Dr. Metablog

Dr. Metablog is the nom de blague of Vivian de St. Vrain, the pen name of a resident of the mountain west who writes about language, books, politics, or whatever else comes to mind. Under the name Otto Onions (Oh NIGH uns), Vivian de St. Vrain is the author of “The Big Book of False Etymologies” (Oxford, 1978) and, writing as Amber Feldhammer, is editor of the classic anthology of confessional poetry, “My Underwear” (Virago, 1997).

DR. METABLOG’S
GREATEST HITS

  • Crackanthorpe’s Wreckage

    The Crackanthorpe name is not as well known as it should be. The short stories in Wreckage (1893) are a good sharp antidote to the pieties and sentimentalities of Victorian fiction.

    There must be hundreds of novels which feature a virtuous, long-suffering heroine, who, however mistreated, turns cheek after cheek until her patience is rewarded with a beau and an unexpected inheritance. Think Jane Eyre.

    Here is Hubert Crackanthorpe's version of this archetype:

    "A blind desire to silence [Aunt Lisbet], to stamp the life out of her, swept over Lilly. Seizing the parasol, which lay on the kitchen table, with all her strength she Aunt Lisbet across the side of her head.

    And over the thought of that blow she lingered, recalling it again and again, repeating it in her mind with a strange, exquisite pleasure. For into it she had put the hatred of years.

    Aunt Lisbet uttered a low, plaintive moan — the curious moan of sudden pain — and fell, dragging with her on to the floor a pile of plates.

    The crash sent every nerve in Lilly's body tingling, but when, a moment later, Aunt Lisbet moved to get up, the blind, murderous desire returned. Another brutal blow of the parasol, and she knocked her back again."

    Hubert Crackanthorpe drowned (perhaps accidentally, perhaps taking his own life) at age 26. His fiction is sometimes compared to that of de Maupassant, but I prefer to think of him as the Dostoevsky that England never produced. 

  • Mrs. Peixada by “Sidney Luska” (1886)

    I've just read, and much enjoyed, a novel called Mrs. Peixada, by one Sidney Luska. The novel was published in 1886 by Cassell & Company, Limited, at 739 Broadway, in New York City. I had it recalled it from the library's archives, where, from all the evidence, it hadn't been touched for a hundred or so years. Why did I read this book? Because a) I'm reading stuff from the last two decades of the nineteenth century, and b) because the novel is listed in the bibliography of the wonderful anthology Victorian Love Stories (1996) edited and illuminated by Kate Flint — an anthology which persuaded me that although I think of myself as moderately well read in Victorian fiction, there are untold riches out there of which I am embarrassed to be unaware. 

    Mrs. Peixada isn't exactly a shower of gold, but it's a revelation. The author "Sidney Luska" turns out to be a pseudonym for Henry Harland, who is better known for his second career as an editor of the Yellow Book. I guess that Mrs. Peixada falls into the broad category, novel of sensation, but it's also a mystery story laced with occasional touches of social comedy and progressive social thought. 

    The plot could be next year's blockbuster movie. Arthur Ripley woos and falls in love with the mysterious young widow, Ruth Lehmyl, who has recently moved into an apartment in his Beekman Place neighborhood. We're treated to the details their sophisticated and modern courtship  — music, museums, poetry. At the same time, Ripley, a lawyer, has been engaged to track down a murderess named Mrs. Peixada, who fled New York after being acquitted on grounds of insanity of murdering her husband. Ripley tracks her from Vienna to Rome and to London, but then loses her trail. He marries Mrs. Lehmyl –  only to discover that she and Mrs. Peixada are one and the same person. 

    Although there are holes in the plot through which a daumont or shandrydan could be driven with room to spare, the novel is engaging and intriguing. But then I'm an easy mark.

    Perhaps our screen writers aught to do some looking at the lower tier of Victorian novels  — especially if (as it seems) they're interested in making lower-tier movies.  

    But for me — it's time to learn more about Henry Harland. 

  • 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.

  • Why I Fear Dentists

    Novacaine was discovered sometime around the turn of the last century, but it hadn't reached the backward interior of Brooklyn during my childhood. As a result, I endured hours of drilling and filling without anaesthetics. It was horrible.

    The local dentist was named Dr. Caress. It would have been more appropriate if he had been called Dr. Butcher. 

    There were no high-speed drills. Dr. Caress used a mechanical drill — a motor attached to a system of small pulleys, if I remember correctly, at the business end of which was some sort of bur. It was slow and awkward and It took forever to drill out a cavity. There was lots of starting and stopping and moaning and readjusting and rinsing and spitting. I can still remember the pain. It was not a "discomfort" kind of pain. It was a torture kind of pain. 

    All this in the office of Dr. Caress.  I can't even imagine what it was like across Ocean Parkway where the local dentist was named Dr. Yankowitz. 

    More on Dr. Metablog's mouth right here.

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  • Boustrophedon, Rongorongo, and the Phaistos Disc

    In a previous post, I expressed fascination that writing could go in any possible direction. I began with Swift, who satirized both "women" and the English when he described the fanciful Lilliputian script: "their manner of Writing is very peculiar, being neither from the Left to the Right, like the Europeans; nor from the Right to the Left, like the Arabians; nor from up to down, like the Chinese; nor from down to up, like the Cascagians; but aslant from one Corner of the Paper to the other, like Ladies in England."

    To Swift's curious catalog (the Cascagians are of course his own invention), I added boustrophedon, a system that Swift did not know but one that would surely have delighted him.

    In boustrophedon (a lovely Greekish word that signifies "turn like an ox plowing"), alternate lines move in opposite directions. Lines one, three, five and seven and so on proceed from left to right; lines two, four, six, and eight from right to left. Ancient languages such as Safaitic were written in boustrophedon; some Etruscan inscriptions, still undeciphered, seem to follow the same pattern.

    Boustrophedon is not unreasonable, but it's certainly awkward for those of us who have made a fetish of left to right. Here's how Shakespeare transforms boustrophedonically. The passage takes a bit of effort to read but it's certainly intelligible.    

    It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,—

    !srats etsahc uoy, uoy ot ti eman ton em teL

    It is the cause. Yet I'll not shed her blood;

    ,wons naht sreh fo niks retihw taht racs roN

    And smooth as monumental alabaster.

    .nem erom yarteb ll'ehs esle, eid tsum ehs teY. 

    Right, left, up, down, aslant, and back and forth might seem to have exhausted the possible formats. But such is not the case. Rongorongo, the language of Easter Island, is written in still another style, that of "reverse boustrophedon." In Lost Languages (2002), Andrew Robinson describes how this most peculiar system works. 

    "To read a Rongorongo tablet, one started at the bottom left-hand corner and read along line 1 to the right-hand corner. Then one turned the tablet through 180 degrees and began reading line 2 from left to right again,  At the end of line 2, one repeated the 180-degree turn so that the tablet was in the same orientation as at the beginning, and read line 3 from left to right and so on….  Every even-number line is written back-to-front and upside-down in relation to an ordinary English text." 

    I don't believe that even Jonathan Swift could have invented a manner of composition so counter-intuitive, so odd.  But then, those Easter Islanders (or, more properly, Rapanui) danced to a drummer who is uniquely their own. I don't believe that there's a second reverse boustrophedonesque culture anywhere on the planet. 

    Is that all? Are there no other possibilities? Yes indeed, there's also the phaistos disc, which (according to Andrew Robinson once again), "was discovered in 1908 by Luigi Pernier in the ruins of a palace at Phaistos in southern Crete. The archeological context suggests that the date of the disc is 1850-1600 BC. The disc is 6.5 inches in diameter and .75 inches thick and is made of fine clay. On both sides is an inscription which consists of characters impressed on the wet clay with a punch or stamp before it was fired. They are arranged in a spiral around the center of each side." 

    The writing begins at the outermost circle and works its roundabout way towards the center, which means either that the scribe knew exactly how many letters (or ideographs, or syllables) he intended to use, or that he started at the center and wrote backwards until he reached the circumference of the disc. Neither method is particularly convenient or flexible, so it's not surprising that spiral writing never caught on. It certainly wouldn't do for people like me who revise heavily.

    The phaistos disc cannot be translated. 

  • All-Awkward

    While I admire the highly skilled, I am also much attracted to the guys who do a lot with less. It's good to throw 100 mph, but my hat goes off to the pitchers who succeed with little more than desire and guile.

    I don't mean just baseball. I've been watching the NBA playoffs and I'm now prepared to name my All NBA Overachievers, guys, who, metaphorically, can throw 65 on a good day.

    Center: Joakim Noah. The most awkward center in the league and one of the most effective. It's terrifying to watch him try to dribble the ball downcourt. His outside shot is, to say the least, unorthodox. But he works hard on every play and when he's knocked down, as is frequently the case, he bounces up like some mythological figure who draws strength from the earth. Plus there's not another center in the league who's fluent in French and Swedish. 

    Forward. Paul Pierce. Can't run, can't jump, but is a perennial all-star and the go-to guy at the end of a close game. I've seen him play hundreds of games (since he was at Kansas, in fact), and I've never seen him "fill the lane." He can't get there in time. Great shooter, though, even if you can't figure out how he does it, year after year.

    Forward.  Shawn Marion. He must have the ugliest shot in NBA history. He seems to hold it out in front of him and push it off with a stiff arm. And yet it goes in. He couldn't have gone to basketball camp as a youngster. He does everything "wrong" and yet he's tremendously effective. And he's an outstanding defensive player.

    Guard:  Andre Miller. He's slow, he can't jump, he has no muscles in his arms, and he can't shoot 3-pointers. But he's intelligent, makes the right decisions, and throws the best alley-oop pass in the league. He's a marvelous player, way undervalued.

    Guard.  Omigosh, I can't think of another active all-overachiever guard, so I'm going to go with Mark Jackson, now retired, who's the archetype. Not particularly athletic, not big, not quick, not a leaper by any means, and yet third on the all-time assist list. Smart though — a Brooklyn boy.  

  • Earthquakes – Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc – King Lear

    We all remember, and we're all still shocked and amazed that the late, unlamentable Jerry Falwell proclaimed that the 9/11 attacks on the US were caused by "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians." How to understand either the logic or the brain of such a thinker? We moderns tend to reason in terms of cause and effect, and cause and effect just doesn't cut it with Falwell. Was he thinking something like, feminists cause sin (a debatable proposition) and Al-Qaeda wants to cleanse us, so they run the airplanes into the towers. That would be unbelievable nonsense, even for Falwell. Here's another attempt to divine his mind: feminists are dangerous and evil and therefore the good old US of A has become Sodom/Gomorrah/Ephesus and the Big Guy in the Sky is offended and therefore he engaged Al-Qaeda to punish the US for its sins by enabling or permitting those young Saudi jerks to fly planes into the towers in order to persuade us to repudiate the feminists. Does that make sense? Very little. 

    Similarly, Pat Robertson deduced that Hurricane Katrina was all about abortion. In this case, the Ancient of Days didn't even bother to enlist human agents. Noticing that there were abortions being performed in the US, he let loose the winds from the caves in which he had confined them and instructed them to bust up the New Orleans dikes and drown a lot of people.   

    Jerry and Pat are a pair of idiots, not only because they lack intelligence, but also because their view of the world is five hundred or a thousand years behind the times. They'd be mainstream in dark/medieval Europe when Attila the Hun and Timur (or Tamburlaine) the Great competed for the title of Scourge of God — the flagellum dei. They pillaged and burned and raped over vast areas of the world not because they were  imperialists and conquerors but because they were instruments of god. They wreaked vengeance on our sins. It was orthodoxy. Cause and effect? Sorry, not part of the picture.   

    The fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc  — "after this therefore because of this"  — means that just because B comes after A doesn't mean that A causes B. Just because an abortion is followed by a hurricane doesn't mean that the abortion caused the hurricane. Just because someone prays to one or another god and recovers from illness doesn't mean that the prayer caused the cure. The volcano isn't quiescent because we sacrificed the maiden. No religion, not a single one, can bear the light of post hoc. Fully honored, it puts them all out of business. Along with all the other varieties of magical thinking. 

    All this hardly bears mentioning except that a couple of days ago, a 'senior Iranian cleric" Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, pronounced that very soon a massive earthquake will devastate the city of Teheran and that the earthquake will be caused by "women who do not dress modestly. [Such women] lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes." There's a chain of logic for you. A guy catches a glimpse of a lock of hair, or, god forbid, a bit of bosom, and boom — earthquake.  But it's not his fault — it's that his natural chastity has been compromised by them there female blandishments. Delilah all over again. Forget the movement of tectonic plates. The energy released in earthquakes isn't caused by subduction. It's ankles.The senior Iranian cleric has not correctly grasped the meaning of the demotic phrase, "the earth moved."

    Sedighi is a boob and is even more presumptuous and illogical than Pat and Jerry. The earthquake hasn't even occurred and he's already blaming it on the outfits. He's launched a pre-emptive strike on post hoc. His is a fallacy so monumentally illogical that hasn't yet earned a name.     

    It's instructive that Shakespeare, writing before the age of reason and before the scientific revolution, offered a full debate on the subject. In King Lear, Gloucester takes the traditional view. Eclipses, like hurricanes, are filled with meaning. Gloucester does not hold with reason or with the logic that he calls "the wisdom of nature."

    "These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects: love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide. In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason, and the bond cracked 'twixt son and father… We have seen the best of our time:  machinations, hollowness, treachery and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves." 

    Gloucester's bastard son Edmund dismisses tradition and argues scientifically and rationally.   

    "This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune — often the surfeit of our own behavior — we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star. My father compounded with my mother under the dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major; so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing." 

    Gloucester is, in our terms, superstitious and simple, but he's also orthodox and reverent. Edmund is realistic and rational, but he is also as loathsome a villain as Shakespeare ever created. Shakespeare is a late medieval writer, which is why he should not necessarily be looked to for moral advice but rather for great poetry, great stories, and aesthetic bliss.

    Meanwhile, the "excellent foppery of the world" has become the province of fundamentalists of all stripes. 

  • Fever of Rome

    Except for its title, which misses the mark, Edith Wharton's "Roman Fever" is an exquisite and near-perfect short story. I'm not sure if I would love it quite so much if I hadn't recently indulged myself with an Edithathon of 25 or 30 long novels, of which "Roman Fever" is a quintessence or distillation. Packed into a few pages is all you would ever need to know about formal, repressed, rule-bound upper-class New York society in which no-holds-barred competitiveness is masked by lifted-pinky manners. The story is so cleverly designed that the last satisfying sentence more than fulfills a reader's wickedest expectations. 

    Mrs.  Ansley and Mrs. Slade, both well-tended New York widows who've pretended to like each other for a lifetime, chat on a Roman balcony. Each is expert at at one-upmanship. Their apparent friendship masks hatreds and sexual jealousies as obvious (once the curtain is lifted) and as brutal as those of lions living in the less habitable portions of the Kalahari desert.

    I know of no work of fiction that is at once so polite and so ferocious. And so chilling. 

  • Our New Neighbor

    Our new neighbor is a white-haired woman, seventy-five or eighty years old.  She has fair, wrinkled skin, uses lots of cosmetics, and dresses conservatively.  She carries a cane.

    On the inside of her right ankle, she sports a faded red and black tattoo of Mickey Mouse. 

  • “Cat Got Your Tongue”

    So it was 1946 and I was in first grade in P. S. 217 and I must have been throwing my massive seven-year-old weight around because one of the "class mothers" took me aside and accused me of quote picking on unquote her dear son Michael who was at least six inches taller than poor poor pitiful skinny me. I remember that I was astonished and taken aback but that I was still in my own head poised enough to think, what a jerk Michael must be to tell on me to his mother — although frankly I don't know now and didn't know then what I could have done to earn her enmity or deserve the reproach. I was innocent! What I remember most clearly is that I was rendered quite speechless when Michael's mommy asked an explanation or apology from me and especially that she two or several times demanded of me, scornfully, "what's the matter, cat's got your tongue? Cat's got your tongue?" I had never heard that expression before and didn't know what it meant, but it sure added a deal of mystery to the confrontation. My tongue was still in my mouth and not in the possession of some feline and I was neither clever enough nor bold enough to stick it out at her. 

    What does it mean, "Cat's got your tongue." It's still a mystery to me even today. Interestingly enough, the expression isn't of ancient origin and apparently dropped to earth only in the late nineteenth century. It's a puzzle, though. Why a cat?  But then, why "cat's pajamas?" Why "cat o' nine tails?" Why "cat's meow?"

    In any case, I was nonplussed that Michael's mommy spoke to me so obscurely and I was indignant to be accused of misbehavior. In fact, sixty plus years later I'm still indignant.   

    Is it possible that the cat-and-tongue episode stimulated my interest in language? 

    I really don't know why this antique event swam out of the dark backward and abysm of the past. Just yesterday, when I mentioned it to Mrs Dr. Metablog, she recalled that one day, also in 1946, when she was in elementary school and she was not sitting as still as we were then expected to sit, she was accused of having "ants in her pants."  She's indignant.     

  • Strange Flesh

    Plutarch makes much of Antonius' "hardness in adversity notwithstanding his fine bringing up." Shakespeare knew these words very well; in fact, his copy of Plutarch was open to this exact sentence when he mended his quill and began to compose the famous speech in Anthony and Cleopatra that begins "Anthony, leave thy lascivious wassails."

    Here are Plutarch's words (exactly as they came to Shakespeare through Sir Thomas North's translation). The passage that particularly stimulated the playwright appears (thanks to the magic of word processing), in a font of vivid blue. 

    "Hirtius and Pansa, then consuls [were sent by Octavius Caesar] to drive Antonius out of Italy. These two consuls… besieged the city of Modena, and there overthrew him in battle, but both the consuls were slain there. Antonius, flying upon this overthrow, fell into great misery all at once, but the chiefest want of all other, and that pinched him most, was famine. Howbeit, he was of such a strong nature that by patience he would overcome any adversity, and the heavier fortune lay upon him, the more constant showed he himself…. And therefore it was a wonderful example to the soldiers, to see Antonius, that was brought up in all fineness and superfluity, so easily to drink puddle water, and eat wild fruits and roots; and moreover it is reported that even as they passed the Alps, they did eat the bark of trees, and such beasts as man never tasted of their flesh before. 

    Shakespeare kept the sense of the passage but put Plutarch's words into the mouth of Octavius Caesar, who despises, envies, but also fears Anthony, his absent rival.     

                                                            Anthony,

    Leave thy lascivious wassails.  When thou once   

    Was beaten from Modena, where thou slew'st

    Hirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heel

    Did famine follow, who thou fought'st against,

    (Though daintily brought up) with patience more

    Than savages could suffer.  Thou did'st drink

    The stale of horses, and the gilded puddle

    Which beasts would cough at.  Thy palate then did deign

    The roughest berry on the rudest hedge.

    Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets,

    The barks of trees thou browsed.  On the Alps,

    It is reported thou did'st eat strange flesh,

    Which some did die to look on.  And all this

    (It wounds thine honor that I speak it now)

    Was born so like a soldier, that thy cheek

    So much as lanked not. 

    Plutarch is shocked that high-born Antonius could bring himself to eat "wild fruits," but Shakespeare, ever willing to push an idea to the limit, makes Anthony's diet even more crude. "Thy palate then did deign [i.e. find worthy]/ The roughest berry on the rudest hedge" — that is to say, Anthony eats not just "wild fruit," but the less palatable "roughest berry." In an even harsher transformation, Plutarch's "puddle water" becomes "the stale (i.e. urine) of horses, and the gilded puddle/ Which beasts would cough at."  It may be stoic to drink "puddle water," but it is a far greater challenge to a dainty constitution to survive on horse piss. As the passage continues, Anthony's diet becomes progressively more exotic. Plutarch says that Antonius consumed "beasts as man never tasted of their flesh before," and seems to imagine Antonius as an adventurer at the utmost boundary of culinary experience. But when Shakespeare suggests that Anthony ate "strange flesh/ Which some did die to look upon," Anthony becomes not just a soldier/explorer coping with natural adversity but a demi-god or some other kind of supernatural figure able to triumph over enchantment or magic — one who can incorporate fleshly food that would kill at a glance men with natures less powerful than his own.  

    Shakespeare characteristically intensifies, exaggerates, or hyperbolizes Plutarch's already extravagant tale. He raises the rhetorical ante. Whatever Plutarch proffers, Shakespeare doubles and redoubles. 

    The animal theme that runs through this series of transformations begins with the evolution of Plutarch's phrase "by patience he would overcome any adversity" into Shakespeare's "patience more than savages could suffer." More patience than savages?  What would that be? Shakespeare provides an answer to an implicit, unspoken question, which is, What is a more, or worse, or a lower being than a savage? The answer seems to be "an animal" — and consequently Shakespeare employs images of bestiality throughout this speech: the horses whose stale must be guzzled, the beasts who cough at the gilded puddle, the stag who browses the bark of trees under sheets of snow, and, climatically, the strange magical flesh that some — but not Anthony — die to look upon. In a characteristically Shakespearean paradox, as the passage proceeds Anthony becomes both more animal and more heroic — at the same time both baser and yet more transcendent. 

    And what is that strange and magic Alpine flesh?  It's impossible to say, and Shakespeare offers no clue. Perhaps it's mere hyperbole — an author carried away by his own rhetorical power. Does Anthony violate the ultimate food taboo and become a cannibal?  Some readers have thought so, but the evidence is lacking. 

    There is, however, a hint that Octavius himself thinks that the strange flesh episode is nothing more than a tall tale. "On the  Alps, it is reported…. " 

  • Wow! Still Another Nineteenth-Century Horsedrawn Vehicle

    It's a patache, and George Sand (in The Miller of Angibault [1852]) offers a detailed account. The patache, it would appear, was a blast from the past even in the early nineteenth century. 

    "Madame de Blanchemont left in a simple patache, that respectable relic of our forefathers' plain tastes, becoming rarer with each passing day. The one which it was Marcelle's unhappy fate to encounter was of the purest native construction and an antiquarian would have contemplated it with respect. It was as long and low as a coffin; no springs of any sort diminished its charms. The wheels were as tall as the cowl. The cowl itself was made of a sort of wattle and daub, so that every little bump rained clods of clay down on the travelers' heads. A thin but ardent little stallion drew this rural carriage quite nimbly, and the patachon, the driver, seated himself on the car-shaft with his legs dangling down."

    The patache, which seems to be a country cousin of the "springless kibitka" combined with elements of the basket-carriage, may now be added to the long list of obsolete horsedrawn carriages. 

  • Noteworthy Pearlmans

    The most famous, I think, must be Itzhak Perlman, who is the earth's most versatile and distinguished violinist — and is also father of five next-generation members of the musical tribe. Almost as widely known but perhaps not so spectacularly talented, is Rhea Perlman, better known as Carla Tortelli, mother to many. The most brilliant of the clan, and certainly the most eccentric, is Grigori Yakovlevich ("Grisha") Perelman, the mathematician who solved Poincare's conjecture and then refused both the Fields Medal (the Nobel Prize of mathematics) and the $1 million Clay Millennium Prize. Grisha demonstrated what most of us simply take for granted: that any closed three-dimensional manifold where any loop can be contracted to a point is really just a three-dimensional sphere. There's also Ron Perelman, a consummate and ruthless corporate raider, once the richest man in America, now, alas,  fallen to 18th — nor any longer contracted to nonce-wife #4, Ellen Barkin. The most amusing of all Pearlmans is surely Brooklynite S. J. Perelman, screenwriter of two great Marx Brothers vehicles — Horse Feathers and Monkey Business. The most reprehensible of the cousinhood is certainly Lou Pearlman, accomplished Ponzi-artist and the mogul behind the bubble-gummy Backstreet Boys, whom he used and possibly sexually abused to the tune of $300 million — and who is now serving a 25-year term in federal prison. Infinitely more respectable is the composer and conductor Martin Pearlman, who learned his trade at Cornell and who is a harpsichordist as well as the founder of the Boston Baroque. Nor should any Pearlman census overlook Ron Perlman, aka Amoukar the Ulam, who many years ago quested for fire. Nor sportwriter Jeff Pearlman, pitcher Jon Perlman, writer Edith Pearlman, film critic Cindy Pearlman; nor the great rhetorician of a prior generation, Chaim Pearlman.

    And also: standing at the top of the heap in the world of fiction is The Wire's incorruptible Maryland Assistant State Attorney, Rhonda Pearlman.

  • Lascivious Wassails

    In Anthony and Cleopatra, Caesar, who is disciplined and ascetic, both envies and scorns Anthony. In one of the play's greatest moments, Caesar apostrophizes his hedonistic, indulgent rival. "Anthony," he begins, "Leave thy lascivious wassails." "Lascivious wassails" is a most marvelous phrase — not only because of its serpentine hissing, but because it is so colorful. In another context, the word "wassails" might signify conviviality, but in this case it is so contaminated by the wickedness of "lascivious" that it can only be taken to signify bouts of drunken excess. "Lascivious wassails" is glancingly oxymoronic and consequently embodies Caesar's confused and contradictory feelings toward Anthony.

    It's an especially pertinent phrase because the speech that follows celebrates those qualities of Anthony which Caesar most admires (and which he simultaneously finds most threatening) — his Spartan, soldierly ability to put aside luxurious food and drink and to subsist on "the bark of trees," and, if necessary, to drink from "the gilded puddle that beasts would cough at." 

    "Lascivious wassails" is brilliant in its freestanding self and without doubt entirely appropriate to its context. It's one of Shakespeare's all-time-great encapsulations — a condensed and beautiful phrase.    

    Except that it's not Shakespeare's. Or, more precisely, it is probably not Shakespeare.

    The Folio text of Anthony and Cleopatra seems to have been set from a transcript of Shakespeare's manuscript. It's the only early printing (there are no Quartos). In the Folio, the line appears this way: "Anthony,/ Leaue thy lasciuious Vassailes." "Vassailes" was, for the first hundred years of its existence, understood to mean "vassals." Caesar, it appears, wants Anthony to take leave of not his cups but his followers. In the fourth Folio of 1683, the irregular spelling "vassailes" was regularized to "vassals." "Wassails" did not arrive on the scene until 1724 and was the ingenious, inspired invention of Alexander Pope. Every single editor since Pope, no doubt taken with the beauty of the phrase, has printed "wassails." 

    It's not as though "vassals" doesn't make sense. It's perfectly fine. It's just the "wassails" is better. In this instance, let's face it, Pope outdid Shakespeare. If not for Pope, it is highly likely that it would have been "lascivious vassals" until the end of time. Who beside a great poet would have thought of "wassails?" Certainly not I.

    Editors aim for authenticity — to print what they believe Shakespeare wrote. Shakespeare probably wrote "vassals" — but "wassails" is so clever that editors cannot help but succumb. They follow the illogic that if it's brilliant, it must be Shakespeare. And so authenticity gladly yields to beauty.   

    Other Shakespeare enigmas:  here, and here.

  • Bronte Notes

    I have just read, for the first time ever, Agnes Grey (1847) by Anne Bronte, and what an infinitely sad book it is! Poor Agnes, an impoverished clergyman's daughter, goes as a governess and is daily humiliated by monstrously spoiled children and their grotesquely insensitive parents. Her sufferings are poignantly particularized. The novel is structured as if it were a comedy (after extended tribulations, Agnes marries a decent young curate) but it is nevertheless barren, desiccated, and joyless. Even the long-awaited marriage proposal receives the shortest of shrifts:

    "And so now I have overruled your objections. Have you any others. "No — none."  "You love me then," he said, fervently pressing my hand.  "Yes."  

    And that's all the romance that this poor downtrodden, passive, beaten-into-the-dust emotionally-stunted "heroine" is granted. 

    Nevertheless, my own personal sadness while reading this novel arose not from Agnes Grey's suffering, but from Anne Bronte's — there being not a skin-of-the-teeth space between the bedraggled writer and the bedraggled protagonist. Agnes's experiences as a governess exactly mirror Anne's — except there was no saving curate to snatch the wedding chestnuts out of the fire. Poor Anne returned home defeated, virginal, and alone, to die at age 28, of tuberculosis. Nor is it simply the doormat heroine or the downtrodden novelist that is so distressing — it's the general oppression of women in the first part of the nineteenth century that must draw a tear from the stolidest of eyes. Here's a society that offered no decent options for women, and even Anne Bronte, as talented as she was, hadn't the least ability to think her way through attitudes toward women that proved to be paralyzing and ultimately fatal.   

    I turned to Agnes Grey because I had recently read Anne's older sister Charlotte's Villette, a novel that perplexed me more than any book I've read in years. I couldn't make sense of it. I've read my share of nineteenth-century novels, and I would like to think that I have a general sense of how they're made, and, after I get a few chapters in, how they must conclude. In Villete, all the early markers point to the eventuality that young Lucy Snowe, after the customary and appropriate difficulties and misunderstandings will have been resolved, will marry the handsome young Dr. John. But somewhere in Book II, the game changed and the poor reader (me) became confused. Dr. John is allowed to make some bad choices — sufficiently wrong that he becomes superfluous and gradually fades into the background. He metamorphoses from a major character in the first half of the book to a minor character in Book III. His place as Lucy Snowe's suitor is taken by a teacher, M. Paul Emanuel, who is nasty and unattractive when introduced but who becomes more and more acceptable as the novel proceeds. I couldn't comprehend the seismic shift until I read the truly excellent biography of CB by Lyndall Gordon (Charlotte Bronte, A Passionate Life (1994). It turns out the plot of the novel parallels CB's experience in Brussels. Initially attracted to a young man who lost interest in her, she fell deeply in love with a teacher at her school. Alas, M. Heger was not available, either matrimonially or emotionally.

    But at least Charlotte, unlike Anne, was willing to take a risk — which is why, in Charlotte's greatest novel, witty, forthright, independent Jane Eyre, for all her weirdness, remains such a striking and refreshing alternative to the ordinary oppressed nineteenth-century heroine.

  • Pretty Poison (1960); Tuesday Weld (1943- )

    Pretty Poison was released in 1960 to excellent notices. I remember adding it to the must-see list. But I didn't get around to it at the time, probably because the film wasn't widely distributed. But Pretty Poison stuck in my mind — or rather it was the combination of Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld that excited my interest. During the VHS years I made another attempt to see the movie, but it was apparently stuck in some sort of royalty-and-ownership dispute and never made it onto tape. And then another twenty years elapsed and I tried again, this time typing the name into my Netflix queue, and, mirabile dictu, there it was.  So at last, after fifty years, a cd of Pretty Poison appeared in the mailbox. 

    It's a fine film, well worth the wait. I don't know what I would have thought about it in 1960, but in 2010 it seems like a late variant of 1950s film noir and an important but unacknowledged way station on the road from Double Indemnity to Body Heat. It offers a dangerous jeune fille fatale in the high school cheerleader Mary Ann Stepanek, some great plot twists, and a creepy young man who's not as clever as he thinks (very similar to his lineal descendant, the fatuous lawyer Ned Racine). The photography, all sunlit and cheerful, disguises the noirish themes and keeps the audience off balance. The screenwriter, Lorenzo Semple Jr., was, if I remember correctly, just emerging from the McCarthy blacklist, which may be why the film stresses cold-war themes — spies and sabotage and the like. Can it be accidental that, in the last year of the Eisenhower administration, a well-meaning but ineffective government employee as given the name Azenauer?  

    At the very time Tuesday Weld, scion of an ancient Massachusetts family performed in this film, I was taking courses in Cambridge, in Weld Hall. How could anyone not be struck by her great name? Tuesday Weld is linked, in my mind, not only to the Saltonstalls, Peabodys, and Lodges but also to Billy Sunday, Rick Monday, Joe Friday, January Jones, Fredric March, May West, June Jones, August Busch, Susan Sontag, Domenico Scarlatti and Jeudi Garland. 

  • Grandpa Tells a Whopper; Cornell Takes a Shellacking

    Last night, the grandkids had a little fun with the old guy. Miss T. (b. 1999), concluded that Grandpa's electronic and computer skills were (her exact words) "stone age."

    Is she correct? Let us review the circumstances. I was here, in B–ld-r, trying to watch the Cornell-Kentucky sweet-sixteen on streaming video (CBS again gave the Big Red the back of its network-y hand) while simultaneously following the Kansas State-Xavier double-overtime epic on Tivo (slightly behind real time so as to sidestep the mini-dramas on the subjects of beer and deodorant). Miss T and Mr. O were snuggled in bed with their mom out there near the Pacific shore and we and they were sending messages back and forth on Facebook chat. Hey, not exactly a "stone age" situation.

    The kiddies were testing my knowledge of IM acronyms, and I was failing badly. I didn't know ROTFL or JK or TMI or LMAO. Then Mr. O became dissatisfied at the pace of the conversation, so he started sending me messages ("texting" me is the jargon) on the cellphone, thereby giving me another device to manage. Which is when I ran out of hands, and in frustration, told what HF (according to SLC), also known as MT) calls a "stretcher." I said (or wrote, rather) to Miss T. and Mr. O., something to the effect of "what do you mean I don't know about electronic media. I used to IM all the time with my grandparents."

    Frankly, they didn't buy it. I can't blame them; they know that my grandparents didn't have much English.

    Meanwhile, the Ivy League fell further and further behind, mostly because Kentucky was quick enough to step around the screens and stop Cornell's three-point game. In the other bracket, Kansas State lasted it out. 

    I know that it's negligent not to enlighten myself about useful chat acronyms. Nevertheless, I suspect that the o-so-up-to-date grandkids at the other end of the IM line are also missing something. They probably think that a "whopper" is a hamburger. They probably don't know what a "shellacking" is. Or shellac, for that matter. Probably think that it's something that originated in the Stone Age.

  • My New Mirror

    There's been some criticism — justified, I must admit — about the dexterity of my shaving. It appears that my face has become more, what shall I say? intricate over the last years, and has developed some interesting crannies that resist the approach of the razor. In order to improve my shaving technique, I bought one of those circular magnifying mirrors that allows you to view your face in such great detail that you can hunt down and harvest that last otherwise inaccessible follicle. The mirror seemed like a good idea, but, dear friends of a certain age, I do not recommend this purchase. Big mistake. 

    It had been many years since I studied my face so intently. Things have happened. While I can still locate the remnants of the scar on my forehead, where, when I was a boy, I was pushed into a subway pillar, the mark used to reside just at the hairline. Now, the hairline has migrated a good three inches to the north of the scar and — thanks to the new mirror — I can clearly detect that the first remaining inch or so of brown-gray hair, which I had thought to be of a healthy bushiness, consists of no more than a few well-spaced strands. And what's this cross-hatching on my forehead? Not just the prominent horizontal furrows but new vertical ones as well — when did they appear? And the deep gorges around my eyebrows! And the eyebrows themselves — when did they become parti-colored? Randomly black and white? And how many years ago did these long recurved eyebrow hairs begin to sprout? Fie upon it –'tis an unweeded garden that's gone to seed. Why are the eyebrows themselves so utterly asymmetrical? and what should I make of the thicket of whiteheads — or whatever the heck they are — at all four corners of my bloodshot eyes?  Was it always the case that my eyes were set so deeply into those wrinkled dells? And my nose– thanks to the new mirror, I can plainly see the scars where the pre-cancerous lesions were frozen off. What in the world has happened to the tip of my nose?  Was it always so preternaturally pointy? I could use it as a letter-opener. When I lift my head just slightly, I see that my nostrils, which I always took to be a matched pair, have set out on separate paths. The right one now sits at a 45 degree angle to the left. It's wandered off-center, like the eye of a flounder. And those nasty black hairs jutting from my nostrils — I must attend to them. And look, there are long hairs coming out of my ears as well. And hanging, floppy earlobes marked with deep lines. What are these fleshy nobs at the sides of my mouth? Were my lips always covered with white flakes?  How is it that the left side of my underlip is so much thicker than the right? And my pearly whites? Cracked and chipped and not much of a row: sixty or so years of gnawing has given each tooth its own unique size, shape, color, and identity. And what's this under my chin? A single off-center hanging wattle? No symmetry even in Wattlelandia? Friends, this magnifying mirror is a disaster. I should have stopped shaving entirely and grown a camouflaging beard.

    But hold on, there's some good news. It may not be a youthful or symmetrical face, but It's not unfriendly. There's no sneer, or lip curl, or disdain, or anger. Puzzlement, certainly. Wryness, perhaps. Curiosity, for sure.

    Folks, at least we're not in a wicked-Dorian-Gray-kind-of-situation.

    Wear and tear, yes; villainy, no. Things could be worse.

  • Existence pre- and post-

    Last night, one of our dinner guests said that at least we no longer have to worry about "pre-existing conditions." Persnickety about language as always, I pointed out that the phrase "pre-existing condition" was a ridiculous piece of jargon. What is meant is "existing conditions?" A condition can't exist before it exists. 

    "Aha," said another of my guests, a Lutheran minister,"now you've opened a theological questions." He was referring to the disputed doctrine that the existence of Jesus preceded his incarnation in the womb. 

    But if "pre-existence" is only taken seriously by theologians and by insurance executives, then I'm going to stand on my claim that the phrase is both obscurantist or bureaucratic and should be discarded from common use. "Existing" is sufficient.

    Moreover, the notion that insurance should be granted to the healthy but denied to the ill is a more dangerous travesty than the mystification of "pre-existence."

  • True-life Overheard Dialogue Accurately Reported

    Two derelicts on the B–ld-r M-ll, both of them victims of (I'd guess) methedrine, beer, tobacco, certainly marijuana and who knows what else. Neither of them looking good: emaciation, missing teeth, scraggly beards, odors strong enough to be visible, cachexis.

    A:  "What are you eating?"
    B.  "Some kind of corn chip?"
    A.  "How are they?"
    B.  "Salty.  I don't like them."
    A.  "Yeah, I try to stay away from salt. Not good for you."

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