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

  • Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

    Every American should read Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (Riverhead, 2003) — but for its political relevance, not its literary achievement. The novel is set in Afghanistan, which is one of the few countries where recent American foreign policy hasn't been entirely incompetent and disgraceful, so to read it feels reassuring and even patriotic. Inasmuch as we're engaged in a never ending war in Afghanistan, every one of our fellow citizens should have an idea why we're there and what we're doing. It's not at all obvious — Afghanistan doesn't have a single drop of oil.  Americans should know how bad the Taliban was and might become again, and also why we should remain vigilant against any rabid fundamentalist theology–even ones that are near and more domestic than Islam.

    In The Kite Runner, the conflict between Afghanistan's dominant Pashtuns and the exploited Hazaras reminds us that there are countries that are far more absurdly tribal than our own.

    Even though I learned a great deal from this novel, I feel that as a work of art, The Kite Runner is profoundly disappointing. It came highly recommended to me and I set out to fall in love, couldn't.  It's an overpraised work. It's advertised as written in "hard, spare prose" (I'm quoting from the back-cover blurb), but in fact it's written in prose without any style at all — and worse still, every paragraph or so there's a sentence that must make a discriminating reader cringe. The novel is very weak in characterization: aside from the autobiographical narrator, there's only one figure of any dimension –Baba– and all the rest are flat as pancakes. The novelist is particularly bad with women, who are never more than wallpaper. The child Sohrab, in whom so much is invested, speaks an idiom that no living child has ever spoken. Has the author ever had a conversation with a real boy  The plot is filled with obvious contrivances, artificial cliff-hangers, and (goodness gracious!) a climactic fist-fight. And while I appreciate the author's love of his native country, it doesn't seem at all honest to attribute Afghani problems to "Arabs, Chechens, and Pakistanis." In this novel, the Taliban is represented by a character who is half-German, a sociopathic admirer of Hitler, and (we eventually discover) a pervert who preys on little boys. He's a grotesque villain who seems to have wandered into an ostensibly serious novel from a James Bond melodrama. Why can't the author face the fact that the the Taliban are home-grown Afghani fascists? He would have given us a stronger novel if he had done so.   

  • Another Variation on the “Replacement Child” Theme

    In Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son (1848), which I've just re-read, Dombey's treasured son Paul dies when his older sister, Florence, is about six years old. Dombey has never liked his daughter Florence (he seems to blame her for being a girl) and likes her less after he loses Paul. Dombey could transfer his affection from his dead son to a possible "replacement," his living daughter. But he shuns that very legitimate psychological option. Instead, Florence is neglected, ignored, exiled, and eventually even struck by her hard-hearted father. In real life, it's inevitable that Florence would become alienated, bitter, and distorted. In Dickens' fairy-tale world her love for her father endures and she remains cheerful and optimistic. Although she experiences a truly horrible childhood, she suffers no permanent psychological deficit. Eventually, she reconciles with her father, forgives him (sic!) and produces two children (named Paul and Florence, of course).  Dombey, now chastened, grandfathers these true replacement children.   

    It's a big, good novel, and Dickens makes us laugh and cry but sometimes against our will and always in defiance of our knowledge of real–as opposed to idealized–children. Dickens' optimism and his faith in the power of forgiveness are wonderful but utterly otherworldly. Replacements, even quasi-replacements such as Florence, rarely fare so well.      

  • Radio Baseball

    Yesterday the Yankees were drubbed, absolutely demolished, by the Detroit Tigers. Sent home packing. Their loss joyed my vindictive, Yankee-hating heart.   

    When I was a boy hanging out at the P. S. 217 schoolyard and learning about life, there was no question but that the pin-striped Yankees were privileged bland tea-sipping Republicans, while the Brooklyn Dodgers were a bunch of upstart and underachieving heroes to whom we neighborhood kids could relate;  they were colorful, they were multicultural (before the letter), they were Democrats, and they were ours. 

    I watched this week's games on the TV and savored not only the outcome, but all the pealing bells and slick technological whistles that modern TV can offer: the multiple replays, the ball-tracking systems that allow the viewer to inspect both the pitcher's grip and his release and also the spin he puts on the ball.  I could count the number of rotations on Kenny Rogers' lovely curve. 

    Although TV is amazingly informative, in my heart I prefer baseball on the radio — the radio of my youth, that is. In those days, baseball was radio and radio was baseball. It's no wonder that baseball was the nation's game — and it's only game — when radio was the dominant medium.

    I love the perennial rhythms of radio baseball: "Steps to the plate… digs in… closed stance… takes a few practice swings…. steps up on the rubber… round comes the right arm…  slider low and outside….  checks the runner on first…  looks down for the sign…  the pitch… high fly to left…  settles under it… two gone in the third…."  It's an enduring, comforting sound. 

    Radio baseball as I remember it transformed the players into larger-than-life figures. It romanticized them. Radio baseball was a never-ending oral epic, Homeric in dimension. TV, with all its wealth of detail, turns the players into ordinary mortals; it makes them too familiar, too common. It plucks out the heart of the mystery. It's impossible to believe that these young men with their stringy beards and their horrid tattoos and their acneed faces are reincarnations of the bronze-age superheroes of my childhood. If an announcer were honestly recording what the TV sees, it would be, "steps up to the plate… digs in…  adjusts his nuts…  steps out of the box… spits a huge goober into the dirt…  now he's really excavating his left nostril."

    Radio was reverent; television is intrusive.

    Radio baseball was noble, and radio listeners were the better for listening to it. Radio baseball brought us together. On East 9 Street, where I grew up, there was very little in common among the Petrantos, the Burkes, the Bernsteins, the Constantinos, the Pynns, the Rhodins, and the Meinekes who populated the block  — except that we could all talk about Cox, Reese, Snider, Robinson, Campanella. I have a strong memory of riding my Ivor Johnson (later my Raleigh three-speed) on a hot summer evening when there were so many people sitting on their porches, or on their stoops, or on the fire escapes listening to Red Barber and Connie Desmond that I could bike for many a mile and not miss a single pitch. Radio baseball turned us into a community. Which is why we'll never, ever, forgive that foul black-hearted traitor Walter O'Malley.

    But I'm cheerful. It's autumn and the Republican Yankees have lost. It's a favorable omen. Is it too much to hope that, inasmuch as the Yankees have lost in October, the Democrats could win in November?   

  • What We Read in the Fifties: My Antonia

    During the 1950s, I spent four long years treading water at Erasmus Hall, a jam-packed public high school at the bepigeoned corner of Flatbush and Church avenues.  Among the required books in our overcrowded 11th grade English class was Willa Cather’s prairie novel My Antonia.

    I’ve just returned to My Antonia after an interval of fifty years.  It’s an excellent novel, though I confess with shame that I remembered very little of it.  I managed to retain a bit of the Nebraska atmosphere and emotion — the empty, roadless steppe, the harsh winters, the sod houses, and the spirit of the indomitable settlers.  I had absolutely zero recollection of the novel’s details and not so much as a glimmer of the story.  But then, there isn’t much in the way of plot — simply the history of narrator Jim Burden’s socially confused and sexually troubled response to the "Bohemian" immigrant Antonia Shimerda, a vibrant girl (and later a woman) two or three years older than he.  I remembered Antonia herself — wild, willful, determined, and ultimately triumphant — but I hadn’t even a trace memory of Jim.  Perhaps it’s because Antonia remains in Nebraska where she tames her prairie acres and also births and nurtures uncountable children, while Jim, burdened with advantages and a middle-class education, leaves Black Hawk to become a lawyer for the railroad (in effect, an antagonist of the smallholding farmer) and, if I’ve read correctly, remains unmarried and childless, a rueful observer rather than an actor in the great pioneer epic.

    I’m also astonished that I had no recollection of buxom, eager Lena Lingard, who teaches Jim about sex.  Was I so virginal and naive that I was unable to construe Cather’s circumlocutions?

    I didn’t remember, and surely didn’t appreciate, that My Antonia is a lovely, evocatively written book, extremely economical and at the same time rich in telling detail.   

    When I read My Antonia for the first time, I hadn’t encountered a plot of grass larger than the outfield at Ebbets Field (297 feet down the right field foul line), so "prairie" was a concept I had to take on faith. Now that I’ve been to Willa Cather country many times — not yet to Red Cloud itself but to Hastings, where the author spent her adolescence  — My Antonia no longer seems quite so extra-terrestrial.  Still, I wonder why the Italians and Irish and Jews and ‘Negroes’ who populated Erasmus Hall were supplied with such books– My Antonia along with O. E. Rolvaag’s no-longer-read Giants in the Earth, which is a desperately grim story of Norwegian immigrants in the Dakotas. I felt, and I think I was encouraged to feel, that they were the heroic, admirable, hard-working truly American immigrants, while we (shopkeepers, telephone linesman, garbage collectors, school-teachers) had somehow snuck in the easy, city way.  Why weren’t we asked to read books about us?  Weren’t we just as genuine?

    Midway through the novel, Jim takes a few seconds to meditate on the relations between old families like his own (his grandparents came from Virginia) and the Czechs and Scandinavians whom they looked down upon.  Conventional wisdom was that "all foreigners were ignorant people who couldn’t speak English."  "But today," says Jim, speaking as a surrogate Willa Cather herself, "the best that a harassed Black Hawk merchant can hope for is to sell provisions and farm machinery and automobiles to the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart Bohemian and Scandinavian girls are now the mistresses."   It’s an observation that applies not only to the economics of Nebraska in the 1880s, but is perpetual to the American experience.  Immigrants work hard.  Is it possible that today’s anti-immigration frenzy is driven by the fear that the present crop of brown-skinned newcomers will work so furiously that they’ll leave in the lurch the neo-nativists who seem to have contented themselves with a lazy respectability?

  • States of My Mind

    I once read the last 200 pages of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure in a single hour.  This extraordinary feat occurred in, I think, 1959 or 1960.

    As a general rule, I’m not a speedy reader — just about average, in fact.  But for one splendid hour, I was able to read at four or five times my usual pace.  I can’t explain why except to say that I was so focused on Jude and Sue and Arabella that the whole world outside of that book just disappeared.  Moreover, it wasn’t only that I read rapidly –I read with insight and with imagination.  I felt that I was in touch not only with the novel but with the author himself and that I could grasp and appreciate all of Hardy’s contrivances and triumphs. 

    Thirty or so years later, I re-read Jude and I was astonished to find that my recollection of the novel was superb — much more detailed and more accurate than of novels that I had recently read or re-read.  What a difference from my usual plodding self!  What a joy it must be to be truly intelligent about books!

    It’s obvious that my mind, and everyone’s mind, must have much greater capabilities than it ordinarily exhibits.  If only we knew how to access that ability. 

    Three or four times in my life, at a concert or listening to music at home I’ve felt myself jump to a higher level of understanding.  All of a sudden, the form of the music — even of complex music– becomes crystal clear and the inevitability of the next note becomes plain.  I seem to know what the composer thought he was doing.  And then, after a few moments, I become self-conscious and self-aware, the flood of insights wanes, and I decline to my usual, rather pedestrian level of appreciation.

    I also had one unique experience when I was between sleep and awake and a tune was repeating itself in my head, and just like! that I started to create interesting variations on the theme.  Composers sometimes say that they transcribe music that they hear in their brains, and for a brief moment, it was as though I myself was a composer.  But alack, after a few short moments, I came to conscious realization of what was happening and I was roused from my reverie;  creativity screeched to a halt.  I’ve never been able to revive within me that particular symphony and song. 

    It’s also happened that while I’m writing something, I enter what could be called a trance state and the world seems to drop away.  It’s then that I can write four or five good pages in the same amount of time in which I would usually grind out a hundred or so words.  It almost seems as though I engage a part of my brain that’s not ordinarily available.  Rimbaud once remarked that "literature is my unconscious talking to your unconscious."  Maybe geniuses are those who can achieve a level of concentration that allows them to delve into inaccessible areas of the brain.  There’s a story about Charles Dickens:  it’s said that he wrote the death scene of Little Nell in the midst of a crowded party and that while he was plying his quill, tears were running down his face and that he was totally oblivious to the noise around him.  He was there, in the room, but in another sense, he wasn’t there. 

    It happened to me two or three times that I was speaking to a group when all of a sudden I became aware that I was constructing elegant and artistic paragraph-length sentences — that my vocabulary had enlarged and that my metaphors were apt and expressive.  I can even remember admiring my sudden burst of eloquence– as though I was simultaneously both performer and observer.  But then, after a few moments, the synaptic connections that transformed me into an accomplished orator short-circuited and my supernova sentences reverted to mere competence.  Wouldn’t in be wonderful to be effortlessly eloquent!  One can only lament.  But to look on the bright side — I’m fortunate to have had a few grand moments.  Even Kekule only dreamed his benzene rings into existence one single time.       

  • In Which the Author Confesses His Want of Imagination

    I was taught, and I have no reason not to believe, that there are three forms of matter.  There are solids, there are liquids, and there are gases.  But nowadays I’m expected to believe that there are at least two other forms of matter.  No matter how I frazzle my brain trying to imagine what in the world can exist that isn’t a solid, a liquid or a gas, I make no headway.  But then I think– suppose I happened to live in a world in which there were only solids and gases — where all solids, when heated, immediately sublimed into gases?  Suppose there was no ice made of water– only substances such as dry ice which, it will be remembered, turns directly into carbon dioxide when warmed.  In such a world, it would have been beyond my conceptual ability to conceive of matter other than the two forms with which I was familiar.  Liquids would have been unimaginable.  I can only conclude that other forms of matter are definitely possible;  it’s just that I myself can’t imagine them.

    Similarly, there are the familiar colors of the visible spectrum:  red, orange yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.  These are the only colors (well, except for brown, and black, and white).  But it’s well known that birds see colors that humans (who apparently lost some color-sensitive cells during the course of evolution) cannot detect.  There are infra-red and ultra-violet colors to which birds respond but that humans are not equipped to perceive.  What do these colors look like?  I can’t possibly imagine, although I dearly wish that I could. An analogy:  let’s say that we humans were constructed in such a way that we could see only the colors of the spectrum that lie between yellow and blue;  there would be no way that we could imagine red or orange, even if we knew that other creatures detected those portions of the spectrum.  We would live in a world that had been drained of color.  But, in fact, compared to the birds, we do live in a color-attenuated universe.  Moreover, there’s no way that we can imagine what it is that we’re missing.

    I wonder also about bats.  Bats are blind but they navigate very precisely by echolocation, which is nothing more than very sophisticated radar.  They emit high-pitched squeals, and they process the echoes of these emissions in a manner that is so precise that they can catch mosquitoes on the wing.  But what is in their minds?  Does the radar create a picture — perhaps something like a three-dimensional black-and-white movie?  Or more likely, is something created in the bat brain that only a bat will ever know and that humans will never, ever be able to imagine.  And what about whales, who are not blind as bats but both see and also gather information by sonar.  What’s it’s like being a whale? 

    We’re limited by the evolved architecture of our brains.  We can’t imagine what we can’t imagine.  We can, however, know that there are phenomena that we can’t imagine — which is something, I guess, but all-in-all a rather paltry compensation.      

    (Plasma and the Einstein-Bose condensate, sometimes termed alternative forms of matter, are not so much alternatives to solid, liquid, and gas as they are states of the atoms themselves:  plasma amounts to, if I understand what I’ve read, atoms stripped of their electrons, while the EBC is a bunch of atoms that don’t form themselves into a lattice as they would in solids.  They just lie there, a frigid clump, each unrelated to the other except by proximity.) 

  • The Leader Theater; Our Leader

    I was not a committed moviegoer as a youth — punchball, basketball, softball, stickball in the street all having more appeal. But often enough, on a Saturday, especially when the weather was bad, there were double-feature matinees at the Leader Theater on Coney Island Avenue.  =Admission for children was fourteen cents when I first started attending; I think that by the time I reached high school the price had risen to as much as a quarter. It was a harmless way to spend a long afternoon. The theater was usually over-crowded with noisy ragamuffins who threw popcorn at each other during the love scenes. There was an impotent "matron" with a flashlight who had the frustrating job of maintaining a modicum of order.

    Musicals mystified me– I remember waiting for the dance numbers to end so that we could get on with the plot. I loved westerns and detective stories and tolerated, though I was frightened by, the war movies.

    In the cavalry-and-Indian movies (Stentorian voice :  "In the Years Following the Civil War…") there was a recurring scene that made quite an impression on me. Indians have attacked an "isolated farmhouse" or a wagon train. The colonel who has just come from West Point to take command of Fort Apache or Fort Bragg or Fort Collins summons the wizened scout who has spent his life on the frontier. The fresh-faced colonel tells the experienced old buckaroo that he's heard that there are Indians camped down by the bend of the river, and that he's going to send a detachment of troops to teach them a lesson. The scout looks at the arrow that the colonel shows him, and says, "But colonel, them Indians down by the Brazos (or Snake or Powder or whatever river it happened to be that particular Saturday matinee) are Comanche; this here's a Kiowa arrow."  But the bull-headed, ignorant colonel won't listen. As far as he's concerned "they're all injuns," so he orders an attack, and soon the whole frontier is in flames and before the movie comes to an end, settlers are hatcheted and the Kiowas are decimated.

    Now I'm sure that George Bush went to see the same movies as I did. But he couldn't have grasped their point; it was far too subtle for his intelligence. He must have thought that the stubborn colonel analyzed the situation correctly when he said that "injuns is injuns," because nowadays  we have a foreign policy that says, if we're attacked by Al-Quaeda, let's just turn around and revenge ourselves on the Iraqis. After all, Arabs is Arabs. The result: the entire frontier is in flames.

    There was a recurring scene in the war movies as well. An American soldier, or a French resistance fighter, has been captured by the Germans. He refuses to talk; won't spill any secrets.  The German colonel says to him: "ve haf ways of making you talk. I'll haf to turn you ofer to him." And then the camera would focus on an obvious sadist in an SS uniform, licking his lips. Next there was a brief but terrifying shot of the captive sweating and screaming. 

    In dozens of films, the villainous Germans routinely employed torture. Americans and their allies, on the other hand, were brave and upright and honorable and played by the rules.

    I can guarantee that at this moment there are movies being made all over the world in which the colonel is American and the sadist is CIA. And these films are going to be watched on Saturday afternoons by generations of children.

    What has George Bush done to us?  What have we allowed him to do?

  • “Geographical Dyslexia,” or “Directional Disability,” or, People Who Lose Their Way

    [January 17, 2012.  There are at this moment three pages of comments appended to this entry, which I wrote almost six years ago. The comments are most interesting and revealing.  Don't miss 'em — Vivian].

    In The Accidental Tourist (New York [Knopf], 1991), Anne Tyler describes a malady that, as far as I know had never before been acknowledged in literature.  All four of her eccentric Leary siblings share "a total inability to find their way around." Macon Leary, who writes travel books for a living and is the novel's focal character, christens this trait "geographical dyslexia."

    I'm not convinced that "geographical dyslexia" is a good name for the Learys' condition. An alternative, "directional disability," is not much better. Whatever the name, sufferers will know what is meant.  There's a class of people (I'm one of them) who are chronically lost; who take a few steps in a strange city and can't find their way back to the hotel; who don't know how to exit the building they've just entered because they've strolled a corridor or two; who are totally befuddled and even panicked when they drive into a familiar intersection from an unaccustomed direction; who break into a cold sweat when someone says, "you know how to get home — just reverse the directions"; and who, because they're frequently lost, are subject to ridicule and mockery from their very own families and from their most intimate friends.

    Macon Leary has a theory about his persistent dysgeographica. He thinks he's disabled because all his life he's moved from house to house, and "people who'd been moved around a great deal never acquired a fixed point of reference, but wandered forever in a fog." I know of no evidence to support this wholly improbable suggestion. Macon clutches at a straw because there's no data (and there's no data, at least in part, because there's no accepted name for his condition).

    Every sufferer nurses his own unscientific, anecdotal theory. I was once convinced that my dysgeographica was related to my total absence of rhythm — as a child I could never learn to pump a swing or even to jump rope. My brother thinks that it must be connected to his aversion to heights. My niece takes the view that it's somehow related to her motion sickness and to her bouts of dizziness. A friend thinks that the trouble stems from the fact that she was naturally left-handed but was trained to be right-handed. In fact, no one knows whether dysgeographica is connected to any other trait, or whether it's one of a cluster of traits. In terms of hard science, the directionally disabled have been allowed to languish in the dark ages.

    I'm almost convinced that dysgeographica runs in families. My father was monumentally disabled, and one of my brothers is so impaired that he's occasionally looked to me for directional advice. Barking up the wrong tree, is he!! (I have another brother who always knows exactly where he is — perhaps he's adopted.) In The Accidental Tourist,  Anne Tyler, who's a very sharp observer of mankind, tellingly attributes dysgeographica to all four Leary siblings.Tyler also notes that Macon has learned how to cope: he "kept a stack of index cards giving detailed directions to the houses of his friends — even friends he'd known forever." Coping mechanisms are essential to the dysgeographical. When I have to drive any distance without a navigator, I write the directions with a thick pen in a notebook and keep it open on the passenger seat. For some reason, I can't seem to retain more than one or two of the approaching turns in my mind, so I must continually refer to the notebook. Mapquest has proved to be a boon, especially if I remember to print out in very large type.

    In The Accidental Tourist, no one pokes fun at the Leary siblings. But in real life, it's considered quite amusing to laugh at the chronically lost. People don't understand that dysgeographica is a disability like colorblindness. I can't say how many times I've been instructed to "concentrate," or "pay attention' — advice which is just as effective as commanding a color blind person to make an effort to register shades of yellow or blue. Without a label and without a support group, the dysgeographical will continue to be ridiculed. It's time for us to unite. Unless we do so, we are not only doomed, like Macon Leary, to be "adrift upon the planet, helpless, praying that by luck [we] might stumble across [our] destination," but doomed to be humiliated as well.

    (July 22, 2007.  I've written again on directional dyslexia.  If anyone is interested, take a look here, here, and here.    And now one more.)  And also.

  • Did Roz Chast Attend P. S. 217?

    Diligent readers of this blague (a “fit audience though few,” as John Milton said in a slightly different context) will remember that I’ve reported on the language, the culture and the sexual politics of P. S. 217 and its neighborhood.

    Newsflash!! It now appears that P. S. 217 contributed to the worldview of the century’s finest cartoonist, the New Yorker’s Roz Chast.

    I had long suspected that Roz Chast was a neighborhood girl — where else but in darkest Flatbush would a nine-year-old go to bed with “The Big Book of Horrible Rare Diseases?” The most overt clues to her place of origin are found in the ‘cartoon a clef’ “Ultima Thule,” in which a young girl imagines life in various exotic non-Flatbush neighborhoods: “Red Hook, which was filled with drunken sailors, loose women, and stevedores; Flatland, which stretched flatly and unpopulated, into oblivion; and Sea Gate, with its maze of Venetian canals, from which, once you entered, you’d never emerge.” In the last panel of this masterpiece, a girl in a green pleated skirt floats freely in outer space: “I just wanted to see what was on the other side of McDonald Avenue.”

    McDonald Avenue, during my childhood, was the outer limit of homey Flatbush. Every once in a while, when I was feeling particularly adventurous, I’d ride my bicycle across McDonald, but I always hustled back. Two reasons: a) it was different there — different architecture, different kinds of stores, different people, and b) the streets ran at a 45 degree angle to the norm. Very scary, very ‘here be dragons.’

    I had a job on McDonald Avenue when I was in high school: I shelved books at the Kensington Public Library (which was scarcely more than a storefront operation), but the building was on our side — the Flatbush side — of the street. I don’t think that I ever crossed to the foreign side — why would a sane person want to do such a thing? So my intuition was that if Roz Chast grasped the mystical end-of-the-earth aura of McDonald Avenue, she had to have grown up somewhere in the vicinity of P. S. 217.              

    More evidence:  In the New Yorker for September 4, there’s a Roz Chast bildungscartoon called “What I Learned.” After nursery school, where she was informed that “if you swallow your gum, your guts get all stuck together, and you die,” our young heroine “went to grade school in [her] neighborhood.” And there’s a full panel of a square featureless brick building labeled “P. S. 217.”  The building doesn’t resemble the P. S. 217 of my memory except for the concrete schoolyard and the chain-link fences that surround it, but it must be the real thing. The curriculum is ever-so-familiar: Vasco da Gama, “Our Friend, Corn,” chain-stitching. Although nothing about the compass and the protractor, for some reason.

    I had read that Roz Chast grew up in Brooklyn, and that her parents still lived in the old neighborhood. Just for fun, I looked up the surname Chast in the white pages. It’s an uncommon name;  in fact, there’s just one Chast in all of richly-populated Brooklyn. Here’s the relevant map. The Chast apartment on Webster Avenue is a block or so from the corner of Newkirk and Coney Island Avenue where P. S. 217 is located; even more startling — it’s no more than a couple of hundred feet from East 9 Street, where I lived from age zero to age 17. Case closed.

    Roz Chast’s genius cannot be circumscribed.  She’s the master of the mock-heroic for which Flatbush is famed; she’s to the cartoon what Woody Allen is to movies — someone who interprets the world through Brooklynish eyes. She’s the sly queen of kvetchitude. And she’s a graduate of fabled P. S. 217. I’m so proud.

    Image result for roz chast ultima thule

     

  • On Tenure in Colleges and Universities

    Most people either don't understand academic tenure or regard it as a flagrant scam — nothing more than a lifetime cushy job burdened with little work and rewarded with long summers vacations. Popular wisdom is entirely incorrect. Tenure is a good deal for those who achieve it and it's a bargain for America.   

    The conventional defense of tenure is that it protects freedom of speech.  Professors, it's thought, are natural born dissenters who are likely to propound unusual ideas, which, unless they're 'dangerous,' should be tolerated. (Even though it should be obvious that it's only the dangerous ideas that need protection.)

    There's some truth to this proposition. Some jobs have been saved (but those who remember the McCarthy period know that university administrators often tripped over themselves to appease the attackers). The professoriat should be encouraged to dissent — it's good for the country to encourage divergent and challenging views. But it's also true that on the whole, professors are not particularly controversial. If there have been cases in which scientists, or business faculty, or professors of literature or music have needed the protections of tenure, they must be rare indeed. Occasionally, very occasionally, a social scientist says something just a bit too anti-establishment, and then along comes some yahoo legislator to demand that the dissenter be fired and tenure be 'investigated.'   Nevertheless, it's hard to make the case that a hundred thousand faculty in non-controversial fields need to be tenured so that one or two people a decade can say something outrageous. I myself think that first-amendment rights as confirmed by the courts are just as good and perhaps better protection than tenure for dissenting views. 

    In my opinion, the best justification for tenure is not freedom of speech but frugality. Let's begin with the self-evident truth that a person who earns tenure in a respectable institution possesses some very positive intellectual and psychological traits. While one doesn't have to be a genius to write a dissertation, one has to be able to amass evidence and structure a logical argument and write a decent sentence or two. One must be diligent;  one must be self-motivated (only half of people who finish graduate courses manage to complete a dissertation); moreover, in the process of securing tenure, a person gains experience in presenting information to groups and also learns a great deal about management and mentoring. These various skills are readily transferable to the private sector of the economy where they would be well rewarded. But when a person of talent and ability chooses to work in the academy, he or she forgoes a large part of his potential earning capacity.  nstead of a high salary, he receives a lower salary plus the security which comes in the form of tenure. So it's perfectly reasonable to conceive of tenure as compensation in lieu of cash. 

    When an accomplished individual accepts tenure and a diminished salary, society benefits in a number of ways. It hires talent on the cheap, so education becomes less expensive. If universities had to match private-sector salaries, the cost of sending a million young adults to universities would become prohibitive. There's also a less obvious but equally important benefit. Without tenure, only the independently wealthy would be able to specialize in, say, in old Mayan, or Tokugawa Japan, or any of thousands of subjects that require concentration and effort but do not have any particular market value. These important but exotic subjects would either disappear from the curriculum, or they would be taught by faculty who would bring to the table the biases of the moneyed classes.  (This was indeed the case in America before the 1940s when tenure became institutionalized.)  Faculties would revert again to what they were when Harvard had its Gold Coast: social clubs for amateurs and coupon-clippers. More than any other innovation, tenure has produced the modern democratic university, where faculty can be drawn from any social class.

    I don't mean to say that there aren't problems with tenure.  Tenure is difficult to obtain, but it's also difficult to lose, and faculties could do a much better job at self-policing. If a professor isn't doing his job, isn't keeping up with his subject, isn't make a good faith effort to make a contribution to learning, then he should surrender his claim to lifetime employment. There certainly is such a thing as "deadwood"– though much less of it than popular mythology would claim. But the deal is this:  lifetime security for a lifetime of learning. Those who don't honor the agreement should be speedily purged. No free rides for the lazy dogs.  But this caveat aside, tenure is a fine, successful institution.

    American universities have become and still remain the envy of the world;  the tenureless university would be less innovative, less democratic, and less distinguished. 

  • My New Tooth

    Toward the end of July, while I was in Lyme, New Hampshire celebrating a friend's third marriage, I bit into a fancy cracker that was topped with a fragment of sun-dried tomato. With my tongue I felt what I assumed to be small stone. I spit it into my hand and after a few disorienting moments realized that I was looking at one of my very own teeth. Number 10, in dentist's language, upper left front.

    I was shocked;  I'm not used to teeth falling out of my head– especially so undramatically. No pain, no cracking sound. I put the tooth in my pocket and found a mirror to inspect myself — mighty vampirish, I thought.

    The next day I saw a dentist down in Thetford and was advised that I needed a root canal, followed by a "post and crown," which sounded less like a dental process than a London pub. A week or so later and I was off to White River to a root canal guy, who hummed Joanie Mitchell songs while digging into my mouth and kept checking the weather to see if he could get in a golf game before the rains came. I asked him why the procedure was so damn expensive and he muttered something mighty unconvincing about the "level of technology."  What with the abscess and all it took two long visits for him to finish rooting around in my canal.  And then one day I took a drink of homemade lemonade and felt another tooth fall out, but — false alarm — it was just a lemon pip.

    The root canal didn't do anything about the big empty space in my head.  I've heard that there are some ladies who find that other-side-of-the-tracks look quite attractive, but in all honestly it didn't seem to do much for my woman. So back home to Colorado and a visit to still another dentist, who installed a post and also a temporary artificial tooth and sent me to the "lab" for a "custom color."  The lab was a surreal experience– way out in the country in a dumpy building there's a oversize space where several rows of white-coated-scientist types with microscopes and very official looking tools sat crafting teeth. Probably out-of-work sculptors, or possibly impoverished MFA students. 

    Custom color — why would I want a custom color?  After the house and the car, this prosthesis is going to be the most expensive object I own.  I think it should be gleaming white, not mottled and yellowed like my native teeth. I'm paying big money, and I want everyone to know that #10 is brand new.  I wouldn't  buy a new car and immediately dent and scratch it, would I?

    Another couple of weeks and I should be all custom-colored, posted, and crowned.  And from now on I'll remember to stay away from sun-dried tomatoes.  Dangerous stuff.

    September 20.  I've been putting the old tooth under my pillow for a month now, but no luck.  Apparently the tooth fairy is indifferent to sexagenarian choppers.

    September 28.  The permanent fake tooth has now been installed. I like it better than the original. It does its job and it's not going to have cavities or fillings or pain. If I had the cash I'd give thought to a full set.      

  • Bush Read “Three Shakespeares”

    More outrageous even than "mission accomplished" is the absurd claim that, during 2006, our very own president, George W. Bush, has read fifty-three books. It's a fool's game to try to re-invent the class dunce as an intellectual, but they're trying.

    There's some incriminating videotape floating around the "internets" in which POTUS, heretofore known to devour only the box scores, boasts that he's an "ek-a-lek-tic" (his pronunciation!) reader. Not only has he been laying into Camus, he's also read "three Shakespeares." He's both full o' shit and unidiomatic. Native speakers of English don't say "three Shakespeares"; they say they've read "three Shakespeare plays."  Next the Great Decider will tell us he's just hustled over to the Kennedy Center where he listened to three Bachs.

    The White House press office has supplied the names of two of the plays to which Bush lays claim  — Hamlet and Macbeth. Was there a third play?  If there was, it's name, like the third murderer and the fabulous WMDs, is lost to history.   

    If W. had actually turned the pages of Hamlet and Macbeth, he might have noticed that in both plays, a bad man has become head of state by extralegal means.  Claudius poured a bit of poison into the ears of Hamlet's father and Macbeth stabbed Duncan. Neither ruler thrives in his ill-gained position, and neither has been able to repent his evil deed. Claudius can't bring himself to pray and Macbeth's way has fallen into the sere and yellow leaf. Fat chance that our unelected president would notice the parallel to his own situation — or that he would be moved to repentance and renunciation. In the world of literature, there's justice:  Claudius is run through with a sword and Macbeth is beheaded. No such luck in real life.

    And what about the mysterious third play that the Uniter claims to have read?  If he were looking for parallels to his own career, he could flatter himself by reading one of the three plays that dramatize the life of King Henry V, in which a scapegrace prince reforms, gives up alcohol and screwing around, and becomes the conqueror of France. The parallel is inexact, because Henry enjoyed some traits of character that George distinctly lacks: courage, eloquence, and the willingness to endure the same hardships as the soldiers who serve under him. A better parallel to George II is the succeeding Henry– Henry VI– a pious, immature, weak man unable to control his powerful advisers.

    In truth, the character in the thirty-seven "Shakespeares" whom Bush most resembles is neither Claudius, Macbeth, nor either of the Henrys, but Lepidus in Anthony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare depicts Lepidus as a man who's happened into a position far beyond his natural abilities. He's way over his head in the Second Triumvirate, not at all of the stature of the heroic but flawed Anthony or the efficient, masterful Caesar. Even the servants recognize that Lepidus is simply bush-league. One of them tells the audience that "to be called into a huge sphere, and not to be seen to move in't, are the holes where eyes should be, which pitifully disaster the cheeks."  This is a bit of Shakespearean obscurity certainly beyond the budding intellectuality of incurious George. It means simply that Lepidus must fill a position as huge as a Ptolemaic sphere, but he can't because he's tiny and makes no impression at all, and as a consequence his circle is as vacant as an eye-socket that lacks an eye. Shakespeare does not think well of Lepidus and soon allows him to be carried off the stage, drunk. So much for morally and intellectually pitiful men who try to play with the big boys! 

    Bush might be even less than a Lepidus, who, when he's not drunk, speaks plainly enough. Perhaps a better comparison is to one of Shakespeare's braggart soldiers, like Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well, or to one of the malapropizing clowns — as for example Much Ado About Nothing's Dogberry.  Dogberry is given to such Bushlingo moments as "is our whole dissembly appeared" and "be vigitant."  And other illiteracies.  But it was beyond even Shakespeare to imagine a world in which a clown could become head of state.  To him, such a reversal of the natural order would have been unthinkable.      

  • An Anniversary

    On the second Monday of September,1956, I found my way to Rockefeller Hall and my very first college class. It was a laboratory section of Chemistry 105.

    There were more than a thousand people enrolled in the course. 

    We had all taken a mathematics aptitude test, and I had been placed in an advanced section of twenty so-called mathematically gifted students.  (Only rarely in my lifetime have my skills been so badly misjudged.)  In my section there were nineteen young men, all armed with slide rules — a device, now blissfully extinct, that I never mastered — and one very pretty brown-haired brown-eyed maid (still sixteen, I was later to discover) with an athletic step and a musical voice. The guys, brandishing their slide rules, clustered around the young lady– bees, or drones rather, drawn to the solitary flower. Many were the offers to help her insert her thistle tube into her cork. Alas, I could offer no assistance, introductory chemistry class being both the alpha and omega of my scientific career.

    Nevertheless, in despite of my laboratorical inadequacies, this sunny September day fifty years later, I'm still married to that brown-haired brown-eyed young woman. 

    So today we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first sighting. 

  • An Iris Anecdote

    In my Vermont garden, I grow a number of different varieties of German (also called bearded) irises. One variety — a bicolor I inherited a decade ago from my sister– had died. I put a spade into the ground to see if I could discover the source of the problem, and I found that the rhizomes had deteriorated to a loathsome smelly unholy mess the consistency of overripe bananas. It was a truly disgusting situation and one that I had never encountered before. For the sake of garden sanitation, I dug out the decay and some surrounding soil and carried the filth to the local dump. 

    Later in the summer, I read this sentence in a garden book: "we cannot confirm the folk wisdom that bacterial soft rot in irises can be caused by horse manure."  I knew that rot in iris rhizomes could be spread by iris borers, but these irises were borer-free. On the other hand, I had been working the soil with load after generous load of horse manure. So perhaps there's some truth to the derided superstition. In any case, since I switched to fertilizing irises with the abundant droppings of sheep I haven't had a recurrence of the disease. But then again, I haven't been able to re-test the particular susceptible variety–it being an iris now extinct in my garden.

  • A Fish Story

    The pond, once brimful of brekkekkek-kexing, has become virtually silent. What's happened to all the frogs?  Is it acid rain?  Or is it the great blue herons who patrol the shoreline morning and evening?

    I think we've located the culprit. The pond has been colonized by catfish, specifically, by the brown bullhead or horned pout.  Omnivores that they are, the pouts must have been dining on those gelatinous strings of frog eggs, or perhaps even hunting down the tadpoles. At least that's the theory.

    To reproduce, pouts scoop out a nest near the shoreline and deposit a cluster of eggs. Then they hover nearby for a week or so, fanning the area with their tails.  One pair made a nest just where we enter the pond to swim and they were guarding their clutch a little too aggressively, so I decided to take action. There I was, spade in hand and poised to strike. I felt as though I was a figure in a diorama at the natural history museum — "Paleolithic Man Hunted Fish with Sharpened Sticks."  My technique might have been primitiive, but nevertheless I managed to nail one of the ugly suckers — a twelve inch guy with a flat face covered with nasty barbels — and a few minutes later I planted him in the vegetable garden, where he's now recycling himself into tomatoes. Later in the summer, a guest caught a second pout with a net.  More juicy red tomatoes.

    But what about the hatchlings and fingerlings?  Perhaps the herons are on our side.  Meanwhile, we'll put out a call for a fisherman. Although horned pouts are hideous, they're reputed to be good table fare — not my table, however.   

    We're looking forward to a froggy renaissance.

    September 5.  I've now read in Scientific American that herons kill and eat catfish. They spear them with their long beaks, carry them to dry ground, and repeatedly wound them. Then they swallow them whole. So when the herons come to visit the pond, we'll have to maintain both distance and silence and let them work. It's good to know that the great blues are our allies. 

  • The Colorado Rockies and the Christianists

    From 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the barrier, until 1957, when Walter O’Malley hijacked the franchise to Los Angeles and cut the heart out of Brooklyn, the Dodgers represented the best of America. While the United States remained legally segregated by race and fractured by religion and ethnicity, it was the Brooklyn Dodgers who offered the nation a vision that was more inclusive and more just.  One year before Harry Truman issued an executive order banning segregation in the armed forces, eight years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, eighteen years before the enactment of federal statutes protecting the right to vote, the Brooklyn Dodgers hired Jack Roosevelt Robinson to play first base. And on an unforgettable day in April in Cincinnati, when racist fans hurled taunts at Robinson, Pee Wee strolled over and put his arm on Jackie’s shoulder.  It was an iconic moment and one that transformed not just baseball, and sports, but the world.

     

     The boys of summer made us proud to be democratic, proud to be Americans. All good men were Brooklynites, at least some of the time. Moreover, the Dodgers were talented: they won five pennants during those years, and, in 1955, they won the world championship. Half a century later the Dodgers are still the most loved, most chronicled, most mythologized team in history.

     

    What will be written about the Colorado Rockies fifty years from now?  The Rockies’ watchword is not inclusion but exclusivity. They are a team not of destiny, but of narrow sectarianism. They search for and hire players of “character”– which means players of their particular "Christian" denomination. Their general manager, Dan O’Dowd, is thoroughly delusional. "You look at some of the moves we made and didn't make. You look at some of the games we're winning. Those aren't just a coincidence. God has definitely had a hand in this." A hand in what?  In a history of failure?  In a losing record?  Last place in their division once again?  God takes sides in baseball games? Either God is bush league with bat and glove or O’Dowd is a one helluva sloppy theologian.

     

    O’Dowd, along with club president Keli McGregor and manager Clint Hurdle, join together for telephone prayer sessions. Is it possible that they hold on to their jobs not because they are capable of assembling a winning team, but because they subscribe to the same beliefs as owner Charlie Monfort (“I believe God sends signs, and we're seeing those")?

     

    Baseball is not about religion. It’s about 95-mile-an-hour fastballs, about hard sliders, about come-from-behind ninth-inning victories.  Colorado taxpayers didn’t fund three-quarters of the cost of Coors-–Coors!!! — Field so that evangelical ballplayers could testify to their faith.

     

    And what a curious faith! The Rockies depart from established Christian thinking and veer toward the banal new cult of “prosperity gospel.” Reformation Calvinism had asserted that an omnipotent deity elects some for salvation and consigns many more to damnation. Believers sometimes understood material success to be a sign (but never, ever a reward) of salvation. The Rockies’ unChristian theology turns Calvinism upside-down and defies common sense when it proclaims that faith leads directly to base hits. (As a matter of fact, “prosperity gospel” seems to work better for the capitalist owners than for the players. The team loses, but the franchise increases in value).

     

    There's no hint of supernatural intervention in the Rockies unremarkable record. If the Rockies were to run away from the opposition, it would indeed constitute a "miracle" — but a miracle only in the common secular sense of the word. It would be a miracle indeed if an incompetent skinflint ownership could somehow stumble into success. 

     

    Are the Colorado Rockies the most foolish, fatuous, and vain organization in the mountain west?  Not in the least. There's a church in Broomfield that has a website where “you can send your prayers and encouragement for the Rockies by clicking here.” Click for Christ. Good Lord!

     

    I wonder if the Rockies ever knew, or if they would like to learn, who it was who said “do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him." If they could answer this question,they'd be in a position to recognize that there's less real religion in the entire history of the Colorado Rockies than in five seconds of Reese and Robinson.

     

    October 19, 2007.  More on the Rockies and religion? Click here. 

  • How to Deal With Enormous, Man-Eating Pythons

    A few weeks ago, I noted that in The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin made the case that early humans were prey more than they were predators. Now I've read a new book on the subject: Donna Hart and Robert W. Sussman, Man the Hunted (Westview, 2005).

    The book's title is a bit misleading because it concentrates on primates other than modern man. Nevertheless, it was good to be reminded of the circumstances under which our hominid ancestors lived. Seven million years ago and until recently, our diminutive forbears were forest dwellers who were pursued by huge crocodilians, outsized eagles, packs of hunting dogs, a variety of giant cats, and hyenas the size of modern lions who had jaws strong enough to crunch human skulls in a single bite.

    And also man-eating snakes. In the course of their discussion of snakes, the authors of Man the Hunted report on the instructions provided to early missionaries to Africa on the proper response to pythons. (A 25-foot-long reticulated python can weigh up to 300 pounds.)

    Remember not to run away; the python can run faster. The thing to do is to lie flat on the ground on your back with your feet together, arms to the sides and head well down. The python will then try to push its head under you, experimenting at every possible point. Keep calm, one wiggle and he will get under you, wrap his coils round you and crush you to death. After a time the python will get tired of this and will probably decide to swallow you without the usual preliminaries. He will very likely begin with one of your feet. Keep calm. You must let him swallow your foot. It is quite painless and will take a long time. If you lose your head and struggle he will quickly whip his coils around you. If you keep calm, he will go on swallowing. Wait patiently until he has swallowed about up to your knee. Then carefully take out your knife and insert it into the distended side of his mouth and with a quick rip slit him up.

    Well-meant advice, I'm sure, but perhaps difficult to follow. Suppose you're just not in the mood to allow the python such liberties with your person. Suppose you've forgotten to bring your knife; suppose the python decides to start with your head rather than a foot. Suppose you involuntarily wiggle just a teensy bit. Suppose you just don't feel that it's a good day to be engulfed.

    I think that, on the whole, running away and screaming at the top of your lungs is a more sensible reaction. But then again, I never signed up to be a missionary.

  • Everything is Crepuscular

    When I encountered an excerpt from wunderkind J. S. Foer's Everything is Illuminated in the New Yorker, I was dazzled. The writing was witty, focused, intelligent, and emotionally rich.

    Now I've read the whole book, and I'm deeply divided about this Jekyll-Hydish performance. The good parts are still excellent. Jonfen's Ukrainian adventures in search of Augustine are beautifully managed  — although I must say that the joke about Alex's English, so wonderful in the excerpt, quickly grew wearisome. But the interspersed history of the shtetl of Trachimbrod is just plain bad. It's boring, embarrassing, and imitative, consisting not only of helpings of I. B. Singer and of the least attractive aspects of Marquez and his numerous unmagical epigonoi, but also of an unhealthy dollop of supermarket-checkout prose. Can Foer discipline his talent, find his own voice, and move into the big leagues?  It would be tragic if he continues to indulge his genius for imitation. Or perhaps he'll be both good and bad, like Larry McMurtry, who's written world-class novels (Leaving Cheyenne,  Lonesome Dove) but has also squandered his talent on pounds and pounds of glossy trash. Time will tell.

  • Life with Gilbert and Sullivan

    When I was no more than a hemidemisemiquaver, I would listen attentively as my mother sat at her old Hardman piano and sang ditties by Gilbert and Sullivan. I believe that the first song I ever learned “by heart” was “I’m called Little Buttercup” with its still mysterious “pretty polonies.” In 1947, when the D’Oyly Carte company made its first post-war American tour, I was taken to see a performance of H. M. S. Pinafore. I was utterly transported. No subsequent theatrical experience has worked equivalent magic. I still think that it’s a little miracle that I saw with my own rapt eyes such legendary Savoyard stalwarts as Ella Halman, Darrell Fancourt, and Martyn Green.

    Pinafore was the only stage play that I saw until I was past adolescence and out of the house. What could have prompted such uncharacteristic extravagance on my parents' part? Whatever the cause, the result was that my infatuation with Gilbert and Sullivan's operas was early established. The attachment was difficult to sustain because there was no family phonograph; moreover, those thick, heavy albums of 78s would have broken the budget. I was fortunate to possess a tattered old anthology of G  & S songs from which I would pick out tunes as best I could.

    In college I had a roommate who was a genuine savoyardophile and who arrived with a "hi-fi" and an extensive collection of ‘long playing’ records. I took advantage of his resources and his knowledge. During the fifties and sixties I attended performances of the full G & S repertory in various amateur and semi-pro productions-–even a rare Utopia Ltd. at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge. I also acquired a treasured collection of D’Oyly Carte and Glyndebourne performances on vinyl. During the seventies and eighties, I couldn’t clean the house or cook a meal without the assistance of Sir Arthur. But turntables and 33s went the way of 78s, and then the vinyl itself came to be sequestered in plastic tubs in the basement.

    I was G & S-less for a decade or so, but Topsy-Turvy (1999), the great Mike Leigh film, rekindled an unfaded love. Now, sixty years after my first Pinafore, I’m compiling a new collection of recordings (everything’s out there on CD if you’re patient). I now own reissues of classic D’Oyly Carte recordings and also of a sparkling Mikado by the Welsh National Opera. In the fall, the entire collection will be transferred to the iPod. Who would have guessed that I'd have gone through four or five new technologies in my lifetime? And yet the song remains the same.

    What is the attraction? Gilbert and Sullivan, I think, gave me early authorization to be silly. The operas licensed criticism of oppressive or irrational social norms. Everything was fair game. Inasmuch as I was raised in a rigidly conformist society, the G & S precedent was a great liberation. I’m absolutely convinced that a great big hunk of my sense of humor was formed around a Gilbertian core.

    When I was a boy, it was the clever patter songs that most struck me. They’re still good, and some are brilliant. Bunthorne’s soliloquy in Patience, in which he confesses that “he’s not fond of uttering platitudes/ In stained glass attitudes” is as fully on target now as it was in 1881. Simply substitute tired modish Derridadaism for the "high aesthetic line," and “the meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a transcendental kind” jumps right out at you.

    But nowadays, it’s not Gilbert's free-standing wit but Sullivan's glorious ensembles that cause the shiver of delight. Instances: Iolanthe's “Oh, many a man in friendship’s name”; Ko-ko, Pooh-Bah, and Pish-Tush singing “To sit in solemn silence in a dull dark dock”; in Ruddigore, the trio “In sailing o’er life’s ocean wide,/ No doubt your heart should be your guide/ But it is awkward when you find/ A heart that does not know its mind.” And many others, including, certainly, the quartet from Yeoman of the Guard: “Strange adventure, maiden wedded/ To a groom she’s never seen.” Still another transcendent moment: the high silliness in Pirates, when the assembled choruses kneel to sing the resplendent, ridiculous: "Hail poetry, thou heaven-born maid…  All hail, divine emollient." I think that the touchstone of all touchstones is a truly wondrous brief duet in Iolanthe, when the lovesick Lords Tolloler and Mountararat, tenor and baritone, rejected by Phyllis, who chooses a simple shepherd over their dignities, leave the stage singing "Neath this blow/ Worse than stab of dagger/ Though we mo-/ Mentarily stagger,/ In each heart,/ Proud are we innately,/ Let’s depart, dignified and stately.”

    In addition to the satire, and the splendid music, G &S also supplies great big helpings of joy. G & S manage to persuade me, at least for the duration of the play, to give credence to “rapture, rapture,” and that “pleasures come in endless series,” and “joy unbounded,” and “laughing song and merry dance,” and “happier than any/ A pound to a penny,/ A lover is when he/ Embraces his bride."

    There’s much to deplore in Gilbert’s creations: nasty racism, an insufferable obsession with class (embraced even as it appears to be refuted), jingoism, which is sometimes satirized but often (as in the faux-japonisme of The Mikado) unconsciously accepted, as well as the constant distasteful bludgeoning of middle-age women. But just as we forgive Shylock in order to embrace King Lear, so we must suspend our moral indignation to revel in the best of Gilbert.

    Last week, two of the grandchildren visited for a few days. We rented the DVD of the Central Park Kevin Kline-Linda Ronstadt Pirates. The kids were attentive, engaged. Next time they visit: more Gilbert and Sullivan. Perhaps we can plant a savoyardian seed.   

  • My Cyberfriends

    People out there misjudge me. Marcia Wainwright, for example, is certain that I need to lose thirty pounds in thirty days. She proposes that I use her "miracle African weight loss herbs." OK, maybe I'm a few pounds above my fighting weight, but certainly not thirty — what the heck is she thinking? Joellie Adella is concerned about my hair loss situation. Elsie Bertie thinks that I need fuller and more erotic lips. Susan van Elk wants to help me discover the benefits of a healthy colon. The "enormity" of my "manhood" is a worry of Penelope French; its lack of "rockhardness" seems to make Hoodiea Gordoni mighty eager to come to my aid. Jacklyn Hughes feels that my sperm count is low; she can help (but how? and for goodness sake– why?). Thank you very much, guys, but I don't really need your assistance: hair, lips, colon, etc. are all doing just fine.

    There's more:  Caroline McPherson and William McWilliams both think that I need to accessorize: she suggests "bling watches and designer handbags" while he proposes "Rolex replicas." I don't know what Natasasha (sic) thinks she  knows about me, but, frankly, I'm not especially anxious to employ her services as a "screwbuddy"; nor do I welcome the efforts of Ms. Ginger Snapz — possibly a pseudonym — who has big surprises in store for me and whose specialty is pole-dancing. These ladies have a wrong impression. So too does Teressa Brandel, who offers to solve all my problems by introducing me to "horny teen barnyard slutzz." Not this grandpa.

    Considering all the negativity, it's good to know that there are not only Russian princesses but also a former Nigerian cabinet official out there who are eager to improve my finances. They both have "unbelievable offers" for me. Sure I have to send a few thousand bucks to an offshore bank, but I'm promised a return of great enormity on an investment that is rockhard.

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