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
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  • Where a Day is Longer than a Year

    A Venusian day, strange to say, is longer than a Venusian year. How can such an apparent paradox be allowed?  It's easy: Venus rotates on its axis once every 243 earth-days, but it revolves around the sun in 225 earth-days. How appallingly counter-intuitive!  If I had any gift at all for thinking in the abstract, I'm sure that I wouldn't find the idea that a day can be longer than a year so disorienting. But I do;  for me, the word "day" has a metaphorical as well as a scientific dimension: "days" are short, "years" are long.  I'm consoled by thinking that my counterpart, a philosophically-handicapped Venusian visiting the earth, would find our speedy days and our disproportionately long year quite incredible. On Venus, the lazy old sun takes 116 days to rise in the west and set in the east (Venus, ever the contrarian, rotates, so to speak, "backwards").  So much for Ovid's swift horses; on Venus, they're all glue and molasses, their forward progress barely perceptible.  There's a mythological corollary that might please the poets. Randy Jupiter would be happy on Venus: the venereal night is truly a megala nux.

    I suppose that the example of Venus teaches us that days and years are not things but concepts. For me, this is a hard lesson. I recognize that it's earthocentric to measure the long Venusian day in terms of earth-days, but I can't seem to reason my way around doing so — the only day that I've ever experienced is 24 hours long and the only year with which I'm familiar has 365 and a bit days. It's alarming to realize how short-sighted it is to assume that a day, a month, a year, tied in, as they are, to astronomical reality are natural, when, in fact, they're only artifacts of our earthly orbit.

    Other measurements of time are less "natural" and therefore even more troublesome.  How entirely arbitrary to divide the day into 24 parts!  Since everything else is going metric, why shouldn't we divide the day into ten or a hundred parts — decidays or centidays?  And minutes and seconds — why sixty of them, when decihours and centihours makes so much more sense?  (The ancients, incidentally, struggled mightily with hours — read all about it here.)  And the week?  No natural reason at all for the week. The Romans, as is well known, were weekless.

    Venus, having no moons, has no months. Mars has two moons — would a Martian calendar, if there were such a thing, have had months, or demi-months, or monthettes, or what?

    When I was a boy, I was a diligent if uncritical reader of science fiction.  In those days, it was not uncommon for entire fanciful Venusian civilizations to rise, peak, and fall and the course of a novel. But in the 1950s, almost no data was available to us about the mysterious planet. Now, I'm afraid, the glamour is long gone. The surface temperature of Venus averages 869F, the atmospheric pressure is 90 times that of the earth, the atmosphere is 97 per cent carbon dioxide and contains no oxygen, and the pretty swirling clouds are entirely composed of hot, concentrated sulfuric acid. It's hardly a place in which an advanced culture would be likely to thrive nor a place from which we would expect much in the way of sophisticated calendrical theory.      

  • Medical Waste

    The Aged Parent, who's ninety-four, received a curious letter from AARP MedicalRX Plans. MedRX is the insurance company that we've chosen to use as part of the Bush drug plan for the old folks. In point of fact, the benefit hasn't been very significant, especially since we fell into the infamous "donut hole."  We pay AARP MedRX monthly by means of deductions from the Aged P's social security check.

    The AARP letter to which I refer was neither cordial nor pleasant. It said this: "Our records show that you owe $108.00 for your AARP MedicalRX Plan premium.  This outstanding amount is for premiums due before you changed your payment method to automatic deduction from your social security check."  The letter also included a threat:  "Failure to pay this outstanding balance could result in the cancellation of your coverage."

    I immediately suspected that the AARP claim to a hundred bucks of the Aged P's money was absolutely false.  We initiated payment the very first month that the plan came into effect and we always paid by deduction. There was no possibility that the Aged P was in arrears. So I called AARP MedicalRX Plans to find out the real story. First there was the usual song-and-dance: "If you are calling about… Press 1.  If you are calling about… Press 2."  I pressed all the correct numbers and was put on hold for ten or so minutes. I listened to some crappy elevator music.  At last, a cheery voice.  "This is Anastasia. How can I help you this morning?"   I explained the problem. "May I put you on hold?"  "Sure." More crappy music, interrupted by, "Please continue to hold. Your call is very important to us."  My call was so important that I was told it was important every twenty seconds for another ten minutes. At last, Anastasia returned.  "Do you remember that last summer you received a letter saying that Social Security had sent you $108.08 in error?  Me:  "Yes, I do. I had several letters from Social Security to that effect."  Anastasia.  "Well, the money that Social Security sent to you was supposed to have been sent to us at AARP Rx.  It was accidentally mailed to you." "I remember.  But then I wrote a check to Social Security. I returned the $108.08 to them as they requested."  Anastasia:  "Well, what happened is that Social Security never sent the money to us." Me:  "So then your quarrel isn't with me. It's with Social Security." Anastasia:  "Exactly right. We're trying to get the money from Social Security. It's been a major confusion. We've been working on it for months."  Me:  "So then I don't owe you any money at all."  Anastasia: "No, you don't.  Just ignore the letter."  Me:  "Ignore the letter?  Why would you send a letter to me that you expect me to ignore?  Why am I wasting my time trying to figure out what your threatening letter is supposed to mean?"  Anastasia:  "Well, you're not alone. We've sent out over a million of these letters."  Me (somewhat exasperated now):  "You've sent a million letters that you know are erroneous and misleading.  You've threatened a million old people with loss of insurance coverage. Why?"  Anastasia:  "It's because the computer is programmed to automatically send out letters when there's a premium that hasn't been paid."  Me: "Why can't you reprogram the computer. How hard can it be?  I'm sure it would be a lot cheaper than sending out a million letters. And then you wouldn't have to deal with hundreds of thousands of telephone complaints." Anastasia (testily):  "Sir, I'm not in charge of the computers."  Me:  "Tell me, what do you do about the old people who don't understand your letter but figure they'd better pay you or they'll lose their coverage?  Do you return their checks?"  Anastasia.  "I don't know.  That's not my department."  Me:  "Thank you very much.  It's been a gigantic pleasure talking with you."  Anastasia.  "Is there anything else we can help you with today."  Me:  "Can't think of thing."  Anastasia:  "Have a nice day."

    February 2. Later, I tried to decide whether AARP Medical RX is incompetent or corrupt. It's a tough call. On the side of corruption: if they sent out a million letters and received $100 from 10% of the recipients, they would have $10,000,000 as, in effect, an interest free loan. But in theory they'd have to return the money eventually.  While there would be administrative costs, it would still be a profitable gamble. On the side of incompetence:  It probably costs a dollar to print and mail a letter, so AARP has already wasted one million dollars and will squander more on time spent trying to repair the damage. That's a lot of misspent effort.  So I lean toward incompetence.  However, if in the end AARP retains the money from the old folks and also keeps the money from social security, then there would be no question but that it's conscienceless malfeasance. 

  • The All-Johnson Team

    Here's the eagerly-awaited all-Johnson NBA team:  Magic, Marques, Kevin, Dennis, Gus.  Everyone knows the first four, but only those with a few years on their backs will recall Gus Johnson, who averaged 17 points a game and 13 rebounds in nine season with Baltimore.  Johnsons in reserve:  Vinnie ("the Microwave"), Larry, Joe, Avery.  There's not a last name that can compete (there are 49 NBA Johnsons to choose from, including the three Eddies and the three Georges).

    I would lay odds that the Johnsons would easily defeat the Williamses (though not in depth — 54 Williamses played in the league).  The all-Williams team:  Gus, Aaron, Buck, Walt, Deron, Jason, Herb.  All of them role players — no real stars in the group.  What about the 53 Smiths?  Could they compete with the Johnsons.  I don't think so:  Elmore, Adrian, Joe, Kenny, and all three Charleses (subsumed into one mega-Charles) could play, but they'd be better if the rules allowed them to use Rik Smits at center.  Who else?  The Millers — not much there beyond Reggie. The Joneses:  Caldwell, Bobby, Sam, K.C., Eddie, Popeye — good but not in the same league as the Johnsons.  It's Magic and the guys by a landslide.  Anyone out there with other suggestions?  Search here for the data. 

  • Notes on Interspecies Sexuality

    Readers might be tempted to disbelieve the outrageous silliness that follows, but here it is, exactly as it appeared in the newspaper.  If you don't believe me, check for yourself. 

    DEAR ABBY: Am I a "sicko" because I step out of the shower naked in front of our dog? My wife, Amy, thinks so. The trouble started when we got a female dog, "Taffy," from the local animal shelter. Taffy sleeps in our bedroom and is there in the morning when I take my shower. Amy insists that I cover up in front of the dog and that Taffy is no different from a child. This has created a lot of stress between us because, to me, a dog is a dog. Is it wrong to be naked in front of a dog? — SCOTT IN NEW JERSEY

    How even to begin?  My immediate thought was to take the opportunity afforded by ABBY and Scott and Amy to make some jokes. E.g., is it wrong to be naked in front of a dog?  Depends on the dog's attitude toward sexuality and gender. Depends on whether it's the kind of dog who likes to worry a bone. Depends on whether it's a hairy or a hairless dog. And also: would it matter if the dog is gay?  Or male?  How does Amy feel about Taffy eyeballing her?  Would Tuffy be granted the same privilege?  Does Taffy spend extra time licking her genitalia after getting a full frontal view of Scott? Etc. Lots of opportunities for bad humor. In addition to the jokes, I thought that I might also write a few serious sentences about sentimentality toward animals. And also about flagrant anthropomorphism — I'm deeply troubled when someone proclaims that a dog is "no different from a child."

    I wrote an e-mail to confidants asking for help, thinking that they might provide me with some one-liners. One of the answers that I received came from my old friend Spike Schapiro, who, diligent readers will remember, wrote to me a couple of days ago on the subject of marriage and animals (see the entry for January 21 titled "Marriage Advice). Spike got himself a little bent out of shape by DEAR ABBY, but I must admit that he took the plight of Scott and Amy much more seriously than I did.  Here's a excerpt from Spike's response: 

    "The trouble began when we got a female dog, Taffy." No, Scott, the trouble didn't begin when you brought home the little bitch.The trouble began long before that. It all started when Amy was a child and her neo-Victorian God-fearing parents, who more than likely had sex once and only once, and then only to fulfill a legal requirement, found their daughter frolicking clothesless and with a hand "down there" and patiently and sensitively explained to her that the great Jehovah would wither her finger if her naked skin ever saw the sun again. Amy's been in a psychological twist ever since. And Scott  — why the heck do you bother writing to ABBY?  You must know the score. Your wife is a total nutball. She's nuts about animals, nuts about nakedness, nuts about sex  — which, I guarantee, you're not getting a lot of. Think seriously whether you want to stay in this relationship. Amy — get a hold of yourself before it's too late. If you want to save your marriage, which is now staggering to a nasty conclusion, don't worry about the intimacy of Scott and Taffy. Throw Taffy and your dancing hyena and the fool baboon out of the window. Worry about Scott and Amy.  Exercise your buccinatory muscles. Learn how to make winky-winky. Unlearn everything that you learned from your parents. Take off your clothes and look at yourself in the mirror.  Grow up."

    I guess I see Spike's point.  I think, though, that he's confused this Amy and Scott with the Amy who wrote about training her husband Scott in the well-known NYT article. Although, come to think of it, they could be the same couple.

    In any case, I think that Spike could have made the same point a little more gently. I've edited out some of his harsher adjectives.    

  • Marriage Advice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    January 23.  Today I received an e-mail from my old friend Spike Schapiro. Spike says, "How come Amy and Scott have been married for twelve years and don't have any children. I'll tell you why. Because Amy doesn't want kids who would leave their toys in her kitchen or leave their clothes in the bathroom. She's quite a piece of work, isn't she?"

  • My Predictions for 2007

    I've been staring into my crystal ball, sorting through chicken bones, tea leaves and the Tarot cards, observing the flights of birds, inspecting the entrails of sacrificed animals, and diddling with the Ouija board. Now I'm ready. Here are my widely-anticipated predictions for the year 2007.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    7)  there will be fluctuations in the stock market, and, finally,

    8)  there will be turmoil in the Middle East.

    There it is right on the page in black and white. No taking it back now. Eight major predictions. I know that I'm going way out on the proverbial limb, but I feel confident — not vain or proud, mind you — of my abilities as a forecaster. Let's all remember to check back at the end of the year and see how well I've performed.  If I come through, I'll rank up there with the true greats of the prognosticating game: John the Revelator, Nostradamus, the National Enquirer, and Pat Robertson.

  • Too Many Fouls, Too Many Timeouts

    Our local basketball team is in the Big 12. We're far from the best team in the league, but the Big 12 is a major conference and as a consequence we have the opportunity to see some well-played, exciting games and also a goodly number of excellent young players. Great athletes appear regularly, mostly, I must confess, on opposing teams, but we've sent a number of guys on to the NBA, including Scott Wedman, Jay Humphries and Chauncey Billups. Last week the U of Texas brought in a freshman named Kevin Durant. Remember the name — he's going to cut quite a swathe in the NBA. I'm a fan; I've gone to almost every home game for twenty-five years or more. At its best, basketball is the most beautiful of team sports. But I have some serious bones to pick about the way the colleges play the game nowadays. Here are two of these many bones. 

    a) Time outs.  Every four minutes there's a "media timeout," so that the TV stations, if there are any, can intrude their commercials. Media timeouts have everything to do with money and nothing at all to do with the sport. Media timeouts interrupt the flow. Team A is on a roll; the coach of Team B doesn't have to use one of this allotted legal timeouts to change the dynamics of the situation — he just waits for the scheduled pause. Four extra timeouts in a half, at a minimum of a minute and a half each, add twelve minutes to the length of the game. And because each coach can hoard his legal timeouts, he has them all available at crunch time, which means that the climax of the game is far too frequently interrupted and the final moments become more the coaches' responsibility than the players'. 

    b)  Fouls.  Too many ticky-tack fouls are called. The result — teams are regularly "in the bonus" nine or ten minutes into the half. And into the "double bonus" four or five minutes later. All fouls — offensive fouls, fouls away from the ball, incidental contact — become shooting fouls. The first ten minutes of each half often have a pleasing rhythm, a bit of pace, but the second ten minutes are always stop-and-go; rarely is there a full minute of uninterrupted action. Boring?  You bet. Contests routinely turn into prolonged exhibitions of foul-shooting. A gazelle of a game now hobbled and shackled.

    Our own basketball stadium is at altitude — a mile high, in fact. Our opponents are almost always flatlanders. We should have an advantage because we're better conditioned to play at 5280 feet. But because the games are so long and punctuated by so many timeouts and fouls, our advantage is lost. No twenty-year-old is going to run out of breath when a forty minute game takes two and a half hours to complete.

    Solution: a) no more "media timeouts." Oh yeah, I know, the teams need the money. Well, maybe there would be some revenue from increased attendance if the games were quicker and shorter and more exciting. b) better-trained and better-instructed referees. No bonus shots. No free throws except for fouls in the act of shooting. And teams should always be able to "decline the penalty," as they do in football, and take the ball out of bounds. Then there would be no incentive to foul in order to stop the clock. Take back the game from the coaches and from the referees. Let the young men play.

    Common sense changes, in my carefully considered view, which, if adopted, would make life richer and more satisfying and more aesthetic.         

  • A Remedy for Unhappiness

    Intermittently throughout the decades, I've been afflicted with what has been called, at various times in history, "the spleen," "vapors," "falling into a brown study," "melancholy," "the blues," and currently, "depression." But now I have devised a very effective remedy for this affliction.

    With the help of the Ellis Island Foundation, I located the manifest of the Rotterdam, the ship that arrived in New York on August 23, 1904 and which brought my grandparents to the new world. I purchased and studied a copy of this document. My grandfather, Joseph Uzilewsky, was 27 years old when he arrived and is listed as a "chemist's (i.e. pharmacist's) assistant." My grandmother, Sonia, was 20 and has no profession. Neither of them admitted to being either a polygamist or an anarchist. There's a specific column on the manifest in which each new arrival was required to say how much money he's bringing into the country. Almost all of the immigrants have a few dollars, but Joseph and Sonia have nothing at all. Nothing.

    When I fall into periods of unhappiness, I think about my grandparents arriving here without a nickel in their pockets and unable to speak the language. And then I think of my own position in life. I had a job that allowed me — no, required me — to read as much as possible, and occasionally to write something about what I had read. My principal task was the pleasant and useful one of learning the young 'uns how to read and write. Now I'm retired and someone puts money in my bank account at the beginning of each month. It's not a lot of money, but it's enough to allow me to do whatever I please.   

    I have no reason to think that I'm smarter or more talented than my grandparents  — in fact, everything that I know about genetics leads to the conclusion that they were exactly as gifted as I. No question but that I've been a heckuva lot luckier. I could have spent my entire lifetime rolling cigars in a hot, airless back-room-behind-the-store, as my grandfather did.

    I keep the Rotterdam manifest under the glass on my desk. When I start to feel gloomy, I force myself to take another look. I don't dare allow myself to succumb to depression. How justly would my grandparents have scorned the mopings and the woe-is-mes of someone so privileged as I have been. 

  • More on King Solomon’s Mines

    I received the following note from Marion Morrison, who is an associate professor of English at the University of Iowa. It was written in response to my entry a few days ago concerning H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. I'm extremely grateful to Professor Morrison for taking the time to comment on my observations. 

    "Dear Dr. Metablog:

    I detect the subtextual presence of mutually imbricated and conterminous forces in your multichronotopic problematizing of King Solomon's Minds. The indigenous woman, Foulani, living in a no (wo)man's land where the colonialist gaze dissects racialized gendering, foregrounds the elusive intersectionalities present in the semiological narratology of deconstructive post-structuralism. It is only by scrutinizing the poetics of diasporic displacement that we can contest the epiphenomenological echo of (hetero)masculinist discourse from a gendered perspective, which, if I understand your insufficiently theorized analysis, you have vainly tried to do. Such (re)mapping of knowledge, even when employing a single-axis feminist theory, unpacks syncretism and hybridity and at the same time denaturalizes doxa rooted in phallocentric epistemologies. But, you ask, what about the reproduction of alterity through a highly policed matrix of conceptual checkpoints?  The answer is simple: any binarist recontextualizing across multiple terrains adds a metadiscursive dimension to the polysemic site and leads to aporias of nationalist cartographies of knowledge, as is crystal clear in the case of Rider Haggard. Without otherizing the conceptual spaces opened up by postcolonial hybridity, hermeneutical nihilism would dismantle palimpsestic textuality — and you know what that might lead to. A meta-analysis of King Solomon's Wives — a textual situation in which there are multiple hegominid discourses as well as the potential for co-implicatedness — could rupture various subaltern geographic positionalities (but only in a translinguistic sense).

    As I'm sure you understand, these comments are written under the sign of the plural."

    January 10.  Today I received another communication from Professor Morrison.  It's a bit angry, so I won't quote it all, but here are the relevant sentences.

    "Dear Dr. Metablog, or Vivian, or whatever you call yourself:

    When you typed my comments into your blog, you clumsily erred. I certainly did not write "hermeneutical nihilism would dismantle palimpsestic textuality"; it's obvious that I wrote "hermeneutical nihilism would not dismantle palimpsestic textuality."  Leaving out the "not" makes a mockery of my argument and renders it virtually unintelligible. You owe me and your readers an apology." 

    Yours,

    Marion Morrison, Ph. D."

    Gosh, Professor Morrison. My bad. I don't know what I could have been thinking.

  • The Lord and the Shopaholic

    Thoughts about Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis's fraud of a preacher, were still reverberating in my brain when I read in The New York Times the outrageous stranger-than-fiction story about the "nationally renowned evangelical preacher," Darlene Bishop. Reverend Bishop, who pastors the 4000-member Solid Rock Church in Monroe, Indiana, and has a famous-in-certain-circles TV program, apparently convinced her wealthy songwriter brother that she could miraculously cure his throat cancer. She failed to do so, he died a painful death, and now the dead brother's children are suing to reclaim a share of the estate which Darlene somehow contrived to inherit. It's a Gantryesque tale — though one that's more sordid than even Sinclair Lewis, who hated demagogic religiosity with a rare passion, could possibly have invented.

    I was sufficiently intrigued by The Times' story to visit Darlene Bishop's website, where she's posted a spiritual autobiography of sorts.  Here's the crucial paragraph:   

    Being that Darlene was raised so poor she began to try to fill the void inside of her with shopping. She bought 2 Cadillacs and 18 fur coats in one year. Finally, one day she came in from a shopping excursion and as she pulled out all the dresses to show her eldest daughter, Jana pointed to one and stated, "Mom you already have that dress." Sure of herself, she replied, "Oh, no I don't." So Jana led her upstairs to her closet and dug the dress out from the collection of many only for Darlene to find that she did already have one of the dresses hanging there with the tags still attached. At this, she realized it was not working. The big house, the diamonds, fur coats, collections of designer clothes, none of it was filling the emptiness residing in her inner most being. She threw herself on the floor sobbing and declared, "Lord, I want more of you! I just want you. And I'm going to seek you until I find my true place in the kingdom."  From then on, instead of going shopping Darlene would delve into the Word of God.

    I read Darlene's conversion narrative with conflicting feelings. On the one hand, it exudes authenticity. It's so unapologetic and downright and un-literary that it can't possible be contrived. On the other hand, it's appallingly trite. Darlene doesn't experience the "dark night of the soul"; instead, she shops. She doesn't go through a spiritual crisis; she discovers that she's bought the same dress twice. Nor is she overwhelmed with the beauty and majesty of the Lord. "Instead of going shopping Darlene would delve into the Word of God"; that is to say, and I don't mean to be snide, she started to shop at a bigger and better mall. In a way, her very triteness serves as a guarantee of her authenticity. 

    Darlene's story also reminded me, once again, that I'm just not on the same wavelength as many of my fellow Americans. I don't think that either shopping or delving can give meaning to life. And yet Darlene Bishop is a celebrity of American religion, who, people believe, can perform miracles.

    And what about Darlene's wonder-working power? In her books and on her website, she claims that she cured her own breast cancer. Did she?  I'm skeptical. According to The Times, when Darlene was on the stand testifying under penalty of perjury, she confessed that "no doctor ever diagnosed the breast cancer." Instead, "she thought that she had cancer in 1986 and that it was cured." Here's a pretty howdy-do. Darlene imagined she had cancer and then imagined that it disappeared — and on such a basis she proclaims a miracle. In my book, that's setting a mighty low threshold for divine intervention. 

    On the website, there's nary a word about her brother's death or about the lawsuit, but there's some fine, excruciating detail about the miracle. Unlike the account of her rampant shopoholia, this story is not one bit credible: it's either delusion or fabrication — and I think the latter.      

    I had been preaching on faith for six weeks, when one night while laying in the bed the devil said to me, "If you don't stop preaching like this, I'll kill you" and without hesitation, I replied, "You're not big enough, devil". He said, "Feel your right breast". When I felt my breast, I felt a lump the size of a silver dollar….  Soon the whole bottom half of my breast became a solid mass. The pain would be so bad some nights that I could only sleep a few minutes at a time. It was as if someone had put hot coals of fire in my breast.

    Let's get this straight. Darlene experienced hot coal pain in her breast, and didn't take herself to the emergency room. She's not only a fake;  she's dangerous. What sort of example does she set to the Solid Rock congregants (and to her readers and her TV-watchers)?  "Let's pause here for a Solid Rock public service announcement: if you experience excruciating pain, under no circumstances consult your physician."

    What should you do for that burning coal feeling?  For pain medicine, I would write down scriptures on little pieces of paper and place them in my bra. 

    Are we to believe that the medieval remedies are still practiced in twentieth-century Indiana?  Egad.

    This went on for nearly four months until eventually my breast began to hemorrhage. I had to put nursing pads in my bra to prevent the blood from coming through my clothes. Some nights I would bleed all night and wake up with my gown and bed sheets covered in blood. Until one day, as I was hunched over the sink, my tears splashing into the bloody water, I heard Him speak my name in an audible voice. He said, "Darlene!"  I rose up and cried, "Yes Lord". He said, "Because you've continued in my Word and not leaned on the arm of the flesh, as of this day you're healed.  Go! Proclaim it! 

    David Hume, whose "On Miracles" is still the definitive analysis, says that when we evaluate a supposed miracle, we discount the testimony of a person "who has an interest in what he affirms." Darlene has built a megachurch and a flourishing business and has inherited her brother's estate on the basis of this supposed cure. Enough said.

    But what about the Solid Rockers?  Can't they see through such palpable nonsense?  Are they mesmerized or stepfordwived?  Is there any hope that they — and other victims of similar hocus-pocus — will some day get their brains in gear again?  Not bloody likely. 

  • What We Read in the Fifties: King Solomon’s Mines

    As an adolescent, I was a passionate enthusiast of novels by Sir Henry Rider Haggard. I read everything that was in the collection of the McDonald Avenue public library. Not only King Solomon's Mines and Allan Quatermain and She and Allan's Wife and Ayesha, but also some of the non-"African" adventures as well. I particularly recall Eric Brighteyes and Montezuma's Daughter.  Yesterday I read King Solomon's Mines (1885) for the first time in fifty years and I couldn't be more unhappy that I did so. It's a toxic mixture of imperialism, brutality, racism, sexism, classism — a compendium of ethnocentric Victoriana gathered into a single atavistic novel.  I'm familiar with the academic doctrine that to judge the past by contemporary liberal values is to commit the fallacy of "presentism," but I'm sorry, friends, I'm mortified that I ever, even as a youngster, could have fallen for this appalling mishmash.  How could I have tolerated the paternalistic Englishmen and the child-like natives?

    Here are two representative incidents from King Solomon's Mines. The first: three Englishman are tramping through Africa. They come upon a herd of elephants. They shoot and kill them. No explanation, no justification, no reason. The second: one of the Englishmen takes a liking to a young woman named Foulata. She dies, sacrificing herself, as is the custom in imperialist fiction, to save English lives. Rider Haggard's  comment: "I consider her removal was a fortunate occurrence, since, otherwise, complications would have been sure to ensue. The poor creature was no ordinary native girl, but a person of great, I had almost said stately, beauty, and of considerable refinement of mind.  But no amount of beauty or refinement could have made an entanglement a desirable occurrence; for, as she herself put it, 'Can the sun mate with the darkness, or the white with the black?'"   

    I shouldn't have tampered with my fifty-year-old memories. But I've made a resolution: I'm going to wait fifty more years before I read another novel by Rider Haggard.    

  • More on Sinclair Lewis

    This blague's readers know that I've been revisiting books that I first read in the 1950s. Last week I reported on Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, which was required reading in junior-year English in Erasmus Hall High School. I re-read Arrowsmith in the very convenient Library of America series, which includes Elmer Gantry and Dodsworth (along with Arrowsmith) in one thick volume.  I felt that I owed it to Lewis (after all, he did win a Nobel prize) to read another of his novels. Elmer Gantry won the toss.

    While Arrowsmith has not worn very well, Elmer G. is uncannily pertinent. It's about an amoral fundamentalist preacher. He's a nasty opportunistic bastard who crusades against vice but maintains a series of mistresses; he's out for notoriety and money no matter what the cost to his parishioners or to American society. He even becomes –and here Lewis is truly prescient — the first radio evangelist. It's a heavy-handed, sloppy, brutally satirical book, but it's also right on target.  I kept waiting for Elmer to be exposed, but the novel ends when he dodges another mistress and sets out on a route to more and more power.  It's a very dark view of the penetration of politics by religion. No wonder it was banned in Boston; even eighty years later, it's much too hot for high school — although I can't imagine a single book that would be more medicinal for pious youth. And now I understand why Arrowsmith was given us to read:  honor the Nobel laureate, but stay as far away as possible from controversy. Dodsworth is about adultery; Main Street attacks American provincialism; Elmer Gantry pillories religion. Arrowsmith is a greatly inferior novel, but it was safer. 

  • My Favorite Inventions – II

    A while ago, I reported on my very favorite innovations of the last half-century  — including such wonders as the retractable vacuum cleaner cord, fitted sheets, duct tape, and the mute button.  I now realize that I was remiss in not celebrating the most revolutionary invention of recent decades — the disposable diaper. 

    I was knuckle-deep in the diaper business from 1965 to about 1973. Cloth was then the material of choice. In our family there were three infants and each one had, roughly speaking, 900 days of diaperhood. Suppose that there were nine changes of diaper a day (a conservative estimate) — that's a total of 24,300 diaper-changes.  Let's say that I personally presided over one-third of those off-with-the-foul-on-with-the-clean exchanges. We're talking more than 8000 excretory experiences. So, dear reader, I know whereof I speak.

    Post-cloth diaper parents live in a world of decadent ease. Here's what they're missing. A) cloth diapers had to be changed more frequently than the new ones — they didn't wick away the liquid as the disposables do. Rashes and irritations were all too common. b) gagworthy solid material had to be carefully flushed away. c)  soiled diapers sat in a waste receptacle, where they generated an ammonia-based chemical one whiff of which could revive a morgueful of corpses. d) cloth diapers had to be washed, dried, and folded for next use. e) diapering with cloth and safety pins was a fine art. Badly-applied diapers hung to the ground to shame the diaperer; open pins and pin-sticks were a constant worry.

    Nowadays, it's pop 'em off, throw it in the trash, pop on a new one. Piece of cake. Perhaps disposable diapers are not ecologically sound  — I don't know. But frankly, I can't think of a better use for the vast Canadian forests.

    But I shouldn't complain too much. We owned an automatic washer and dryer. My mom had the same number of diapers, but she scrubbed them on a washboard in the "laundry sink," put them through the wringer (first a hand-crank, later an electric), and hung them outside to dry. She was a true heroine of diaper labor. And I can't even bring myself to imagine the diaperworld of older generations.

    Today's parents, wallowing in sybaritic luxury, cannot appreciate what it means to be "put through the wringer." And just as well. 

  • O My Papa

    We've had two major snowfalls in the last week and the road crews haven't yet found their way to our street. It's a knee-deep icy mess out there. Yesterday one of my neighbors spun himself into quite a hole. He needed a push, so I went outside to help. Even with my professional-grade ice-chopper, I had to bang around for a while and the task took a lot longer than I had expected.  Eventually, I had to resort to the old towel trick to gain enough traction to release the vehicle. My neighbor said, "I'm embarrassed. You shouldn't be doing this."  Which took me aback, of course. I replied, quite spontaneously, "It's exactly what I should be doing." 

    And then I recalled one of my father's maxims: "Never omit an opportunity to do a favor for a friend, and never be embarrassed to accept a favor."

    The old guy did lots of favors. When someone on East 9 Street had a problem or got into a little trouble, my father acted as consigliere; as far as I know, he never took a nickel for his trouble–though occasionally someone would drop off a compensatory lasagna. In his last years, when he lived alone and his arthritis was very bad, someone mowed his lawn and someone took in his garbage cans and someone raked his leaves.

    My father was the least materialistic person that I've encountered in an entire lifetime. He didn't seem to need possessions. No car, no clothes beyond the absolute minimum, no items of personal adornment. He didn't "shop." I was with him once when bought a new hat: "See this. I want another one just like it." We were in and out of the store in two minutes. 

    Although he lived in a world of weasels (he was a real-estate lawyer), he was uncontaminated by what went on around him. He'd often tell me stories about the various chicaneries by which people cheated each other–and every time he would express the same astonishment at the fallibility of human nature. He knew of public officials who were on the take, but he preferred to talk about the state legislator who had a large sign on his desk that said, "NO GIFTS."

    In one of our very last conversations, I asked him if he himself had ever done anything illegal. He thought for a long time. "I don't know if you'd call this exactly illegal. Do you remember the B—–s?  Rose was a widow and she was dying of cancer, but she didn't know it. She was a teacher with two young children and she had a benefit coming to her from the city. She made a very bad decision–a lump sum instead of an annuity for her children. I went to her school and substituted a new form for the one that she had filed. It was technically a violation and I could have gotten into a lot of trouble." And then he surprised me by quoting some Wordsworth–the lines from Tintern Abbey about the "best portion of a good man's life,/ His little, nameless, unremembered acts/ Of kindness and of love."

    It's hard to believe that he's been dead for twenty years now. But I remember him when we come around to the winter solstice (he was born on December 22, 1904)–and he's especially real to me when a neighbor lets me help him extricate his car from a snowbank. 

  • What We Read in the Fifties: Arrowsmith

    Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, published in 1924 and now hopelessly dated, was a mere thirty years old when we read it in Erasmus Hall High School English classes. I must confess, once again, that I recall almost nothing from my 1950s reading — just a vague sense that I'd been there before. Nevertheless, the novel wasn't a bad book to present to young people. Dr. Martin Arrowsmith is a dedicated, humorless, idealistic, workaholic scientist who eludes both the snares of commerce and also of love and family in a single-minded pursuit of the knowledge that will save lives. Sinclair Lewis's America is repressive, vulgar, materialistic, and unredeemed. Why not let high schoolers read a book with such a manic, satirical spirit?  It might have done them a world of good — though I can't vouch that it did anything for me.

    Dr. Arrowsmith has no time anything so frivolous as aesthetics — and it's just as well, for neither does his creator. Arrowsmith is shapeless in form and crude in style. It's a sledgehammer of a book, as unsubtle as America at its worst. 

    Query: were we informed that Sinclair Lewis was famous for having said that "when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross?"

  • Haircuts: A History

    When I was a child, haircuts were perpetrated at Joe's Barber Shop on Coney Island Avenue. It was a pleasant place: there were wall-to-wall mirrors on either side of Joe Montuori's shop, and a boy sitting in the chair could lose himself in the infinitely-regressing images. Joe always had a friend or two in the shop with whom he spoke incomprehensible rapid-fire Italian. The haircutting itself was an ordeal. Joe charged 75 cents a head, but my mother had driven a bargain: three haircuts (myself and my two brothers) for $1.80. Joe revenged himself on me by a) working the electric buzzer as rapidly as possible, and b) frequently re-arranging the angle of my head with a blow from the heel of his hand. Back home, my mother would sigh and say, "Turn around.  Let's see what he did to you this time."

    I've not big on personal adornment, and, perhaps because of my early hair experiences, I've never been comfortable in the barber's seat. As soon as the cloth is fastened around my neck I feel hogtied and hopeless. "What are they going to do to me today?" Once, on the west side of Manhattan, in the late 1960s, when my hair was rather long (it seems absurd that you could signal your opposition to the war in Vietnam by letting your hair grow, but such was the case), I walked into a shop and asked the barber to "leave it long." He immediately transformed me into a rabid supporter of carpet-bombing. Also in New York: when I naively wandered into a shop with a specialized clientele, a hair technician employing a razor and a variety of gels and lotions turned me into someone whose hair was giving off signals with which the rest of his body was not in accord. In Hanover, New Hampshire, in an upstairs 'salon,' the barber suddenly stopped work, drew back, studied me for fifteen or twenty seconds, and asked, "Are you Jewish." I mumbled something about not really wanting to discuss my ethnicity with him, whereupon he launched into a disquisition of which I understood not much and remember less, except that that it involved prophecy, the Book of Isaiah, and The Hatching of the Egg. He hauled out his heavily annotated King James Version and pointed me to various passages underlined in coded colors. As it happens, I'm more conversant than most people with scripture, and so I can assert with moderate authority that his reading of the Bible was — how shall I say — original. It took me an hour to extricate myself from his insistent and wayward scholarship: fifteen minutes of hair-cutting and forty-five minutes of exegetical enthusiasm.   

    For a decade or so, when our finances were perilous, my wife cut my hair. There were some benefits (a guy could cop a feel while being ministered to) but I must admit that although my good woman was earnest and effective, she never fully mastered tonsorial technique. She had the habit of yanking upwards on the strands with the scissors, with the result that each snip produced a stab of pain — although nothing more intense than might have been alleviated by the injection of a dozen or score shots of novocaine directly into the scalp. And then there were the ear nicks.

    After a while, I returned hair responsibility to the world of commerce. I had success for many years with Liz of Chicago Hair across town. Liz was good at her work and respected my multiple cowlicks. But then she started to raise her prices. When she reached $20, I would just hand her the Visa and ask her not to tell me what she charged. When she went to $30, I retaliated by spacing the haircuts further and further apart in order to keep my annual cost constant. But when she broached the $40 barrier, the puritan in me rebelled. I started to patronize the cheap ($14) barbershop across the street from the college. There's a rotating staff and it's hit-and-miss: sometimes the results are acceptable, sometimes disastrous.   

    When I come home from the expedition, my wife says, "Let's see what they've done to you today."

    And then she sighs. 

  • Frost

    When I lived in Cambridge in the first years of the 1960s, it was not unusual to encounter, on a warm winter afternoon, the poet Robert Frost walking slowly along Massachusetts Avenue. I'd watch him as he strolled over to Plympton Street and to the Grolier — which was then as now, I imagine, the only all-poetry bookstore in America. One day I crept behind him to the shop and sat in a secluded corner, studying him as he browsed the shelf of new arrivals. With his leathery old skin and unruly iridescent white hair, he was an iconic figure — famous not only among friends of poetry but among readers of Life and Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. When he "said" his poems at Sanders Theater (in late 1961 or 1962), he filled every seat and every standpoint of a large auditorium. He was an honest-to-goodness celebrity, a presence, a man who had created a body of work and had earned a reputation that no poet or cultural figure today can rival.

    At JFK's inauguration in January of 1961, Frost commanded a national television audience. He started to read the poem he had composed for the occasion, but his 87-year-old eyes were blinded by the bright sunlight and he couldn't continue. There was a moment of embarrassment, and I remember cringing in sympathy with his struggle. But then he gathered himself and recited from memory, in a rejuvenated voice, "The Gift Outright." "She was our land more than a hundred years/ Before we were her people." It's an almost mystical but grandly patriotic poem about rude, unlettered colonials transforming themselves into a Nation. "Such as we were we gave ourselves outright…/ To the land vaguely realizing westward,/ But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, / Such as she was, such as she would become."

    Frost died in January of 1963, just ten months before our young president was shot. It's almost impossible now to reconstruct the effervescence of the Kennedy years — a brief exciting moment between the lukewarm bland Eisenhower administration and the interminable nightmare of Vietnam. Frost's "Dedication," the poem that he couldn't read at the inaugural, is not his best work, but its last lines catch the spirit of the time. The poet took his inspiration from the Rome of Augustus and of Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. "It is no miracle the mood is high," he wrote.  "It makes the prophet in us all presage/ The glory of the next Augustan age/ Of a power leading from its strength and pride,/ Of young ambition eager to be tried,/ Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,/ In any game the nations want to play./ A golden age of poetry and power/ Of which this noonday's the beginning hour." Frost proved to be a better poet than a prophet. Instead of a golden age of poetry and power, we've had, after the three horrible murders, a parade of fools: first the crook, then the senile puppet, then the congressional fellatio hunters, and now the smirking, dangerous dunce. 

    Like the nation, I too am in steep decline. It used to be that I could memorize short poems with ease. Nowadays, it's a titanic effort of will. To forestall hardening of the mind, and in a desperate effort to keep my brain supple, I decided to memorize Frost's "Birches." It's when you learn a poem by heart that you truly appreciate it, and so I can now say with absolute confidence and authority that "Birches" is a poem not just for the age, but for all time. In point of fact, I've been bothering myself about how Frost will fare in civilizations as far into the future as Virgil and Horace are in our past. Will students of poetry be able to grasp the subtlety of "Birches?" The story, the plot itself, will pose no problem. Frost knows that birches are bent to the ground by ice-storms, but he would fancifully "prefer to have some boy bend them/ As he went out and in to fetch the cows." For the "boy," tree-climbing is a high art: "He always kept his poise/ To the top branches, climbing carefully/ With the same pains you use to fill a cup/ Up to the brim, and even above the brim." Frost then shifts perspective, and the fantasy that birches are bent not by ice-storms but by athletic youngsters transforms into a memory, a truth: "So was I once myself a swinger of birches;/ And so I dream of going back to be." He closes the poem with a vision in which he leaves the real world and starts life anew: "I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,/ And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk/ Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,/ But dipped its top and set me down again." Even though our descendants will read the poem in an extinct language and in an edition encrusted with explanatory footnotes, I'm sure that they'll understand its outline. (I imagine too that some future scholar will make his career by explicating the line "A boy too far from town to learn baseball.") But will anyone in 4006 A.D. be sufficiently conversant with everyday twentieth-century American English to recognize the skill with which Frost masks his deep insights into the relationship between the material and the eternal with art-that-hides-art colloquialisms? Or appreciate to the full the sly understatement of "one could do worse than be a swinger of birches?" The beauty and the profundity of "Birches" tease us who share Frost's language. What a challenge the poem will be eighty generations down the road! Moreover, Is there even the remotest possibility that our successors will be equipped to grasp how much of Roman poetry (Ovid especially) Frost distills into "I'd like to get away from earth awhile/ And then come back to it and begin over./ May no fate willfully misunderstand me/ And half grant what I wish and snatch me away/ Not to return." Frost possessed the genius to keep us in touch with our past and to connect us to our future.

    I wish that I had talked to Robert Frost that winter day when he was trudging on. "How are you, Mr. Frost," I might have asked. Perhaps he would have smiled or said "Nice day."

    That would have been a good thing to recall.   

  • What We Read in the Fifties: Ivanhoe

    For an entire lifetime I've had a ghastly relationship with Sir Walter Scott. Ivanhoe was a mandatory book in the Erasmus Hall High School English curriculum and I remember reading the novel with painful indifference. It's entirely possible that I didn't persevere to the final pages but instead relied upon the 1952 film. At various times I've made an effort to read novels by Sir Walter, but time and again I've foundered. Twenty or so years ago, Old Mortality and Redgauntlet were being trumpeted by academic critics, and I gave each novel a fair trial, but, after a chapter or two, ran aground on the sandbar of dullness. As part of my project of re-reading books that were popular or required in the 1950s, I tackled Ivanhoe again, and I can report that this time I read it to the very last drop — but what a colossal effort! I never "got into" it but read it in gobbets of five or six pages at a time before succumbing to boredom or sleep. I deserve the 2006 Bulwer-Lytton Prize for Drudgery.

    Why did our elders judge Ivanhoe to be suitable for 10th graders? The plot plods, the characters are unidimensional cliches, and there's a total want of suspense. The dialogue is ludicrous. It reminds me of what Jonson said about Spenser–that "in affecting the ancients, he writ no language." But in point of fact, Scott does write a language–he writes bad Blackadderese. "Fear not, my lord. I must speak with you in private, before you mount your palfrey." "Have patience, sir. I might retort your accusation, and blame the inconsiderate levity which foiled my design."  "A truce with your raillery, sir knight."  "If thou refusest my fair proffer, the provost of the lists shall cut thy bow-string, break thy bow and arrows and expel thee from the presence as a faint-hearted craven." And on and on for four hundred mucilaginous pages.   

    There's another roadblock to empathetic reading. Ivanhoe features a Jewish money-lender named Isaac who's a walking inventory of stereotypes: he's usurious, greedy, faint-hearted, fawning, and although he claims poverty, is secretly rolling in shekels. He sums up all the worst aspects of both Shylock and Fagin. But Scott thinks we should forgive Isaac even though he's such a miserable human being, and by asking us to do so, he somehow manages to make tolerance even more offensive than bigotry itself.In addition, Isaac has an impossibly beauteous and virtuous daughter named Rebecca. Yes, it's a miracle, says Scott, but there are Jews (or at least Jewesses) who are not money-grubbing villains. Thanks a lot, Sir Walter. 

    Why was Ivanhoe high-school fare?  Beats the heck out of me. And it makes me angry to think that this bad book was thrust down our throats. Let's put those upstart immigrants in their place, is what they were saying. Was it malevolent or merely unconscious? Difficult to ascertain, but after slogging through Ivanhoe, I'm not in a forgiving mood.   

    January 7.  I've now watched the 1952 Ivanhoe with Elizabeth Taylor as Jessica, an aging Robert Taylor as Ivanhoe, and an aging Joan Fontaine as Rowena. It's a bit dated and it occasionally anticipates Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but it's not half bad. The writer, who had the wonderful name of Aeneas McKenzie, discarded the novel, started from scratch, and composed a screenplay that has action and adventure and romance and every once in a while borrows an incident from Sir Walter Scott. A good strategy, in my view.

  • Some Shops

    We're just back from a week in Greenwich Village. Here are some of the stores that were within two or three blocks of our temporary residence: "Beasty Feast Pet Food Supplies"; "Cherry Boxx" (sex toys and outfits); "Golden Rule Wine and Liquor"; "Henrietta Hudson Bar and Girl"; "Badlands Entertainment" (xxx videos); "Condomania" — all kinds of condoms and related gear; "Suds Cafe" (a laundromat and espresso bar); a shop that specializes in "eyebrow threading"; the "Sports Cap and Hat Store"; "Man + Plus" (which I read as Man plus plus); "Yuki's Chinese Restaurant" (bad corporate name); "Birthday Suit" (bachelorette-fetish, the sign clarified); the "Why Not Men's Spa"; "Pet Portraits"; "Doodle-Doos" (a children's hair salon); "Kid's RX" (children's prescription drugs); and "Cowgirl" — I couldn't recognize anything in the cowgirl stock, certainly nothing that would home on the range; also, an admirable piece of commercial hyperbole: "Splendid Dry Cleaners." In addition, a truck bearing the name "Dr. Playground" — mobile playground repairs, I would suppose. All in all, quite a remarkable display of capitalist initiative.

  • Xmas Thoughts

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

    Would they not have been reduced to angry and impotent sobs by the grotesque consumerism — the burnt offerings and squeaking timbrels  — that in 2006 substitute for justice and righteousness?  Could there be anything more loathsome either to Amos or to our devout ancestors than "Silent Night" at a shopping mall?

    Ah for a twenty-first century Amos!

    Further observations on the "holiday season" can be found here.

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