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

  • My First Earthquake

    Here we are again in Alameda, California.  Last night, just after 8 pm, we were lying in bed reading (me: Conrad’s The Secret Agent;  she, Roth’s Exit, Ghost) and recuperating from the grandchildren’s pre-Hallowe’en hysteria, when I said to A., "Would you please stop shaking the bed."  She, of course, replied, "I’m not moving," and I joked, "Then it must be an earthquake."  And, much to my surprise, so it was.  Five point six on the Richter scale, just twenty miles south of here, five miles underground, along the Calaveras fault.  There’s the possibility of another one, but so far, nothing that we’ve been able to discern.  Astonishing to say, but just a few hours ago, the sure and firm-set earth was feverous and did shake — which put me in mind of the fragility of our earthly being and also made me recall some other natural phenomena that I’ve witnessed.

    All that I can remember of the famous 1945 hurricane was watching at the window while my father, out in the storm, tried vainly to secure his precious peach tree, which was being shredded to oblivion by the fierce winds.  I have a vivid recollection of the great blizzard of 1947, because after the storm subsided, snow was piled so high on both sides of the sidewalks that, for a small boy, it was like walking though a canyon — and great fun to clamber up the mountainous heaps.  I was a young witness to a sudden squall on Long Island Sound that sank, if I remember correctly, hundreds of pleasure boats.  Even more serious was the Connecticut River flood of 1972, which washed out the culverts on our road, tumbled downstream some hefty boulders, and isolated us for a couple of days.  Throughout the summer, there were memorable mud stains thirty feet in the air on the trees that grew in the river valley.  Once in the 1980s, driving across the country just after the Mississippi had overflowed its banks, we observed standing water many miles from where water had any business to be.  We were at Mt. St. Helen’s a year after the mountain blew its top, but signs of the devastation — bald patches, toppled trees — were still writ large on the landscape.  Same with the Black Tiger fire;  we missed the fire but couldn’t ignore the extensive blackening.  In Hawaii once, we walked along hardened lava flows for a couple of miles to find a standpoint to observe magma, fresh from the earth’s interior, fall steaming into the ocean to create new land.  In Costa Rica, we visited a dormant volcano — monumental even in its sleepiness.

    Not many such events, but a sufficient number to produce respect for the natural processes.  No tsunamis or crackings of the ice shelf.  And nothing, thank goodness, comparable to the explosion of Tambura on the island of Sumbawa that caused the summer without sun and a crisis of subsistence in parts of Europe and North America. And certainly nothing whatsoever like the meteor that landed 70 million years ago in the Yucatan, after which the fossil record becomes a blank for a thousand years and every creature larger than a pussycat went extinct.  Yesterday’s trembling was a good reminder that our mother earth is a lot more fragile than she appears to be on your average warm, pleasant, quakeless evening.   

  • Real Live Dialogue

    First the exchange, exacty as it occured in real life, and then the gloss.

    The cashier: "Breakfast of Champions?"

    Me: "Well, I’m a vegetarian."

    The cashier: "Yeah, I know, all organic."

    So here’s the story. We were driving across the western, uninhabited part of South Dakota, heading toward the glorious Black Hills and the Badlands. Somewhere out there, I stopped for gas. It was about 9:00 or 9:30 in the morning.

    As a general rule, I don’t drink coffee or other caffeinated liquids, but when I’m driving long distances, I keep a Coca-Cola by my side on the conservative principle that whatever damage the caffeine might do to my eccentric heart, it will be probably be a lot less dangerous than falling asleep, crashing the car, and mangling myself and my passengers. Moreover, I’m not a consumer of candy bars, but the day before, somewhere in Minnesota, A. had treated herself to a package of M &Ms.  I had wheedled a handful or so from her and I had decided to make good her loss.  So when we stopped to refill the gas tank in Somewhere, South Dakota, I purchased, at one of those roadside convenience stores, a 12 oz bottle of Coke and a small plastic bag of multicolored chocolate candies, and the friendly, tough, old lady who kept the register looked at me aslant and said, affectionately, questioningly but also with a touch of scorn, "Breakfast of Champions." I was feeling defensive and while I could have responded by explaining that I don’t usually eat junky stuff, and that it wasn’t even my breakfast, I didn’t feel that I needed to apologize, so I went the other route and capitulated: "Well, I’m a vegetarian." Which made the lady smile a bit, as I had hoped, and made me feel as though we were on the same mock-serious wavelength.  It was a moment of deep communication, far superior to the commonplace vacant salesperson/customer/middle-of-nowhere encounter. Feeling a kindred spirit, the lady went along with the game and both assimilated and expanded on my gambit, saying, "Yeah, I know, all organic’ –an expression that was in part friendly but which also carried a little bite, as if she detected that I was from some tofu/granola city (which, in fact, is true, even though I myself am an old-fashioned cheeseburger –as opposed to veggieburger — kind of guy). Altogether, it was one of the more satisfying conversations I’ve had in the last while. A moment of deep and profound understanding, the kind of intimate communication that we all strive for all day, every day, even out there on a two-lane in one of the "flyover" states.

  • More on Religion and the Rockies

    I’m trying to remember the name of the superstitious 1940s Dodger pitcher, who, when the inning ended, would flip his mitt into the first base coaching box, then walk over and reposition it so that the fingers pointed directly toward the mound.  (I’d better stop here and remind the young folks that in days of yore, players left their gloves out on the field when they came in for their turn at bat. I can’t remember exactly when the Commissioner prohibited this harmless, colorful custom — was it in the late 50s?)

    Baseball players have always been notably superstitious. They don’t step on foul lines or talk about no-hitters in progress.  They wear the same underwear or socks for the length of a winning streak.  Turk Wendell had to brush his teeth and chew licorice between innings.  Wade "Chicken Man" Boggs, a good enough hitter not to solicit divine intercession, had to eat a meal of chicken before every game.  Craig Biggio refused to wipe the dirt or the pine tar off his helmet for an entire season.  Baseball is where the Curse of the Bambino and the Curse of the Billy-Goat are items of faith. It’s also where players wear gold crosses in their ears and ostentatious floppy crucifixes around their necks and point triumphantly to the sky when they bloop a single to center.

    Chewing licorice and making the sign of the cross are equally effective procedures, as far as I can tell.  The only difference is that one is a private superstition while the other has the sanction of religion.  It’s individual delusion versus mass delusion.

    At this writing, the biblethumpatudinous Colorado Rockies, baseball’s most Christian-y organization — the only team with a chaplain on its payroll — have won twenty-one of twenty-two games and will (after an eight-day timeout) head for their first-ever Series.  It’s astounding and wonderful, and I’m rooting for the home town boys.  But my enthusiasm is tempered because fanatics are already calling it "a miracle," or "destiny," or claiming that "it’s meant to be."  Baseball’s a gritty, subtle game, and the Rocks are winning because they’re playing excellent defense, getting timely hits, making great pitches at the crucial moments, and committing very few mental errors — not because of their prayer circle or their morning bible study or because the Great Signifier in the Sky has decided that this year, the Rockies are kosher and the Diamondbacks are treyf.   

    But, say the superstitious, it’s unlikely that any team could take twenty-one of twenty-two.  Of course it’s unlikely.  But if statistics tells us anything, they tell us that even unlikely events will occur some of the time.

    Here’s what’s genuinely unlikely:  that the Rockies’ shortstop, Troy Tulowitski, who (if there’s any justice under the heavens) will be soon named rookie of the year, has a "Christian" name that is an acronym for The Rookie Of Year. What, pray tell, are the odds?  And also, that the Rockies’ have a catcher, Yorvit Torrealba, whose name is an anagram for "real toy vibrator."  Such an extraordinary unlikelihood has never happened before and it’s never going to happen again, and it’s entirely more remarkable than any winning streak, however extended.  Yorvit Torrealba is one of those gosh-darned superstitious sky-pointers.  It would suit my Manichean view of the world if Yorvit would also point downward, toward Sheol or Gehenna or whatever is supposed to be down there, every time he futilely chases a high fast ball, which he does far too frequently.   

    I would also like to point out that the Rockies have a reliever named LaTroy Hawkins, whose name would also anagrammatize into "real toy vibrator" if he would simply rechristen himself LaTroy Riverboat.  Coincidence?  Or destiny. 

    Go Rockies! 

  • Robert Bage’s Hermsprong (1796)

    Back in the early '60s, when I was just beginning to learn about literature, I enrolled in a course on the eighteenth-century English novel. I diligently worked my way through an ambitious syllabus. There were more than twenty novels, some of them monumental in size, like Clarissa and Tristram Shandy;  and others blessedly brief, like Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield and Mackenzie's Man of Feeling. Diligent lad that I was, I read every single word, every syllable. In addition to the required reading, there was also an extensive register of recommended works. On this intimidating list was Robert Bage's Hermsprong, which, forty-five years after the fact, I've at last read. Better very very late than never at all.

    It's a good book — not a masterpiece, but very fine, very enjoyable. The plot is  unoriginal. An heiress falls for a fortune-hunter, elopes to the continent, but is rescued just before the threatened deflowering; a domineering wicked old guy forces his unwilling daughter into marriage with an idiot aristocrat; a man of mysterious origin turns out to be the estate's true heir — that sort of thing. But other elements are less cliched. Charles Hermsprong, raised among Indians on the banks of the "Powtomack," is a plain-spoken 'merican radical; Maria Fluart is as witty and defiant and independent as Benedick's Beatrice — sometimes it seems as though her lines could have been composed by Oscar Wilde himself. Maria is by far the most vibrant character in the novel. If Bage were as advanced a thinker as he sometimes pretends to be, he would have let his hero marry her.It's disappointing that Hermsprong falls for a conventional dutiful young simperer, while Maria, too strong for any man in the novel, is left on the putative shelf.

    Here's a passage that jumps out at the reader. It's from a description of two of the novel's minor characters:

    "But the tender interest they had in each other was torn asunder by pride and prejudice, and this pride and prejudice, she feared…."

    Whoa, daddy!  Jane Austen's novel was originally named "First Impressions" and only borrowed its familiar title from Bage late in the game. It is obvious that right there on Jane's bookshelf, next to Sir Charles Grandison and Tom Jones and the novels of Frances Burney, was a copy of Hermsprong, which Ms. Austen (unlike your dilatory '60s student) was smart enough to read in a timely manner. 

  • Jane Austen Nude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • A Scene from my Youth

     
    NewkirkThis Here is a photograph of Coney Island Avenue, the grim commercial thoroughfare along which I crept to school unwillingly like snail between the years 1944 and 1952. The unknown photographer who left us this record stood at the corner of Newkirk Avenue, just in front of the P. S. 217 schoolyard, and pointed his camera north toward Ditmas Avenue. It's the east side of the street; on the west side stood a used-car lot and a gas station, where, if the view were more panoramic, signs reading "Veedol" and "Mechanic on Duty" would have been visible.

    It takes only a few seconds of detective work to date the photograph. In the center is the marquee of the Leader Theater, which advertises the 1947 release It Happened in Brooklyn, a soldier-returns-home musical with Frank Sinatra, Kathryn Grayson, Peter Lawford, and especially Jimmy Durante, who was clearly the neighborhood favorite.  The second feature, Undercover Maisie, a policier with Ann Sothern and Barry Nelson, was released in the same year. (The double bill was standard — and at 14 cents for kids and a quarter for adults, a darn good value). It's early autumn not only because the ivy and, in the distance, a Norway maple are still in full leaf, but because the Casa del Rey advertises High Holy Day services (the orthodox congregation's synagogue on 18th Avenue had not yet been constructed). I would guess that the large traffic sign that dominates the frame has something to do with the fact that the old trolley tracks had recently been removed. The shops near the Leader are too small to identify, but I remember Singer's drug store, Safier's candy store, a shoe repair place, a small liquor store owned by P. V. Melia, and Joe Montuori's barber shop.  At the moment the camera snapped, I was eight years old, in Mrs. Sherwood's third grade class at P. S. 217. 

    The architecture is hodge-podge — the featureless apartment house and shops, the vaguely deco Leader, and then, closer to the camera, the what-the-heck-is-it-doing-there Moorish Casa del Rey (for weddings and other gatherings;  I passed it thousands of times but never once entered).

    The man at the right of the frame, jingling his car keys in the pocket of his voluminous slacks, stares at the camera unenthusiastically.

    It's a dreary picture, I'm afraid. Gray. A nondescript street in a nondescript neighborhood.   

    I'm trying, but I just can't seem to work up the requisite nostalgia for the old country. 

  • No Words, No Words? Hush.

    A few nights ago, I attended a performance by our local treasure, the ever-glorious Takacs Quartet. Without asking my leave, they chose to play works by Aarvo Part and Philip Glass. I suppose that there must be virtues to "minimalist" music, but a single motif played over and over again in the same tempo, with the same unvarying dynamics, and in the same non-key — what's the point? Music without melody, harmony, or rhythm is like a novel without a plot or like a severely abstract painting. Sorry folks, I'm antediluvian. A relic. I want a story and I want it dressed in rhyme and meter. It's exhilaration that I crave, not forty-five long minutes of total ripvanwinkleization.      

    I was already in a sulky mood at the intermission when Mr. and Mrs. Talkative behind me, after gushing over the minimalists, directed their intellects toward Shakespeare. Mrs T. announced, "You don't need to read a Shakespeare play before seeing it. Just read a plot summary so that you know what's happening." Mr. T. agreed:  "Absolutely. Going to the theater is all about the costumes and the set and the business. As long as you have a general idea of the story, you don't need to understand the words."   

    No need to understand Shakespeare's words?  Go to the theater and ignore the words of the finest poet in human history?  What are the Talkatives thinking?  The costumes are the work of the costumer; the business is the work of the director and the stage designer. The only part of the performance that is Shakespeare's is the language. 

    One of the teachers of my youth, the late and much lamented Alfred Harbage  — the finest Shakespeare scholar of his generation — used to say that he didn't care what the actors did on stage as long as he could hear the words.  I'm not nearly so tolerant. I don't want Rosiland and Orlando to send email messages to each other — I want them to articulate. I don't want Cinna and Metullus Cimber to be dressed as blackshirt fascist thugs. And I certainly don't want Snug and Bottom to ride to the Duke's Oak on motorcycles. Such antics are stupid and distracting.

    The performance for which I'd pay a premium price is one at the Theatre, or at the old Globe, or at the Blackfriars during the years when Shakespeare was teaching the parts to Burbage and Hemmings and Kemp. Dollars to doughnuts he insisted that the actors pronounce the words distinctly.   

    After the grating intermission, the Talkatives ran out of insights and my indignation began to wane. Eventually Ed, Andras, Karoly and Gerry returned to the stage and played one of Haydn's great Opus 76 quartets. It was transcendent — melodic, intelligent and intelligible, warm, robust and sensuous. It was music.   

  • Tolstoi’s Moth

    A third of the way through Anna Karenina — the finest novel in this or any other universe — Anna's deceived husband Karenin reluctantly brings himself to consult with a famous divorce lawyer.

    The lawyer was short, stocky, and bald, with a dark, reddish beard, long light eyebrows, and a bulging forehead.  He was dressed like a bridegroom, from his cravat and double watch chain to his patent leather boots.  He had a clever, rustic face, but his clothes were dandified and in poor taste….  Won't you sit down?"  He indicated an armchair beside a writing desk covered with papers, and sat down himself behind the desk, rubbing together his little hands with their short fingers overgrown with fair hairs, and leaning his head over to one side. 

    The lawyer's "clever rustic face" is the tipoff that he's of peasant origin and probably only a generation or two away from scythe and flail. With his pretentious get-up and his bulging forehead and his stubby hirsute fingers, he is repulsive, even brutish. O, the indignity of it all — an aristocrat like Karenin having to seek help from such a pretentious upstart!

    And there's worse. The lawyer is not only a social-climber; he's also a ruthless opportunist.      

    He had just settled into this pose when a moth flew over the table:  with a rapidity it would have been impossible to expect, the lawyer unlocked his hands, caught the moth, and again assumed his previous posture. 

    I would not want to assert that Karenin is precisely a moth. Nevertheless, Tolstoi certainly suggests that, given half a chance, the lawyer would not hesitate to strip his client's wings. It's clear that the awkward relations between the lawyer (whom Tolstoi never even bothers to name) and Karenin are governed by centuries of master-serf antagonism and by the prospect of revenge. 

    Tolstoi quickly brings this episode to a close and never brings the lawyer back on stage. But he lets him exit exultantly.

    He bowed deferentially, showing his client out the door. But once he was alone, he abandoned himself to his glee. 

    Our lawyer now decides that it is time to give up moth-catching.  Instead,

    he had definitely made up his mind to have his furniture reupholstered in plush the following winter, like Sigonin's. 

    The dog-eat-dog lawyer is convinced that he can transform Karenin's distress into hard cash. The fees, which he savors prematurely, will allow him to catch up with his rival.

    The world of Anna Karenina is both tough and unsentimental — and revealed with great economy by its accomplished creator. It's a long novel, but packed with significance, every rift loaded with rich shining ore.  olstoi takes on all the great perennial and nineteenth-century issues — class, wealth, family, labor, spirituality, city and country, science, women's rights, royalty and democracy, agricultural reform, bureaucracy, sexuality, etc. — but he still manages to extract significance even from the lowly, Czarist moth.      

    It had been thirty years since I re-read Anna Karenina. Now I've resolved to make it at least a biennial event. It's too astonishing a novel to let lie fallow.

  • Wild Turkeys in My Garden

    Even a decade ago, wild turkeys were an utmost rarity, and the sight of one in the distance caused everyone to stop and peer. But each succeeding year, there are more and more of them. They're everywhere — on the roads, in the fields, even under the apple trees, gorging themselves. Last week, a hen and a dozen poults walked bold as brass right up onto our front lawn, ten feet from the deck.  Didn't even bother to hasten away — took their own sweet time wandering off.

    I don't believe that turkeys were native to Vermont, but it's well known that since the reintroduction, they've expanded well beyond their former range. They're adaptable and wily creatures.

    The domestic turkey is legendarily stupid. Its brains have waned as its breasts have waxed. The wild turkey, on the other hand, is smart, though given to occasional lapses. Sometimes the hen leads her brood through the woven wire fences. She knows the route, but one or two of the poults will find themselves barricaded from the flock. They set up a wail. The flock comes to a nervous halt. After a while, the spectator — me — can't endure the tension. I slowly head over to see what I can do, trying not to alarm the lost fowl — whereupon the poults suddenly remember that they know how to fly. Unlike their domestic cousins, they're strong fliers. They clear the fences with ease.

    I now understand a few words of Turkeyish. The male gobble: "I am very large and handsome; come mate with me."  The poult peep: "I'm lost.  Where is everyone." The hen cluck: "Come along with me." The double cluck: "Everyone fly into the trees."

    Here's what worries me. Every year there are more and more turkeys. Even the hunters can't keep up with the population explosion. Will the turkeys turn into a rural version of pigeon? Overrun our gardens and fields? 

    Where are the fisher-cats, the foxes, the coyotes, the hawks?  Get to work, guys. While turkeys are not exactly sitting ducks, they're still very tasty.   

  • Cuisine de Minnesota

    The Ranch Restaurant (family-owned, not a chain) in Rochester, Minnesota offered a splendid salad bar. In addition to the conventional fare (greens, onions, tomatoes, peppers, etc.), there were some items that were distinctly regional: herring in wine sauce, baked beans, cherry jello topped with whipped cream, chocolate pudding and also Watergate Salad.

    Watergate Salad, new to me I must confess, is a melange of pistachio pie filling, mini-marshmallows, canned pineapple chunks (with syrup), pecans, and Cool-Whip. Here's a question for those who are expert in Minnesotan fine dining: is your Watergate Salad best eaten with or without herring?

    Our waiter at The Ranch, asked whether the tomato soup was prepared with cream, replied, "It's a tomato biscuit with peas and stuff in it." He was slightly off the mark: lots of stuff in the bisque but alas no peas. 

  • Why I Hate Machines

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

  • Clean Deer

    That most malicious of all living creatures, the white-tailed deer, has been destroying the phlox. Also the roses, the blueberries, the plums, the hollyhocks (tender new leaves only), the day lilies, and most particularly, the precious new apple trees. They've weakened the Wealthy, noshed the Norland and bonsaied the Baldwin. My friends and neighbors suggest various remedies. Eight-foot high fences is the consensus — although occasionally, allowed a running start, the deer are able to leap even these. But do I want an unsightly eight-foot fence around my garden and orchard? Let's consider some other wisdome of the ffolke.

    Should I buy human hair from the local barber and hang bags of it around the orchard? I don't think so — far too voodooish for a post-Enlightenment gardener such as myself. I could douse the grounds in coyote urine, though I'm not sure that I want to milk a coyote — or, a fortiori, a mountain lion. I know one kind of urine that doesn't repel deer  — at least when anecdotally applied. Some folk, more determined than I could ever be, soak rags in human urine and ring the garden with them, but I suspect that I would not savor either the administration or the aesthetic repercussions of this method. A strong solution of garlic might work, but it's deer I want to repel, not vampires. A spray of peppermint seems like a more pleasant choice, but apparently it must be renewed after every rainfall, which is highly impractical in our moisture-abundant climate. A recipe of a slightly beaten egg mixed with a gallon of water is claimed to be effective, but must be applied nightly — too much cookery for me. Some people claim that moth balls repel deer, but the same people claimed that moth balls would repel raccoons. My raccoons took the moth balls for marbles and made a game of them and of me. Decaying fish heads would no doubt repel deer, but they'd also repel bees, birds, friends, and family. Even if I could procure them ("I'll have a couple of pounds of decaying fish heads, please"), do I really want to sit, contemplative, in a garden of such stinkiness?

    Besides, I don't believe in these superstitions. I want data. I want double-blind experiments. I want science. 

    My sister, who lives in prime white-tail country, hangs bars of Ivory soap in her apple trees. It works, she says. Not credible, not scientific, say I. But last week we visited her, and there they were, a half-dozen or so thriving young apple trees. Not a nibble on a one of them. New growth allowed to be new growth.

    Hers are New Hampshire deer. I bet that our Vermont deer will sniff the soap, chortle, and proceed to bathe face and hoofs. We'll soon have the cleanest deer in all creation.

    In desperation, I've joined the ranks of the credulous. I've threaded Ivory soap with baling twin and hung a cake on each of the young apples. White rectangular scarecrows. But for the first time all summer, I'm seeing new growth. This could work. 

    One of my neighbors says, "No, no, don't use Ivory soap — use Irish Spring."

  • A Exceedingly Weird Dream

    Aficionados of this blague know that I'm directionally disabled. I don't think that I've admitted that I suffer from frequent nightmares in which I'm totally lost in a strange city or building. 

    Last night I experienced another such dysgeographical dream. I was trying to walk north in some unidentifiable but mysterious city. A large building, which seemed to me to be a junior high school, blocked my path. I decided to cut through the building and continue on my way. I traversed various confusing corridors and staircases until I was satisfied that I was about to exit the correct door (one of many). But I couldn't get out because there were wires (which looked like electric fencing for animals) strung across the doorway. I attempted door after door and each one was wired — chicken wire, barbed wire, all sorts of stuff. I started to panic, as I often do in such dreams. 

    At last I decided to force my way through one of the doors. I tangled myself in various wires which had somehow metamorphosed into thick chains. The chains rattled loudly and I said to myself that someone would hear them  –  it was as though I was back in school and had gotten myself into deep trouble with the principal. And sure enough, along came a guy who seemed to be either a janitor or a detective. He was speaking rapid Spanish and I couldn't understand him. Although I begged him, he would not untangle me. I cried out, "I'm  tired of this basura (basura is the word for garbage in Spanish, which happens to be a language I've never studied and don't know). I shouted, "With basura, with basura."  And then I thought, wow, the phrase "with basura" could be used as the basis of a parody of Ezra Pound's Canto XLV, "With Usura:" ("With usura hath no man a house of good stone/ each block cut smooth and well fitting/ that delight might cover their face" etc. etc.)   A person could substitute the word "basura" for the similar sounding "usura" and make good fun of Uncle Ez's economic theories — theories which are in fact nothing more than a great big load of reactionary pseudo-medieval poppy-and-lily trash. Inspired, I decided to wake up and get to work on the poem, but I wasn't alert more than a few seconds before I came to the realization that the great world is probably not exactly aching for a parody of Pound's Canto XLV.  Even an exceedinglyl clever parody.

  • The Absence of the Elms

    When we arrived here, in the summer of 1968, there were so many huge old dying elms that we jokingly referred to the place as "Dead Elm Farm." One by one every single elm succumbed to the virus. Bare and leafless, they dropped their branches and then stood as barkless pillars until rot or a windstorm toppled them. For many years there were young elms around, but as soon as they grew to twenty or so feet, the disease would take hold. There are still a few adolescent elm skeletons, but they're harder and harder to find. 

    We have some slippery elms and an occasional water elm, but the good old American elm, a prominent feature of our landscape for several hundred million years down to this present moment, is virtually extinct. 

    Am I a member of the last generation on earth to marvel at the majesty of these great trees?  Sure the landscape is still rich — maples, oaks, birches both white and yellow, beeches, spruce, pine, fir, hemlock, the big-toothed aspen, a cottonwood or two, cedars and our most plentiful wetlands inhabitant, the deciduous conifer variously called the hackmatack or tamarack or larch (in taxonomists' parlance, the larchy larch, larix laricina).  But I grieve for the elms. Their absence makes a space in my mental landscape. 

    I don't, of course, long for the American chestnut, which was gone for fifty years when I came on the stage. Just as my descendants won't notice the absence of the elms.

    Not far from the house an old elm has coppiced in an awkward place, and it needs to be removed. It's ugly — twenty or so stems ten or twelve feet high racing for the sun. It should go. But I imagine that I'll leave the best of the shoots and hope that it will thrive. It would be almost criminal to saw down the last lonely elm. There's always the one-in-a-million chance that this unhandsome specimen will prove to be virus-immune. Wouldn't that be something?   

  • Bring Me the Head of Alberto Gonzales

    It's public knowledge that Bush recently underwent a colonoscopy, but the doctors' reports have not been widely disseminated. It appears that, in addition to the polyps, way up high, lodged against the pyloric sphincter, was found the entire head of Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales. Until this discovery, it was not generally known that Gonzales' head was missing; according to received Washington wisdom, it was only his brains. A second smaller mass, puzzling at first, has now been definitively identified as the nose of Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn).

    (August 16)  Spike Schapiro adds: "Not the whole story. Bush's head was also found in there. It had been missing since late in his last term as Texas Governor." 

  • Christopher Marlowe’s Shoes

    At age seventeen, awash in hormones, I took a serious shine to the sensuous words with which, in Marlowe's play, Faustus addresses Helen of Troy. 

    Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air
    Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
    Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
    When he appeared to hapless Semele;
    More lovely than the monarch of the sky
    In wanton Arethusa's azured arms.

    Just a bit more polished and glorious than what I myself could devise in the way of compliment, the outer limit of which was "you're looking kinda nice."

    No wonder I was impressed. Marlowe was, and still is, a young person's poet. Ageless because he was murdered at age 29, he was flamboyant, unsubtle, and hyperbolic beyond any ordinary hyperbole. And above all, musical. "Wanton Arethusa's azured arms?" "Azured" only because the unusual adjective jauntily reinforces the timbre of  "Arethusa."  In actual fact, even the most alluring of female arms aren't blue –unless they are bruised, which Marlowe surely did not mean to imply). "Wanton?"  In the story, Arethusa was chaste and preserved herself from the approach not of the monarch of the skies, but of the minor river-god Alpheus. Marlowe could trample on visual accuracy and learned tradition. But who could grudge him when the outcome was sonic delight. Nor did it seem to matter that Helen was compared not to a female goddess (many were available) but to Jove himself. And so I toted Tucker Brooke's old-spelling edition of Marlowe's works to my 1950s summer job, hoping and pretending that the poet's escapist rhythms could put a little shine into the grim warehouse where I earned my pittance.

    I've just read a new biography of Christopher Marlowe. It's Park Honan's Christopher Marlowe, Poet and Spy (Oxford, 2005). It's a good but not great book. It's a revelation how much new information has come to light in the last fifty years  — not so much about Marlowe himself as about his co-workers in the espionage business. Honan attends to Marlowe's plays, but he's clearly more interested in spying and in the Elizabethan political milieu. He repeatedly employs such formulas as "Marlowe could not help think… or "Marlowe must have felt…" in order to lace public events to the poet's putative consciousness. It's a doubtful procedure, but I suppose justified by the paucity of direct biographical evidence. Honan is diligent in accumulating information but his writing is careless and his interpretation of the plays hardly more than slapdash. 

    It's no secret that Christopher Marlowe, son of a mere shoemaker, wrote obsessively about men of lowly origin who achieve greatness. Faustus was (in Marlowe's version only) "base of stock," Gaveston a commoner who attends a king, and most notably Tamburlaine a simple shepherd who sets his foot on a large slice of the Asian steppe. Honan thinks that Marlowe was ashamed of his father's trade, and adduces as evidence the fact that the playwright "never uses words such as shoe, shoemaker, or sole but distances himself from his father's concerns. At the various times when he refers to leather, or boots, the allusions are oddly repulsive: 'Covetousness: begotten of an old churl in a leather bag,' 'a worm eaten leathern targets,' 'As if he had meant to clean my boots with his lips,' 'our boots which lie foul upon our hands.'"  Such lines, according to Honan, "suggest hatred" of the cobbler's work.

    Perhaps, but not the whole story. In Tamburlaine, when the Scythian shepherd woos Zenocrate, his seduction technique is to pile gifts at her feet. "A hundred Tartars shall attend on thee/ Mounted on steeds, swifter than Pegasus./  Thy garments shall be made of Medean silk,/ Enchast with precious jewels of mine own./ With milk-white harts upon an ivory sled,/ Thou shalt be drawn amidst the frozen pools,/ And scale the icy mountains lofty tops." And on, and on — Marlowe, bless his enthusiastic heart, was never embarrassed by excess. No shoes in the royal dowry?  But wait. There's also Marlowe's best known poem, the "passionate shepherd to his love." The Arcadian shepherd, following at the heels of the Scythian, also offers a long list of gifts to his beloved.

    I will make thee beds of roses

    And a thousand fragrant posies,

    A cap of flowers, and a kirtle

    Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.

    A gown made of the finest wool

    Which from our pretty lambs we pull,

    Fair linèd slippers for the cold,

    With buckles of the purest gold.

    "Fair-lined slippers for the cold,/ With buckles of the purest gold!!"   Not your ordinary, trudging-around-Canterbury-in-the-mud shoes, but footwear nevertheless. When he wrote these lines, "Marlowe could not help think" — to use the formula of biographers — that he had celebrated and ennobled his father's profession. 

    Or so I like to think. Although John Marlowe probably did very little business in the gold-buckle line. 

  • Equines and Ovines

    There are now five horses and about twenty-five sheep pastured on our fields. The horses are Morgans; they're handsome and dignified. They have mucho gravitas and very distinct personalities.  I'm proud to say that we're friends; the horses make a point to trot over and say hello when I'm working nearby. They have big brains (or, at least, room for big brains) and they seem to want to communicate. I sweeten our intimacy with windfall apples. My relationship with the sheep is less satisfactory. Frankly, we're not on the same wavelength. Today I was cutting some brush (mostly beaked hazelnut and red maple) on the other side of the pond right against the sheep fence. Because I know that sheep take a gourmet interest in leaves of any sort (although we keep them away from lilac and wilted cherry), I carried a stack of branches out into the field. The sheep were interested but wary. Finally, one of the lambs (Braveheart, let's call him) sidled up to the pile and pulled on a leaf — at which point the whole stack moved an inch or two. The entire flock started and immediately skedaddled back home.

    The sheep are Scottish Blackfaces. My neighbor Ed, who owns them, claims that Scottish Blackfaces are the smartest of all ovines. Talk about damning-with-extra-faint-praise. Here's how utterly brilliant sheep can be. There are two gates right next to each other to a second pasture. One of the gates is for the horses and one is for the sheep. The sheep gate is nothing more than a few boards tacked together to make a space 4 feet high and 4 feet wide — just large enough so that the sheep can slip through but the horses can't. The gate for the horses must be 12 or 14 feet across. It's metal and it rests on a hefty pair of hinges. Sometimes it's left open to allow the horses access to the field. But even when it's wide open, the sheep don't use it. Instead, they line up single file at their own little gate and wait their turn. Not a one of them, even Braveheart, has the sense to look around and notice that the main thoroughfare is available to anyone who wants to show a little initiative.

    The horses are organized. Gillian, who's a twenty-something-year old mare, is the boss. Gabe, an ex-boy, is at the bottom. In between, the two young chestnut mares and a newly gelded bay struggle for status. In social terms, the sheep are a horse of another color. If there's a system to the society of sheep, I've not been able to discern it. It's all random Brownian movement. I asked Ed, who knows his sheep and has kept them for many years, if he'd ever been able to discover the structure of ovine social life. "Near as I can figure out," he answered, "one of them gets it in his head to go somewhere, and the rest follow."   

    Horses are noble; sheep are amusing but duller than Charles B., who was twice left back in first grade in P. S. 217, and duller also than my long-time colleague Joel S. 

    Whose idea was it, do you think, to placate the gods by sacrificing sheep?  Were our ancestors trying to pull the wool over their deities' eyes?  Were they being deliberately disrespectful?  What sort of offering is a sheep?

    "Here, sir god, I'll kill you a sheep. It's enough. What would you want with a horse?"

  • Summers at Sears Rosebush

    I worked for Sears, Roebuck and Company at its warehouse on Utica Avenue during the summers of 1957, 1958 and 1959. The job lasted for ten or twelve weeks each year and I was paid $1.25 an hour for the first two summers and then was catapulted to $1.30 for the third. At 40 hours a week, I could, in theory, earn $50 a week and take home $40, but Sears managed to calculate it so that I had worked 39 hours or 38.5 hours. Always less than forty. I was routinely baffled and disappointed by my pay envelope. I'm utterly convinced that the time clock was rigged, but there was no one to whom to protest, and if I had made a fuss, I wouldn't have won my case anyway. No one did. (It might seem frivolous to worry about a few cents, but cents mattered a lot more in the 50s than they do now. Ten weeks at $40 amounts to $400. When I entered Cornell in 1956, tuition cost $450 a semester and a half of a double room in the dorm for the year was $315. At college, I survived on chocolate malts ($.25), hamburgers ($.25), and an occasional celebratory cheeseburger ($.30).)

    At the Sears warehouse, my job was to pinch hit for people who were absent for their annual two-week vacations. I performed a variety of services of which I have clear memories of just two. I was a substitute "receiver" on the loading dock where I kept records of railroad cars and tried to minimize "dunnage." A second job: I operated the manual telephone switchboard, inserting jacks into receptacles in order to complete a connection; it's stunning to remember that such equipment, now seen in old black-and-white movies and found only in museums of early technology, was still in wide use. I can't remember my other jobs, except that each one took about two hours to learn, was interesting for a day, but stupefyingly boring for the remainder of the two-week stint. I developed real sympathy for the people who were Sears lifers. What a test of will to come to work every day, year in and year out, to the tedious rote dehumanizing employment that the warehouse provided! Job satisfaction? I doubt that anyone, employee or employer, had stumbled upon such a concept, let alone given it an instant's thought.

    The warehouse stocked "big-ticket" items: washing machines, dryers, and reefers (refrigerators). Day one: sales orders were sorted and routed; day two: goods were pulled and lined up on the dock in the reverse of the order in which they would be delivered; day three: items were loaded onto trucks and sent out to various Brooklyn neighborhoods. The system worked well but there were always crises when a particular model in a particular color wasn't available. It might be impossible for this generation of youth to believe, but in those pre-civil rights years Sears didn't sell refrigerators at a fixed rate. Salesmen (at the main store on Flatbush Avenue) received 11% of the negotiated price on an item and therefore had an incentive to set the figure as high as possible. It quickly became evident to me that there was a pattern: the poorer the neighborhood, the higher the sale price. Moreover, 99% of big-ticket items were purchased on time. The obvious corollary: the poorer the neighborhood, the higher the negotiated rate of interest. Prices and interest were most outrageous in Bedford-Stuyvesant, at that time — and perhaps now — Brooklyn's Harlem. Occasionally I'd see a repossessed used model (no cardboard carton) on the loading dock. It was to be delivered as if new to Bed-Stuy. When I questioned the practice, I was told, very definitively, "Who's going to believe them?" Working for Sears was, in a word that had not yet come into existence, "radicalizing."

    The warehouse was a Staszewski-Sullivan stronghold. No Italians, no Jews, no "Negroes." Well, actually, there was one African-American, but he was assigned to a broom rather than to a forklift. I didn't make any friends at the warehouse (I was chronically, disablingly shy), and although I was fearful that I might be ostracized as a "college kid," I was treated not unkindly. I suspect that my paltry wage made me an object of pity.

    An embarrassing moment: Sears held a sale on cheap, shiny suits. They sold so many that I was called to the main store to help fold and pack. Even today I'm a hopelessly inadequate folder and packer. It was a nightmare. After watching me fumble for a few moments, the wives would snatch the suit impatiently from my hands. "Here, sonny, let me do that."

    A good moment: I was on the ROR desk for a week or so. ROR stood for "record of return." When a refrigerator or washer came back, Sears didn't reimburse the purchase price until the ROR had been cleared. One day, bored, trying to kill some time, I was searching the desk to which I had been temporarily assigned. Stuck behind a drawer I found a misplaced three-or-four-year-old ROR, unprocessed. I called the telephone number on the ticket and asked the woman who answered if she'd ever been reimbursed for the refrigerator she had returned — $350 or so. There was a long silence. Then the woman broke into tears and into fervent thanks. "I've been trying to get my money back from Sears for years. I've tried everything. I can't get anyone to believe me." I arranged to have the money sent to her and I felt that I had done a good deed. Not much satisfaction for three summers of employment, but something.

    The principal result of doing my time at Sears: a decision to give a wide berth to the much revered "corporate sector." It's a decision that I've never regretted, not for a moment.

  • Good News for the Directionally Impaired

    I've been indoctrinated by our uncomprehending society to regard my geographical dyslexia, or my directional disability, or whatever it's to be called, as a shameful condition. So it's good to know that DD can be otherwise valued.

    I've been informed by one of my readers that the Pilipino word ligaw has two meanings: a) courtship, and b) totally lost. As a result, the adjective ligawan can refer either to a person who has no sense of direction, or to someone who is especially attractive to suitors. It stands to reason that a person who has absolutely no awareness of direction (right or left, east or west) whatsoever and is constantly buffaloed and flabbergasted by the well-meaning instructions of friends and would-be guides must be extremely radiant, perhaps even charismatically magnetic.   

    I find this new information to be both highly probable and extremely consoling. 

    Moreover, my admiration for Pilipino language and culture and good sense has skyrocketed. 

    I therefore propose that the term "geographical dyslexia" be replaced by "ligawan." 

    From this moment on, there's a new order to the universe: to be hopelessly dysgeographical, hopelessly lost is now, officially, sexy. 

  • My Life in Periodicals

    When I was seven or eight years old, I was given a subscription (by whom?) to a children's magazine (which one?) Was it my older brother who said, "you still reading that magazine for babies?" Always susceptible to public criticism, I soon lost interest in the publication. Since then, I've subscribed and unsubscribed to dozens of periodicals. Here are some that I remember. In my teens, Mad Magazine, of which I was a serious enthusiast, and had been since Mad's Harvey Kurtzman comic book days. Also, Sport Magazine — a precursor of SI. And various pulp sci fi mags — Astounding Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction and probably others that came and went. In the '60s, political magazines: The Reporter, The Nation, and before it went totally wrong, The New Republic. A decade later, Local Population Studies, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, The Psychohistorical Review, The History of Childhood Quarterly. When I became serious about Shakespeare, I was an assiduous collector of the Shakespeare Quarterly and the Shakespeare Newsletter and Shakespeare Research and Opportunities and the Shakespeare on Film Newsletter. Closely related: English Literary Renaissance and the George Herbert Journal (of which I at one time owned every issue). In the '70s or '80s, Organic Gardening (sample title — "How We Grew Papayas on our Vermont Hillside Using Organic Methods and Faith in God"); later, Fine Gardening (sample title: "How We Converted a Defunct Brewery into an Extremely Expensive Bed-and-Breakfast Complete with a Replica of an 18th-century Capability Brown Landscape"). At various times: Scientific American, Science News, Bluebirds Across Vermont, the newsletter of the Southern Vermont Dairy Goat Association, One Two Three Four (a magazine briefly in existence that concerned itself with the early history of rock and roll), the Atlantic, The Skeptical inquirer. Newspapers: The New York Times, United Opinion (nowadays the Journal-Opinion), Behind the Times, the Daily Camera. Nowadays:  Harvard Magazine, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Northern Forests.

    I'm sure there must be many others that I can no longer recall.   

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