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

  • The P. S. 217 “Assembly”

    During the 1940s and early 1950s, when I was a pupil at P. S. 217, the school auditorium was given over to formal weekly "assemblies." Boys were required to wear white shirts and green ties (girls had a specified outfit as well, but in those days I was so unconscious of a) girls and b) their costumes that I'm darned if I can remember what was worn by the young ladies). Before entering the auditorium, classes lined up in "size places." P. S. 217 was particularly strong on "size places" – a point of particular humiliation for me, because I was, as WS says about R of G, "so long a-growing, and so leisurely" that I was by far the smallest child in every class from first grade to eighth. After we found our assigned seats (boys in one row, girls in the next), our principal Miss Bildersee, a formidable and incredibly ancient woman with nostrils so huge and distended that an agile boy could go spelunking in them, would perform the mandatory reading from the Bible. Blessings on her fond old heart, Miss Bildersee regularly choose melodious passages from the book of Psalms. I was particularly struck by the eloquence of "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful," with its abrupt counterbalancing antistrophe: "the ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away." After the Bible reading and some announcements, there was usually a performance of some sort. Choral readings, the oddest of art forms, were far too frequent. I remember that I was once a member of a sextet of quavering sopranos who memorized and recited the patriotic World War I poem "In Flanders Fields." What in the world was a second-grader supposed to make of "We are the Dead. Short days ago/ We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,/Loved and were loved, and now we lie/In Flanders fields./Take up our quarrel with the foe:/To you from failing hands we throw/The torch; be yours to hold it high./If ye break faith with us who die/ We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/ In Flanders fields." (Such poppycock was received as true literary greatness. It would have been beyond utopian imagination that our teachers would have known or introduced us to the distinguished WWI poetry of Wilfred Owen or Isaac Rosenberg or Siegfried Sassoon or Edward Thomas.) Then our music specialist Mrs. Georgia Keiselbach would sit down at the piano and teach us songs, some of them also left over from the first World War:  "Keep the home-fires burning,/ While your hearts are yearning,/ Though your lads are far away/ They dream of home;/ There's a silver lining/Through the dark cloud shining,/Turn the dark cloud inside out,/Till the boys come home." And also: "Give me some men who are stout-hearted men/ Who will fight for the right they adore… Shoulder to shoulder, and bolder and bolder."  And: "Tramp, tramp, tramp along the highway/Tramp, tramp, tramp, the road is free…  We're planters and Canucks/ Virginians and Kentucks/Captain Dick's own Infantry/ Captain Dick's own Infantry," which I now know to have come from Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta (1910) and which provoked a great deal of surreptitious tittering because it had the word "dick" in it. In those unenlightened days we sang very many overtly religious songs: "White Christmas" and "Silent Night" and "Easter Parade." I much admired the tune of "The First Noel" but I had no idea what was meant by "born is the king of Israel" — the only Israel I knew of was a recently-founded democracy. I loved the Thanksgiving hymn "We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing;/ He chastens and hastens His will to make known;/ The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing,/ Sing praises to His name; He forgets not his own" and many more stanzas, none of which I could parse or understand (still can't, in fact!). Another Thanksgiving song: "Over the river and through the woods/ To grandmother's house we go/The horse knows the way/To carry the sleigh…," which I found to be curiously disorienting because my particular grandmother lived in a tiny third-floor walkup on noisy and sweaty Coney Island Avenue. We sang the immensely mysterious Lord's Prayer (in the Schubert setting, I later discovered). Why did we so?  Were the heathens and Jews among us expected to convert on the spot? I much preferred the patriotic songs, although even they too were permeated with inexplicable theology. We were fervent jingos.   Not one, but two full stanzas of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic": "In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,/With a glory in His bosom, that transfigures you and me/ As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,/ For God is marching on." And two stanzas also of "The Star-Spangled Banner": "Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand/ Between their loved home and the war's desolation!/ Blessed with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land/ Praise the Power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation./Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,/ And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'" I preferred the rousing "O Columbia! the gem of the ocean,/ The home of the brave and the free,/ The shrine of each patriot's devotion,/ A world offers homage to thee" and "God Bless America" as well as the jingoist exceptionalism and cluttered syntax of "Our father's God, to thee/ Author of liberty/ To thee we sing./  Long may our land be bright/ With freedom's holy light;/ Protect us by thy might/ Great God our King." 

    Here's a song we were distinctly not taught and did not sing: "This land is your land, this land is my land/ From California, to the New York Island./ From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters/ This land was made for you and me." We especially did not sing: "In the squares of the city  — in the shadow of the steeple/  Near the relief office — I see my people/ And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin' /If this land's still made for you and me."

    December 17.  I now remember that we sang musical settings to two familiar poems. The first, Emma Lazarus's inscription on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Hey, that's my grandparents you're calling "wretched refuse." The second, Joyce Kilmer's horrid "Trees": "I think that I shall never see/  A poem lovely as a tree…  A tree who's hungry mouth is pressed/ Against the earth's sweet-flowing breast" etc.  This song was only palatable because it allowed us to say the word "breast" out loud. 

    (Thanks to Steve and to Barry, graduates of P. S. 217, for jogging my memory;  thanks also to David [P. S. 102].

    Graduates of P. S. 217 who happen to stumble onto this site: feel free to add comments or to forward this post to classmates with whom you might be in touch.)

  • Some Stretchers

    We’re in Washington visiting our four-year-old granddaughter (and her parents, of course).  This morning I walked the little girl to her Montessori pre-school. As we passed some dormant rhododendrons, the grand-daughter told me that she saw a "very large antelope" resting under the bushes.  I like her style — not a dog, or even a deer — an antelope!  And a very large one to boot.  I love her sincerity, and I love it that she’s still young enough to live in the imagination.  What a gift!

    Here are some other "stretchers"  — Huck Finn’s word  — that she’s told me during this visit.  That she once ate thirteen bananas in a row.  That her mother and her grandmother had just gone to the Antarctic.  That she had six brothers and eleven sisters.  That the cheese that she was eating was made entirely of "green slimy boogers."  That she had just pooped on her cat.  That she built the neighbor’s new picket fence.  "You did?  How did you do it?"   "With power tools."   That she had eaten a whole meal of eyeballs.

    Well, she’ll have to live in the world of hard facts soon enough.  Everyone must, even those of our leaders who would prefer to reject the "reality-based"  universe.  I say, let her enjoy the fantasy just as long as she is able. 

  • Among the Struldbrugs

    In the little read Book III of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver finds himself on the island of Luggnagg, where there is a group of people called Struldbrugs who are "blessed" with eternal life.  On hearing of Struldbrugs, Gulliver waxes ecstatic:  "happiest, beyond all comparison, are those excellent STRULDBRUGS, who, being born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature, have their minds free and disengaged, without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehensions of death!"  Gulliver is soon disabused of his enthusiasm.  He learns that after an allotted number of years have passed, the Struldbrugs are declared legally dead, but that they continue to grow older, feebler, and more wretched.  It’s hard to know whether Swift points his satire at human optimism or whether he is simply repulsed by extreme old age.

    In any case, we’ve been spending much time at the nursing home lately, visiting the Aged P (I’m using the euphemism adopted by John Wemmick in Great Expectations).  Friends, you don’t have to voyage to Luggnagg to learn that it’s possible to live far too long;  the evidence is close at hand.  Let’s try to remember to get the heck out of here while the going’s good — before we too are metamorphosized into a bunch of Struldbrugs. 

  • Violence in My Life

    A few weeks ago, I wrote about my violent nightmares.  And now I shall unclasp a secret book and write about real-life violence in my life — to be exact, about a murder and an attempted murder.

    In the middle-1970s, I exchanged jobs, homes and automobiles with a faculty member of a university in England.  I will call this person by the fabricated name of Maurice Shaper.  Although I certainly profited from teaching in a new setting, and I loved the city in southeastern England in which we lived, Mr. Shaper himself was a disaster.  He missed half of his classes and was cruel to my students when he did present himself.  He fled town early, leaving behind stacks of unread papers, distressed students who had not received grades or credit for the work, and a mess that took me a full year to resolve.  Moreover, Mr. Shaper, who had a friend on the west coast and was commuting 1200 miles bi-weekly, put 60,000 miles on my Dodge station wagon before smashing it into another vehicle on a rainy California road.  Within an hour of our arrival home, we were greeted with a summons and a lawsuit — as owners of the car we were liable — from the occupants of the maimed vehicle. It was a lawsuit that took a number of years to run its expensive course.  In short, I must admit that I nursed more than a little antagonism to Mr. Shaper.  Anger, I’d say, but something less than murderous rage. 

    Some five years later I returned to England.  The morning after I arrived, I was standing on the steps of the British Museum in Bloomsbury waiting for the building to open when an acquaintance came up to me with a newspaper.  "Have you seen this?" he asked, and showed me an item in The Times. "University Lecturer Murdered."   And sure enough, Mr. Maurice Shaper had been killed in his own home — the home in which I had lived for a year.  Although it didn’t say so in the newspaper, I was later informed that he had been in the habit of picking up young men on the Dover Road and bringing them home.  He must have misjudged his quarry, because he had been slashed in the neck with a broken liquor bottle and had bled to death in his bathroom.  His Peugeot and his camera and a few other items had been stolen and the presumed murderer had disappeared.  What was so odd was that he had been killed just a few hours after I arrived at Heathrow.   

    That’s the murder;  now the attempted murder.

    In my second year at college, I had a roommate (let us call him Peter Dickerman) with whom I was in perpetual conflict.  I’m not generally short-tempered, but once, I was so angry at him that I actually picked up a carving knife and waved it in his direction.  Eventually we came to a truce of sorts;  although we inhabited the same rooms, we didn’t speak to each other for the last months of the semester.  Mr. Dickerman then went his way and I went mine.

    Thirty years later, I was in Washington DC for a couple of weeks doing some reading at a specialized library when I read in the Washington Post that someone had attempted to murder a northern Virginia psychologist.  The victim, Peter Dickerman, had received a letter-bomb in the mail.  He had opened it, there was an explosion, and he was burned over 60% of his body.  The story was a sensation for a few days but gradually faded from view.  It’s my understanding that Dickerman did not die.  (I’ve now googled him under his real name and I see that he’s still practicing psychiatry in Virginia.)

    So two times in my life, a person with whom I’ve been in serious conflict has been violently attacked.  And both times, I’ve been close at hand.  A little creepy, isn’t it?   

    The man who murdered Maurice Shaper was arrested and convicted.  The identity of the person who mailed the letter bomb to Peter Dickerman is unknown to me. 

  • My Favorite Inventions

    Life has certainly changed since I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s.  Here are some of the key inventions that have made life better for me and for all sentient Americans.

    1)  the retractable vacuum cleaner cord. Truly one heck of an improvement.  Just step on the little lever, and the cord comes flying back into the machine.  It used to be, I’d waste minutes tying the thing up only to watch it immediately unravel.

    2)  fitted sheets.  Just snap them on and have done with it.  Perhaps the greatest improvement in standard of living in my lifetime.  No more folding under and then waking up in the middle of the night sleeping on the mattress tufts.

    3)  the bungee cord.  A stroke of true genius.  For packing the top of the car, an unparalleled innovation.  And nowadays, I keep a pair of them strapped to the lawn-tractor cart.  I use the bungee cords to double the load that I can carry in one trip.

    4)  luggage wheels.  Pull instead of carrying.  What a concept!!  Luggage, marooned for centuries in the paleolithic, finally discovers the wheel (and just in time to save my shoulders).

    5) the mute button. Just a flick of the thumb and the commercial voice disappears.  A godsend.

    That’s my top five.  Any other suggestions out there in the blogworld will be sincerely appreciated.

    November 30.  I’m so chagrined.  I’ve forgotten the most remarkable invention of the last several decades:  duct tape.  In our household, duct tape holds together more items than gravity. 

  • November 22

    On November 22, 1963, we were living in a small third-floor walkup on Irving Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  It was in the afternoon.  Some high schools students (Cambridge High and Latin was just around the corner) were walking by.  One of them shouted to another, "Kennedy’s been shot.  In Dallas."   I immediately thought "this is bad.  That kid shouldn’t know that Kennedy’s in Dallas."  So we turned on the radio.  And began to grieve.

    I don’t think that this country’s ever regained its balance.  Jack, and then Bobbie and Martin Luther King  — the heroes of the left taken out, one by one, by assassins.  Without the murders, we’d never have had Nixon and Reagan and Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld.

    If we ever can get the United States on track again, then, only then, can we cease to grieve.   

  • “A Strange Slavery to Beauty”

    On September 6, 1664, Sam Pepys purchased for his young wife a pair of gloves trimmed with yellow ribbon. At 20 shillings, he knew that he overpaid but he was not at all sorry, because Doll, the 'Change woman from whom he made the purchase was "so pretty, that, God forgive me! I could not think it too much — which is a strange slavery that I stand in to beauty, that I value nothing near it."  Pepys, God forgive him, was not only enthralled by handsome women, but was attentive to beauty in all its manifestations.  He loved plays and performances, paintings and prints and architecture, as well as music, especially songs and ballads.  Pepys's life was ruled by his "strange slavery to beauty."

     

    But why should he have described his fascination as "strange?"  If there is a single trait that distinguishes not just Pepys but human beings as a species, it is an irrepressible love of things beautiful.  For every one of their senses, humans have created an appropriate form of art. Hearing?  Music and song.  Sight? drawing and painting and sculpture and film. Taste? elaborate cookery. Motion?  the dance.  Speech and language?  literature from lyric to epic to novel.  Moreover, there's scarcely a substance that human beings have encountered in their time on the planet that they haven't transformed into something harmonious and elegant.  At first, bone and stone and fur; and then wood and metal and cloth and clay.  Occasionally, some anthropologist will emerge from his laboratory with a theory that the fundamental human trait is  — you name it — aggressiveness, or territoriality, or the ability to play games, or an interest in the future, or the capacity for bonding into societies.  Such theories have a bit of truth, but they overlook the obvious.  The essence of humanity, in my view, is the drive to create and to appreciate beauty.  Pepys' "strange slavery" is not a bit strange;  it's universal.

     

    As for myself, I believe that I can remember the exact day, hour and minute when I was first struck by beauty.  My moment of ascension occurred in a garden.  I must have been twelve or thirteen years old (and therefore not fully human).  One spring day I tagged along with a gang of schoolyard savages to the Zoo to see if we could get ourselves into a little trouble.  So there we were, running about, screaming and hiding and throwing stones at each other and clods of dirt at the respectable zoo patrons. Someone must have called the cops, because the next thing I knew we had all scattered and I was running as fast as I could.  In those days I was small and spry and any fence that I couldn't squeeze through I could certainly clamber over.  And what's a little barbed wire to a frightened urchin?  Separated from my cohort, I became completely lost.  Eventually, I found myself in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden which was then as now adjacent to the zoo.  I climbed over one or two more fences and entered (not by a gate, but surreptitiously) the famous, mature, refined Japanese Garden — one of the great artistic achievements in all of America.  I was dazzled in all my senses– it was a true epiphany.  I particularly remember the red cut leaf maples and the wisteria.  Of course I was too ignorant to know that it was wisteria;  I only knew that I was surrounded by magnificent cascades of blue flowers in abundant bloom.

     

    Here are some pictures of the garden.  Just take a look, and then try to imagine an uncivilized pre-adolescent, a scared, sweaty, ragtag child, a product of concrete schoolyards and filthy subways stumbling upon such a amenable place.

     

    What good fortune it was to have vaulted that one last fence!

     

    I think that I've spent the rest of my life trying to get back to that garden — or, more accurately, I've spent it trying to recreate and to re-live the aesthetic explosion that I experienced at that epiphanic moment.  When I travel. I make it a point to visit the world-famous gardens, and when I'm at home I work on my own landscape.  But it's not just gardens — the most ephemeral of art forms –to which I stand in strange slavery.  I've found the aesthetic shiver in other places.  Poetry, Shakespeare in particular, is always at hand.  Is there a civilized soul who can read "Do not laugh at me;/ For (as I am a man) I think this lady/ To be my child, Cordelia" without dropping a pleasurable tear.  The Winter's Tale, which is the finest play in the history of this or any other universe, is a fountain of delights, especially Perdita's "I was not much afeard; for once or twice/ I was about to speak and tell him plainly,/ The selfsame sun that shines upon his court/ Hides not his visage from our cottage but/ Looks on alike" — a sentiment which may be the most genuinely democratic in thirty-eight otherwise monarchist dramas.  Visual arts also are a constant source of pure delight;  in a gallery of Rembrandts at the Metropolitan Museum I was once so ecstatic that my heart began to beat uncontrollably.  And in Helsinki, I had a moment of pure architectural joy at the Church of the Rock — the most beautiful and holy of buildings.

     

    But of all art forms, it's music that is most reliably transcendent.  My tastes have evolved over the years:  Dvorak and Mahler are in the past but Beethoven's great fugue still sets my spine on edge and so does the long harpsichord solo in Bach's Fifth Brandenburg.  Recordings usually (but not always) work better than live performances.  When I'm in the right mood, I play the shivery passages again and again.  Nowadays the single most lovely piece of music is the great chaconne from Bach's second violin partita.  Hilary Hahn's performance is my favorite, but the chaconne is almost as exciting in Celadonio Romero's guitar transcription and in the Brahms piano version (for virtuoso left hand only).  The chaconne does all that music can do, and it does it in fifteen unaccompanied minutes.

     

    It's not just classical music.  I'm also strangely enslaved to what is now called "golden era gospel" — the singing of the "Heavenly Gospel Singers" and the "Harmonizing Four" and Clara Ward and Brother Joe May and Dorothy Love Coates and the "Swan Silvertones" and the "Five Blind Boys of Alabama." A small sample of some of my many, many favorites:  Mahalia Jackson's long live version of "How I Got Over"; the "Roberta Martin Singers"' "Standing on the Promises"; Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Marie Knight singing "Beams of Heaven"; the "Sensational Nightingales" "Brightly Beams";  perhaps the best of the best:  Professor J. Earle Hines, "God Be With You."  In such great music resides the aesthetic ecstasy, that, when we open ourselves to it, makes us most completely human. 

  • And Speaking of Mosquitoes…

    Once upon a time I had a foolproof system for clearing a bedroom of mosquitoes.  Close the door, turn on a light, stick the left arm out of the bedclothes, keep track of the mosquitoes by their whine, and then, as soon as one lands on the exposed skin, smack it with the right hand.  After a few minutes, turn out the light, sleep tight. Used to work wonders.

    The system doesn't work any more?  Why?  Because my antiquated ears no longer register high-pitched sounds. I can't hear mosquitoes until one of them pecks on my eardrum.  I'm vulnerable to sneak attack. 

    It's bad: all mosquitoes are now stealth mosquitoes. It's good: I'll never again be troubled by that nasty whine. 

  • Mosquito Sex

    Sexnews from the mosquitosphere: "if larvae of Aedes stimulans are raised at 75F, about half become males and half become females. But if they are raised at 84F, only 9F higher, they all become almost complete females."  Almost complete females?  What's the meaning of "almost complete?"  Either they're male, or they're female.  Doesn't the good book say that "male and female created he them?"

    Here's the surprising scoop. "Larvae that would have become males lack the big bushy antennae of the normal male and have mouth parts and external genitalia that are indistinguishable from those of a "real" female. Furthermore, "feminized" males have no testicles or other internal male organs of reproduction, but they do have ovaries and other internal female organs of reproduction. Some feminized males have even mated with normal males and been inseminated, but they laid no eggs."

    All this mosquito sex science comes from entomologist Gilbert Waldbauer, author of A Walk Around the Pond (Cambridge [Harvard], 2006).

    Professor Waldbauer claims to love his insects but he is unmoved by the plight of the 84F feminized males. Can there be sadder words in Aedes households all over the warming earth than "they laid no eggs?"  It's poignant, perhaps even tragic.

    How do the mosquitoes themselves feel about attenuated antennae and awkward genitalia?  If Waldbauer had looked with a more compassionate eye, he would have noticed that "normal" males of the 75F variety wave their big bushy antennae and point and laugh at the feeble mini-antennae of the wannabe females. He would also have noticed that wannabe females are stigmatized and often depressed because they are so frequently picked on by "normal" males, who regularly direct loud, scornful, threatening whines at the antennae-impaired.

    There's a crisis of values in mosquitoland. Many "normal" males are fundamentally convinced that the wannabes have made a conscious choice to mimic females and that water temperature has absolutely nothing to do with it. Some among the "normal" males — the more enlightened — propose that with the right kind of counseling and prayer, the mimics can be reclaimed. But other "normal" males hate, simply hate, the males who consort with the feminized wannabes. They condemn as unnatural all intercourse between the normal and the feminized, and they proclaim the actual act of insemination to be the work of the devil.

    I myself wonder why the "normal" males get themselves into such a twist.  I'm tempted to think that they protest too much — that they themselves secretly lust after the feminized males.

    I'll ask the expert, Professor Waldbauer. If he doesn't know, I'll get a second opinion. Perhaps the Rev. Ted Haggard would like to share his insights.   

  • What We Read in the Fifties: All the King’s Men

    I've now re-read Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (1946), a novel that I hadn't looked at since the early 1950s. Once again memory has played its tricks. My fifty-year-old afterimage does not correspond to reality. The book that I thought I remembered focused on Willie Stark (Huey Long) — his ascent to power, his anti-establishment politics, his ruthlessness, and his assassination.  Willie Stark does in fact appear in the book that I re-read, but he's not the central figure — not even close. It's a novel about Jack Burden, press-secretary and chief blackmailer for Stark, and about the various spokes of Burden's wheel: his semi-aristocratic mother, his lawyer-turned-religious-fanatic father, the apparently upstanding judge who was his mother's lover, his childhood sweetheart Anne Stanton and her doctor brother, and also Sadie Burke, the Boss's secretary-girlfriend-political guru, and of course about Stark himself.  Perhaps I misremembered because the Willie Stark parts of the novel are so strong, or perhaps my memory was filtered through the 1949 Robert Rossen film. Even half a century later, it's hard to read the book without seeing Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in the mind's eye. (The film is now in the Netflix queue, so I'll revisit it shortly.)

    It's a good book, well worth the prizes and the accolades. For my money, there could have been more politics and more Louisiana and less young-man-searching-for-his-identity. It's a big, as they say, "sprawling" novel; sometimes the sprawl works, but at other times — the long flashback in which adolescent Jack woos adolescent Anne, for example — an editor's scissors would have done the novel a world of good. The prose is mannered and affected and derivative: hunks of Thomas Wolfe, a dollop here and there of Faulkner, along with extra-large helpings of Chandler or Hammett. But it's nevertheless strong writing.       

    Melodramatic?  Yes, indeed: murders and suicides, betrayals and reversals, mysteries and exposures. But at the core, a genuine curiosity about America and its southland. All the King's Men persuasively creates a culture in which genuine goodness is mere namby-pamby and in which ruthlessness has become reasonable. To succeed in such a world, Jack Burden and Willie Stark become as corrupt as the world around them. 

    The Huey Long material is excellent groundwork for a novel. Warren dresses it up with paragraph after paragraph of murky philosophizing. I confess that I didn't make the effort to absorb the meditations — they seemed to be the usual southern stuff about religion and about the weight of history. I think that readers are supposed to learn that "if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without the one there cannot be the other, and … if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future."  But if such a platitude is the best that Warren can do, it's best to skip the tepid philosophy and stick with the rich and abundant storytelling.  

  • Flying the Flag

    Yesterday, we dug out our grand old American flag and flew it from the holder that I had improvised after 9/11. We flew it to celebrate two great changes: a) the Democratic triumph in Tuesday's election, which restored a bit of our faith in representative government, and b) the end of the arrogant reign of Donald Rumsfeld, the principal mover (except for the cowboy-in-chief himself) of this foolish, disastrous adventurism in the Middle East. We're hoping for a return to common sense in America, but we're not entirely optimistic  — the guy who's in charge doesn't read, can't admit he's ever made a mistake, and takes his marching orders from a) Rove, b) his gut, and c) his narrow, parochial version of the great signifier in the sky  — in what order of priority no one knows. 

    Rumsfeld should have been out on his ass years ago. He had lost the respect of the soldiers, certainly of the generals, the congress, and, as we now know from the election results, of ordinary Americans everywhere. However, until yesterday he could still patronize and mystify the journalists, and he could still issue instructions to those beneath him in the chain of command.  And generals obey even when they despise the person issuing the orders.

    In 1606, Shakespeare described the psychological relations between the generals and their civilian commander. Of Macbeth, Angus says that "Those he commands move only in command,/ Nothing in love." That is, they do what they're told, but they hate doing it. Here's the full transcript of Angus's remarks: "Now does [Macbeth] feel/ His secret murders sticking on his hands;/ Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;/ Those he commands move only in command,/ Nothing in love: Now does he feel his title/ Hang loose upon him, like a giant's robe/ Upon a dwarfish thief."

    It's hopeless to expect that Rumsfeld would recognize that the mantle of Secretary of Defense hung upon him as Angus describes Macbeth's (or, as does, a fortiori, the presidential mantle upon its own wearer) — there's not sufficient insight or perspective or self-knowledge around the White House these days. But we know exactly what Angus meant, and we know that some of our so-called leaders are nothing more than dwarfish thiefs.     

    ("Minutely" means "every minute";  "Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach" means "every minute a revolt [by one of his former followers] pays Macbeth back for his own breach of faith, i.e. assassinating Duncan.)

  • What We Heard in the Fifties

    Regular readers (and even stray internet pilgrims) know that Dr. M. has composed a series of entries called What We Read in the Fifties, in which he's revisited books that were noteworthy or notorious during the days of his youth. It's been a rewarding exercise, at least for him. Some of the books have been canonical novels that were required reading in English class at Erasmus Hall High School, some have been pop best-sellers which his more earnest teachers would have scorned, and some have been cheap sensational paperbacks passed under the desk from hand to grimy pubescent hand.

    In the years that have passed since I first read these books, rivers have changed course, glaciers have melted, and American society has altered almost beyond recognition — and yet the books have remained exactly the same. Reading them has been an exercise in nostalgia and a test of memory, and also an unwelcome insight into the incalculable callowness of adolescence. And yet, Dr. Metablog has found readers — or, at least, he thinks he has, for in May and in December, when high school students all over America, yea, even across the waters, write their assigned term papers on Lord of the Flies or The Catcher in the Rye, blague-traffic spikes, and the dissenting views offered in these essaylets are plagiarized and offered to a new generation of English teachers, who reward them with grades of D or F. 

    I fear, however, that my readers might have gathered an erroneous impression of 1950s Flatbushian youth — that they might have been literate or intellectual. Let me clear my conscience and confess that for every hour that I spent reading books that had actual bindings, I spent ten hours reading comic books and an equal measure with my ear to the radio. It was the comics that taught me how to read; I was well along in years before I came to realize that there were such things as lower-case letters and that there could be sentences that didn't end with exclamation points! In my neighborhood, super-heroes (Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman) were as common as squirrels or starlings. But radio — radio serials– affected us even more than the comics. Radio stimulated the imagination, took us to worlds far way, presented us with alternative realities. Members of my age-cohort will not forget the glories of radio:Jack Armstrong, the All-American boy, who trotted the globe in support of native ideals and Wheaties; Bobbie Benson, the youth who inherited the B-Bar-B ranch in the Big Bend country, and who, along with Tex, Windy, and Harka, triumphed daily over snakes, droughts, famines and outlaws; the Shadow, who had the power to "cloud men's minds so they cannot see him," and who taught us, every day, that "the weed of crime bears bitter fruit"; Sergeant Preston of the Northwest Mounted, who fought crime and bad guys in the Yukon with horse and dog ("Well, King, this case is closed"); and the Lone Ranger, who with the aid of Tonto and the "thundering hoof beats of the great horse Silver" and with the marvelous voices of exotic Detroit's Fred Foy and Brace Beemer, created an enduring mythology of a spacious but vague and unlocatable west. 

    Radio gave scope to the listener's imagination. When television came along, and these programs were translated into a visual form, they were all inevitably diminished. It's no wonder that the great epics (Gilgamesh, the Odyssey and Iliad, Beowulf, the Icelandic sagas) are oral creations. The spoken word can cast spells that are beyond the capacity of visual forms. When it comes to heroes, a single word is worth a thousand pictures.

    Radio prepared me for Shakespeare. It's a fact that when Londoners crossed the Thames to attend the Globe, they did not go to "see" a play; they went to "hear" a play. There's a world of difference between seeing and hearing. When we "see" a movie, 90% of the information comes to us through the eye. In a Shakespeare play, it's exactly the opposite — 90%, or more, of the information comes to us by way of the ear — which is why recordings of Shakespeare's plays can be so entirely successful and so true to the original intent. And because the plays are primarily oral, with their big speeches and complicated rhetorical patterning and brilliant displays of verbal acuity, they can also be larger-than-life — and they can be heroic. Shakespeare's plays are closer to radio than they are to any other modern literary form. Those of us who grew up with radio bring to Shakespeare an intuitive understanding of oral forms that precede television, film, and even precede the theater itself  — especially decadent modern theater with its compulsive and distracting visual distortions.   

  • Shakespeare and Dogs

    In a recent post, I casually mentioned that William Shakespeare was not fond of dogs and I offered as evidence the fact that the two villainous sisters in King Lear are called "dog-hearted daughters." Not convincing, says one of my readers. Is that so? Well, let me offer further evidence of dog-heartedness. Shakespeare's first true villain, Richard of Gloucester, is metaphorically speaking, a dog. According to the legend, which the character himself embraces and flaunts, Richard was born with a full set of teeth "which plainly signified/ That I should snarl and bite and play the dog." Not a tractable or ingratiating dog either, but one who is both treacherous and poisonous: "when he fawns, he bites; and when he bites,/ His venom tooth will rankle to the death." At the end of Richard III, when Richard is killed at the climactic battle of Bosworth Field, his heroic Tudor successor Henry Richmond proclaims victory in these words: "God and your arms be praised, victorious friends,/ The day is ours, the bloody dog is dead."  So here's a pretty pack of hounds: Goneril, Regan, and Richard of Gloucester. And yet one more villain — Iago in Othello: "O damn'd Iago. O inhuman dog." 

    In the Shakespearian universe, villains are regularly described as dogs, but dogs are never, ever, characterized as loyal, or affectionate, or helpful. They're anything but our newspaper-fetching friends.  On the contrary, dogs are "base," "unmanner'd," "thievish," "mangy," "hellish," "whoreson," "coward," "rascal," and "bloody." Shakespeare often uses the dysphemism "cur" for dog. Curs are "mongrel," "cruel-hearted," "o'erweening," "whoreson indistinguishable," and "venom-mouth'd." Hounds, highly regarded by some for their hunting ability, are "false" or "fell and cruel." Both Richard of Gloucester and Macbeth are "hell-hounds." Shakespeare's dogs are regularly associated with disorder, violence and evil;  everyone knows Mark Anthony's "Cry 'havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war."

    Shakespeare draws upon dogs when he wants to describe an uncivilized and wild world. Henry IV fears what England will become when his undisciplined son succeeds him: "For the fifth Harry from curb'd license plucks/ The muzzle of restraint, and the wild dog/ Shall flesh his tooth on every innocent." Dogs are untrustworthy, because they are "easily won to fawn on any man." "They turn… As dogs upon their masters." When the conspirators murdered Caesar, they "fawn'd like hounds,/  And bowed like bondsmen, kissing Caesar's feet;/ Whilst damned Casca, like a cur, behind/ Struck Caesar on the neck." Dogs are not only disloyal, they're disgusting as well. In The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, Archbishop Scroop complains that the common people are no more loyal to Henry than they were to his predecessor Richard II. "So, thou (i.e. the people) common dog, did'st thou disgorge/ Thy glutton bosom of the royal Richard./ And thou would'st eat thy dead vomit up,/ And howl'st to find it." 

    Shakespeare knew his dogs and had their names at his finger tips. Macbeth runs through a catalog:  "hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs/ Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves, are clept/ All by the name of dogs." Mad Edgar, in Lear, makes a similar list: "Be thy mouth or black or white,/ Tooth that poisons if it bite;/ Mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim./ Hound or spaniel, brach or lym,/ Bobtail tyke or trundle tail." Shakespeare had a particular and peculiar dislike of fawning dogs, whom (as was first noticed by Walter Whiter in 1794) he lumps together with (strange as it seems) candy or sweets, and images of melting. When Hotspur thinks back to an early encounter with the future King Henry IV, he remembers "Why, what a candy deal of courtesy, this fawning greyhound then did proffer me." In Anthony and Cleopatra, Anthony realizes that his followers are abandoning him; he laments that "the hearts/ That spaniel'd me at heels, to whom I gave/ Their wishes, do discandy, Melt their sweets/ On blossoming Caesar; and this pine is bark'd/ That overtopp'd them all." Flattering dogs and sweets are bound so closely in Shakespeare's subconscious that sometimes the dog is implicit rather than explicit. Hamlet to Horatio: "Why should the poor be flattered./ No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,/ And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee,/ Where thrift  [i.e. advantage] may follow fawning." A reader who is familiar with Shakespeare's imagination can detect the ghost of a fawning spaniel behind that "candied tongue." The ghost of a ghost is there also in King Lear, where Lear, in his madness, imagines that he surrounded by a pack of hounds: "The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me." 

    Did Shakespeare suffer some traumatic childhood event involving dogs and candy? It has been so suspected?  Whether yea nor nay, it's more than clear that Shakespeare's loathing of dogs was not of the surface; it was a deep and elemental revulsion. 

  • Occupations Not For Me

    Here are some career paths that it's just as well I didn't tread.   

    1.  Taxi driver in a large city (especially a city that's not on a grid, such as Boston or London. Even the DC-diagonals drive me nuts). I've earlier written about my incapacitating directional disability, but I neglected to mention that I tend to get into a bit of a panic when I'm lost –  I start driving much too fast and far too waywardly. So, dear friends, imagine me a befuddled cabbie, sweating super-profusely, while the fares in back scream bloody murder when I take the exact wrong turn for the fourth consecutive time. It would be a freakin' nightmare. Related occupations that won't work: tour guide, wilderness guide, tracker.

    2.  Dog-groomer. I've hinted at my lack of affection for doggies before. I just don't think I'd do a good job blow-drying Fido or brushing Fifi's teeth. (Incidentally, I'm joined in my prejudice against curs by gentle Will himself, whose references to canines are uniformly unfriendly: the superbly wicked sisters in King Lear, for example, are "dog-hearted daughters.")    

    3.  Trapeze artist. I'm terrified of heights and I have absolutely no sense of rhythm. Imagine me launching myself at just the right moment to catch my partner by the ankles. Related opportunity for ignominious failure: dance instructor.   

    4.  Surgeon.  I'm far too squeamish to be poking around in someone's innards.  Even channel surfing has become a dangerous pastime since we accidentally acquired the live surgery channel.  Motto:  "all gore, all the time."  I have to keep clicking that remote lest I accidentally pause at an open-heart moment. The FCC should mandate a warning and a five-second delay:  "Caution:  palpitating inner organs on view shortly." 

    5.  Hostage.  Chained to a bed somewhere in the 'stans wouldn't work for me. I must have my oatmeal every morning at 7 a.m., and I need to move my bowels shortly afterward. Moreover, if I don't eat lunch right on time, I get wicked headaches. Not to mention that I don't function well in rooms that are either too hot or too cold or not well ventilated, and which are peopled with chain-smoking guards. On the whole, I'd be a mighty cranky hostage.    

  • Book Report: Fiction by Michael Chabon

    I liked the film Wonder Boys (2000) so very much that I set out to read all of Michael Chabon's writing. Here's my interim report. I couldn't finish The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (William Morrow, 1988). The book is reported to have sold well and it has been widely praised, but, I'm sorry, I thought it was precious juvenilia and should never have been published. I do, however, love the title. A Model World (1991) and Werewolves in Their Youth (Random House, 1999) are collections of short stories. I found them both mighty insubstantial, and I confess to wearying of the little boy whose father left the family (a far-too-frequently-repeated motif). Wonder Boys (1995) is a fine, complicated, clever, satisfying novel.  Grady Tripp, Terry Crabtree, and James Leer are all memorable creations. The Passover service (omitted in the film) is top-flight — comic and moving at the same time. The story is fast, funny, and original — even richer than the fine, little-known movie. 

    I respected more than I loved the pullet-surprise winning Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Random House, 2000). It's engaging but overcrowded. While reading it, I was too conscious of the artifice and too aware of the novel's debts: Nabokov, a pinch of Pynchon, Doctorow, etc. Chabon's a great storyteller with a bright future. So far, he's doesn't have the heft of Bellow or the fluency of Roth, but he's up there in the big leagues. I'm hoping Summerland and The Final Solution are as good as the novels I've read so far. It's going to be fun to follow Chabon's career. He's a talented guy.

    October 25. Today I read the novella The Final Solution (Harper Collins, 2004). It's a snazzy mystery. Chabon returns to his infatuation with mythic figures; he also re-creates the hero-sidekick relationship that is an obsession of AAKC — this time its S. Holmes and Linus Steinman.  A very entertaining story, although sometimes I worried that I was reading a filmscript-in potentia.  Perhaps I'm too suspicious: not many directors are jumping to cast a parrot in the lead role. 

    October 30.  I read forty or so pages of Summerland (Miramax, 2002). Two words: "teen" and "fantasy." Not at all my cup of tea.  I hope that Chabon doesn't continue to indulge himself with such trivialities. He's too good for this stuff.

    Michael: get back to work!  Get serious! 

  • On Foley, Rascal Beadles, and “Hypocrisy”

    It's the scandal of the month that Republican Representative Mark Foley solicited sex from adolescent male congressional pages in the same years that he headed the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children and made his reputation for his work on legislation targeting sexual predators.

    Foley has been universally condemned for his "hypocrisy," as well he should be. It's especially piquant that his castigation of a much-reviled-by-moralists former president has resurfaced to embarrass him and to amuse the rest of us: "It's vile. It's more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction." What kind of rationalizing maneuvers were going in the Foley mind when the Congressman uttered these words about Bill Clinton?

    Foley's "hypocrisy" is anything but unique.  Shakespeare nailed the phenomenon centuries ago. In one of his great wisdom-in-madness moments, King Lear sees beneath the surface: "Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!/ Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;/ Thou hotly lust'st to use her in that kind/ For which thou whipp'st her."

    Every few weeks or so, it's discovered that one of our very own American beadles is enthralled by the exact sin against which he inveighs. There's the anti-pornography campaigner who has accumulated some unusual apparatus in his clammy basement; the anti-vice TV preacher caught with a shady lady in a by-the-hour motel on the Memphis strip;  the anti-gay state legislator photographed dancing in a downtown bar that caters only to men; the radio talk-show host who wants to send drug-users up the river for life but is himself addicted to hillbilly heroin; the flabby propagandist for virtues who pulls all-nighters at Atlantic City blackjack tables.  ll of them are hypocrites, I suppose, but in my view "hypocrisy" is a label that has no explanatory value.

    It's not as though people set out to become hypocrites. It's not an aspiration or a chosen career path. There's no Hypocrisy 101.

    I'm not an anti-vice campaigner or a psychologist and have no particular claim to expertise in this area, but I don't believe that people like Foley are cloven-footed sociopaths.

    Nor do I hold to the theory that it's simply protective coloration: "if I scream loud enough no one will suspect me." That shabby dodge has long since worn through; who else do we suspect nowadays if not the loudest shouters?

    I think the migration to hypocrisy must be very gradual. The Foleys of this world are driven by the flesh. Their vice becomes their obsession. I believe that they try to turn that obsession, that vice, in a positive direction.  Let's say a person is fascinated by adolescent boys;  he can then take on the cause of sexual exploitation and he can manage his compulsion in a socially acceptable manner. He can study it, observe it, catalog it; he can stay in close touch with the temptation but not succumb to it; he can in fact turn his vice into virtue. It's an excellent game plan.  It's a healthy compensatory reaction.

    I'm sure that there are anti-vice campaigners who employ such tactics successfully. But there are others who, in moments of weakness, do succumb. Now they're in a tricky psychological pickle.  Who better to appreciate the damage to adolescents than the person who has made a professional study of the outcomes?  So now Foley and the others know in their hearts that they are truly hateful. Perhaps they persuade themselves that their power makes them invulnerable. Meanwhile, they redouble their efforts to help the exploited; they pass legislation and start foundations.  And so the gulf between their professed beliefs and their private practices becomes deeper and deeper. Good deeds and evil deeds become inextricably entwined.

    In the story, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (a child-molester) inhabited the same body.

    I think that what must happen next is that self-loathing kicks in, big time. And as we all know, self-loathing and self-betrayal are twinborn. So the Foleys among us cooperate in their detection.  They engage in riskier and riskier behavior until they are exposed. Because, in fact, they want to be exposed. As Lear says, they "strip [their] own back[s]."  Because once they're exposed and the punishment commences, they can then set out on the path of redemption, which, I'm absolutely convinced, they crave as much or more than they crave the pleasure of their vice. 

    When La Rochefoucauld said that "hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue," he acknowledged that the term "hypocrisy" did not explain anything–that it's an incidental by-product of human frailty.

  • A Recurring, Violent Nightmare

    I wish I had pleasant dreams but I only have nightmares. Here's one of them. Beginning with early adolescence and continuing to this day, I've had a recurring dream in which I've murdered someone–I don't know whom. The victim is always an unidentifiable male, and his death is always violent. Ordinarily, I beat him to a bloody pulp with a shovel. I have problems disposing of the gory body, but usually I bury it next to the neglected garage that lay behind our house on East 9 Street in Flatbush where I lived my first seventeen years. It's an anguishing dream not because I've killed someone, but because I've failed to conceal the body properly and because I'm going to be arrested and punished. It's amoral  — I don't feel guilty that I'm a murderer — just embarrassed because I'm incompetent. It's a very realistic nightmare. A couple of times it's been so vivid to me that even after I was wide-awake, it took me ten or fifteen seconds to realize that I was not being hunted by the police and that I could proceed normally with my life.

    I don't know why I should be so oppressed with this fantasy. In the daylight hours, I'm your run-of-the-mill peaceful person. Never killed anyone.

    Imagine my surprise when I read (and studied the illustrations of) J. M. DeMatteis's 100% autobiographical "graphic novel" Brooklyn Dreams (Paradox, 2003) and discovered that my nightmare is not entirely my own. DeMatteis suffers from exactly the same recurring dream. "I remember the body — buried out behind my apartment building… or maybe stuffed in a trash can across the street….  Some poor, innocent schmuck I've either hacked up with a machete… or machine-gunned with Cagney-like ferocity… or maybe just kicked down a flight of stairs."  DeMatteis labors under the guilt that's provoked by this dream, and, like me, he can't explain it except to speculate that his life is a nightmare from which he's trying to awake.  But here's what's so fascinating to me: DeMatteis is a product of the exact same Brooklyn neighborhood as I (see map).  He grew up at the corner of Ocean and Foster, and he hung out at Newkirk Plaza, a commercial island that would nowadays be called a shopping center, where I endured painful haircuts, carried my mother's dry cleaning back and forth, and entered and exited the BMT subway.  Was there something about Flatbush, or, more particularly, something about "the Plaza" that made us killers in our dreams. Yes, I rather think there was.

    Is it significant that DeMatteis is a kind of replacement child? He is the survivor of a pair of fraternal twins. His potential sibling was spontaneously aborted — although DeMatties speculates, that, prescient about life's forthcoming difficulties, he might have "jumped." DeMatties' mother was about to be "scraped" when the doctor had second thoughts. In Brooklyn Dreams, DeMatteis describes his mother's and father's hysterical, debilitating and inconsistent protectiveness — traits often discovered in parents who haven't properly grieved the loss of a child. 

    Is it possible that the person whom DeMatteis thinks he murdered is, on some level, the unborn twin?   

    And so we have still another variation of the replacement child syndrome. 

  • Death and Dying in Boulder, Colorado

    Our local newspaper, the Boulder Daily Camera, has announced a new policy. No longer will obituaries be considered news. They've been turned over to the classifieds and will be written by friends or relatives of the deceased and placed by funeral homes. Bottom line: deaths are now an opportunity for revenue enhancement.       

    I'd always taken it for granted that keeping track of who's born, who's married, and especially who dies constitutes a considerable part of the mission of a local paper. Such events are bread-and-butter matters — part of the soul of the community. 

    The Daily Camera is certainly not where we find out what's happening in the big world — it's woefully inadequate in that regard, although it does pick up and truncate a few pieces off the wire. The Camera's sole reason for being is that it covers local news, and by doing so allows Boulder's citizens to feel that they have something in common. 

    But in fact the Camera only masquerades as a local paper. It's a holding of the folksy-titled Prairie Mountain Publishing, which is a joint venture of E. W. Scripps Co., the newspaper conglomerate, and the MediaNews Group (MediaNews itself owns the Denver Post and four other Colorado papers;  Prairie Mountain also owns the Colorado Daily). There's nothing local about the Camera and there's no reason for its absentee owners to care two cents worth who lives or dies in Newlands or South Boulder or Wonderland Hills. The Camera's job is to extract as much money as possible from Boulder and to forward the cash to Prairie Mountain Publishing.

    The Prairie Mountain overlords have placed a new publisher, Al Manzi, at the Camera; Manzi is a corporate lifer. I'm reliably informed that he came with specific instructions to up the Camera's profits. 

    And so, obituaries are now on a pay-to-play basis.

    How is it that there have been absolutely no complaints about the new policy?  Boulder is a contentious, argumentative city.  It would be reasonable to expect that the Camera's letters-to-the-editor columns would be saturated with protest, but there's been nary a word. Why?  Because Manzi has instructed the editorial staff not to publish any letters that protest the new policy. It's good to be the publisher. 

    Here are some proposals for Al Manzi.  Why stop with obituaries?  Or with wedding and anniversary announcements, which are obviously fair game. Letters to the editor: why not?  Why should a newspaper give free space to community opinion. Let those who can pay, pay. And editorials. Why should there be editorials when there can be advertorials?

    Here's a phrase to remember:  "revenue center."   

    In today's paper, there's an announcement that the Camera's editor, Sue Deans, who has local roots, has resigned. Could it be that her departure is related to Manzi's policy changes?  Would anyone be astonished to discover so?   

  • Two Erotic Poems

    Here are two excellent poems, of different eras and origins, that are at heart surprisingly similar. The first, "Politics," written in the pre-World War 30s, is by W. B. Yeats.

    How can I, that girl standing there,

    My attention fix

    On Roman or on Russian

    Or on Spanish politics?

    Yet here's a traveled man that knows

    What he talks about,

    And there's a politician

    That has read and thought.

    And maybe what they say is true

    Of war and war's alarms,

    But O that I were young again

    And held her in my arms!

    This lovely verse restates a perennial literary theme: the conflict between public and personal, or, between the life of duty and the life of pleasure. The speaker of the poem, whoever he is, withdraws from a troubling weary political conversation into a succinctly limned but very concrete and nostalgic sexual fantasy. The anxieties heaped up in the first ten lines are overpowered by the buoyancy of the concluding two. The hinge of the poem is the daring "But O" — "O" being the most dangerous syllable in poetry, which, when wrongly used, can be a sentimental disaster, but when discreetly employed, as here, condenses into one moan an outburst of genuine feeling that overwhelms a stultifying social ritual. For a pleasing moment, the speaker, powered by that great "O," withdraws from politics to enjoy, at least in his imagination, the pleasures and consolations of sex.  I 

    Here's another poem — a song, actually — quoted first in sixteenth-century manuscript version and then modernized.

    Westron wynde when wyll thow blow

         The smalle rayne down can rain

    Cryst if my love were in my Armys

         And I in my bed Agayne.

    (And now the modernized version.)

    Western wind, when wilt thou blow

         The small rain down can rain?

    Christ, that my love were in my arms

         And I in my bed again.

    In this anonymous quatrain, it's not politics but the cruel world itself that is so discomforting. It's winter, and the singer waits for the western wind that is the harbinger of spring. "Small rain" is not an idiom that is still in use;  nowadays we say "light rain" — the meaning is something like "April showers."  In the traditional world that we have lost, "small rain" might even have had just a touch of biblical resonance: "as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass." The "small rain," when it will at last come, will bring an end to harsh sterile winter and signal the start of fertile spring. To paraphrase the first two lines: "when will the western wind bring in the showers that will cause the earth once more to bloom?"  And then the hinge expletive "Christ" (paralleling Yeats's 'O' but shockingly blasphemous) which precipitates a potent sexual fantasy: in his warm, no longer wet wintry bed, the speaker can shower sex upon his beloved.

    Four exquisite, unmatchable lines of erotic poetry that are, miraculously, even more spare and resonant than Yeats's.

  • An East 9th Street Memory

    It was an entirely different world — East 9th Street in the old days. Sometimes it seems so long gone that I find it hard to believe it even though I was there: the last horse-drawn vegetable trucks and milk-wagons in America, an "old-clothes man" shouting his cry in the street, an itinerant knife-sharpener with his pushcart. On the street, a few, very few, rusting 1930s automobiles (it was the war, and all the factories were turning out tanks). And me, in first grade, wearing hand-me-down knickerbockers with long socks as if I were some turn-of-the-century waif.

    Next door to us was a two-family house. On the first floor, the very ancient Mr. and Mrs. Pynn, who tended their gladioluses in the tiny backyard. He was a retired merchant marine. (How did an old Cornish sailor come to live in our neighborhood?)  On the second floor were the Pynn's tenants the Rhodins, Thor and Pearl, who were at least a generation or so older than my parents and who had three adult children (Thor Jr, Yammie [actually Hjalmar] and Peggy) none of whom I ever met and whose existence I was aware only because Mrs. Rhodin would boast of their exploits — Thor Jr. was a physicist who, she said, worked on The Bomb. The Rhodins were very quiet people. He, a tall, thin, aloof man who never spoke, was either unemployed or retired;  he emerged from the house twice a day to walk his poodle. Mrs. Rhodin "went to business," as the saying was in the neighborhood.

    One hot summer day, I was reading in the back bedroom. Windows (ours and the Rhodins) were wide open. Across the narrow driveway, I heard Mrs. Rhodin launch into a furious tirade. All the promises Mr. Rhodin had made to her. How little he had accomplished. The kind of place they lived in. Stuck in Brooklyn. She supported him while he lazed around at home. And other complaints that I couldn't understand or don't remember — but there could be no doubt about her fury. Her litany of objections was loud and it seemed to go on for hours. A one-way street, though; I never heard Mr. Rhodin's voice.  Stunned, I shamelessly eavesdropped. 

    Was it days, or weeks, or months later that Mr. Rhodin was run over by a bus on 18th Avenue and instantly killed?

    Was there a connection between the tirade and the accident? And was it an accident?  Even in my childish naivete, I thought suicide. And because I knew Pearl and Thor's secrets, I felt as though I were a bit of an accomplice. 

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