Paternal Wisdom

Regular readers of Dr. Metablog know that the good doctor has been flat on his back for a couple of months.  However, I'm glad to say, the crisis has passed and I'm upright once again.  

While lying there I had an opportunity to think about old times. I began to recall some things that my father used to say.  I wouldn't say proverbs or gnomic wisdom or anything so formal -- just sentences that would occasionally, casually, pass his lips.  Here are a few of them, lightly annotated.  

1."Never omit an opportunity to do a someone a favor, and never be embarrassed to accept a favor." My father would say, "people like to help each other."  My own experience has confirmed my father's wisdom and I've tried to follow his example. However, there was a time that I ran into a stone wall with this one,  I was forced into close dealings with a man whom it was impossible to help -- because whenever I did something for him, he thought that it meant that he had outwitted me. My favor, offered freely, became his triumph. Needless to say, our relationship did not prosper. 

2.  "Anyone can get rich if he makes it the entire effort of his life."  My father was the least materialistic person I've ever known. He had no possessions and wanted none. Not only did money hold no allure, but he was contemptuous of those who felt the need to acquire it. But was he right? Can "anyone" get rich?  I don't think so. I've known people who tried and have gone down in flames.  But I certainly understand my father's point.

3.  "When the stock market is going up, everyone's a genius." I know that my father owned one stock in his entire life -- because a friend insisted. He would have kept his cash in the mattress if he could have. I think that recent world economic events confirm his sentence and lead to a corollary -- "sometimes the geniuses only seem to be geniuses."

4.  "Never get into an argument with a drunk." He was certainly 100% on target on this one. There's just no odds -- even if you win the argument, the drunk doesn't know it. Plus the jerk is liable to throw the beer bottle at you. (I doubt that my father was drunk a single time in his entire life. I was drunk once, in 1962, and it was enough). 

5.  "Try to do the things you're not good at." He said that when he was younger he would say, "I don't like to swim" when the truth of the matter was that he wasn't a good swimmer. (He was a fine athlete.)  He would counsel me -- "do what if you're not good at it. Try it."  I wish I could say that I've honored this precept, but in all honesty, I haven't. Sorry, pop.

6.  "Don't forget to wash behind your ears."  

7.  "Always try to appeal to the better side of human nature."  For example, in raising children, you should not punish a child; instead, you should say, "you don't want to be the kind of person who would do such-and--such."  I believe this saying of his to be practical and useful. Needless to say, my father didn't respect  that side of the political/ religious/ social spectrum that considers human beings to be fallen, inherently depraved and selfish creatures. He was basically optimistic -- though his optimism was certainly tempered by the public events of his last decade.

8.  "Never run with the crowd for the sake of being one of the boys."  This saying was central to his view of the world. I believe it came out of some particular experience of his youth but he never shared the details with me. I can certainly say that I've honored this precept -- perhaps to a fault. I could have been more sociable, more "clubbable"

Ditch the Didge!!

The downtown mall is home to a motley assemblage of street buskers. Some are excellent and welcome performers: the occasional string quartet, the accomplished visiting bluegrass band, a witty gaggle of a cappella singers. Others are less excellent but still tolerable; the contortionist, the magician with the rings that divide and rejoin, the sword-swallower, the zip-code man, the fire-eater, the too-young violin student supervised by his mommy, the juggler whose act hasn't changed since the days when he was known as a joculator. And then a step lower still: that inaudible French girl who struggles with her ukelele. Less welcome are the drummers: bang, bang, bang with no discernible rhythm, just noise great enough to set off sympathetic vibrations in your own personal pancreas. But the worst of the worst is the didgeridoo-master. After decades of practice, all that the didge player can produce is an ugly drone. One note. It goes on and on, relentlessly, and it's dull, grating and loud. If you haven't heard it, imagine a big old bagpipe, playing one note at the bottom of its range, for ever, and ever, and ever. Worse still are didgeridoo assemblies: didgetets or didgeridoo chamber orchestras. 

The didgeridoo comes to us from northern Australia, where it was invented more that 1500 years ago. Perhaps it hasn't evolved because it's thought to be sacred. While the rest of the world developed wind instruments that played a variety of colorful notes, the non-innovative didge people embraced an unchanging and exceedingly boring drone. They are patient people. One by one, native Australians said no to the bassoon, the clarinet, the horn, the sax, the flute, the piccolo, the trumpet, the tuba, the oboe bright and cheerful, and decided that a branch of a eucalyptus tree, naturally hollowed by termites, was all that they needed in the way of wind-instruments. In another fit of imagination, they invented the bull-roarer, an instrument that hasn't yet taken a bow on the mall, but trust me, it won't be long.  

Let's face it;  the didgeridoo is an instrument that hasn't produced a pleasant sound in many thousands of years. It has no plans to do so. Didgeridooists are barking up the wrong tree -- it's never going to be music. It's always going to be noise.

Which brings me to my point, which is that would-be mall performers should not be permitted to busk until they have passed a performance test and have been granted a license. The Board of Acceptability would consist of some of the more traditionalist faculty of both the Music School and the Department of Theater and Drama. The chairman would be an open-minded but engaged citizen, such as Me.  Approval must be unanimous. We (the Board) would strictly enforce standards of artistic excellence. Life would improve.