Dr. Metablog

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

DR. METABLOG’S
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  • Words New to Me

    There's a small mystery in Tolstoi's Sebastopol in 1855. An officer drives "a telyezhka, which [says Tolstoi] stands halfway between a Jewish britchka, a Russian travelling-cart, and a basket-wagon." How in the arithmetical world can any object be "half-way" between three different kinds of wagons? A translation problem, let's hope. Moreover, the word "telyezhka" doesn't appear in any of my English dictionaries. An internet search located the not very precise definition, "baggage cart." And what the heck is a "Jewish britchka?" In nineteenth-century Russia, did horse-drawn vehicles have religion?  Not according Gogol in Dead Souls, where a britchka is specifically located in terms not of ethnicity, but of class; it's a "light spring-carriage of the sort affected by bachelors, retired lieutenant-colonels, staff-captains, and land-owners possessed of about a hundred souls." (Is it like or unlike a troika or a drozhky?) "Telyezhka" and "britchka" made me realize that my notions about horse-drawn vehicles are extremely hazy, and that when I read pre-internal-combustion novels I pay too little attention to the distinctions that separate Jaguars from jalopies; they're all coaches to me. But surely it makes a difference whether our hero arrives in a fly ("a horse drawn public coach") or a trap ("a light, often sporty, two or four wheeled carriage in which passengers sit face-to face") or a landau ("a large four-wheeled covered carriage"). Not to mention chaise, phaeton, cabriolet, sulky, surrey, curricle, barouche, brougham, gig, hansom, buggy, victoria, four-wheeler, and dogcart.

    Also in Tolstoi's Sebastopol; frequent references to "gabions," which are "hollow cylinders of wicker or strap-iron like a basket without a bottom which are filled with earth and used in building fortifications." If they have no bottoms, how are they filled?

    Other words new to me: from The Return of the Native, a number of lovely dialect words from Thomas Hardy's county of Dorset: "nunnywatch," predicament; "stunpoll," blockhead; "gallicrow," scarecrow; "kex," the dry, hollow stem of a plant; "knap," the summit of a small hill; "vlankers," sparks; "huffle," a gust of wind; "fess," lively; "withywind," bindweed; "scroff," firewood debris; "scammish," clumsy; "twanky," complaining; and, most relevantly, "spring-van," a van "resembling a large wooden box with an arched roof that opens from behind."

  • My Campaign for City Council

    My positions:

    1)  NO DOGS WITHIN CITY LIMITS. Rationale: fatal and near-fatal dog attacks, dog bites, barking dogs, whining dogs, ubiquitous dog "waste," dogs annoying citizens in parks and open space, the indulgence of dog owners. But what about seeing-eye dogs? Slippery slope, that. Sorry, no dogs (except for purposes of vivisection).

    2)  NO CHRISTMAS LIGHTS. Rationale: waste of electricity and other scarce resources. Global warming. Bad taste.

    3)  NO MUSIC WRITTEN AFTER 1897. Rationale: obvious. Why 1897? Death of Johannes Brahms. Also, no amplified music in a motor vehicle that is audible outside the vehicle.

    4)  NO SMOKERS. Rationale: lung cancer, heart attacks, emphysema, ashes, bad odors. Note: not "no smoking" — "no smokers."  No going outside of city limits to light up and then re-entering.

    5)  NO IDLE CHATTER. Rationale: incontrovertible.

    6)  NO VISIBLE TATTOOS. Rationale: I don't like tattoos. Why visible?  Whole-body inspections would be intrusive. 

    7)  NEW ANNUAL HOLIDAY: Charles Darwin's birthday, February 12. Rationale: uncontroversial celebration of a great thinker. I reject out of hand those extremists who want to move the holiday to December 25. I'm a uniter, not a divider. 

    My slogan:  Brilliant!  Charismatic!  Omniscient!  Hyperbolic!   

  • Phrasal Verbs: Put .*.

    The caprice of phrasal verbs (formerly called verb-adverb combinations) came to my conscious attention sometime in the 1950s, when I first read Mansfield Park. Fanny Price, the heroine, is lying on a couch; her sailor brother William cries, "Poor Fanny!… how soon she is knocked up! Why, the sport is but just begun. I hope we shall keep it up these two hours." I was shocked. In the P. S. 217 schoolyard where I learned my English, "knocked up" had one and only one definition: made pregnant. There could be no doubt– especially when the meaning of knocked up was confirmed by such transparent sexual equivocations as "sport," and "keep it up these two hours."  When did proper Fanny Price find time to get herself knocked up and how could I have been so inattentive a reader as not to notice?  And where did Jane Austen learn schoolyard slang?

    How in the world was I to know that in nineteenth-century England, "knocked up" was an innocent phrasal verb that meant "tired."

    Phrasal verbs are treacherous. There's nothing in the basic definitions of either "knock" or "up" that yields tired (or pregnant either, for that matter).

    I was equally confused when Othello, quelling a disturbance, commanded the contending parties to "Put up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them." Inasmuch as I wasn't familiar with the phrasal verb, "put up," which means "sheathe," I guessed that "put up" meant its exact opposite — "brandish." "Put up" is misleading: what's "up" about sheathe?

    Just as there is nothing "up" about "up", there is nothing "out" about the "out" in "put out." The meaning that I knew was the demotic one to which my dictionary provides the formal "to indulge in promiscuous sexual intercourse." A woman who puts out can get herself knocked up. But "put out" has other equally unpredictable meanings: "make an effort," for one, and "annoyed" ("I was put out by his use of verbs") for another. Moreover, a person who's put out, can also be "put off," or dissuaded; "put on," or deceived; "put up," or lodged; "put up with," or tolerated; "put down," or harshly criticized. A person can be persuasive and "put across" a point, or be insane and be "put away" in an institution, or can be frugal and "put by" money for a rainy day; or can be gullible and "put upon."  Phrasal verbs are exceedingly nasty little critters, and they must drive English language learners off their collective gourds. 

    Next week; same time, same station: got .*.   

  • The Replacement Child: Juliet

    In the narrowest definition, a "replacement child" is a being who is intentionally conceived because an older sibling has recently died. Such substitutes must endure the lifetime burden of competing with a lost and often idealized child. Because it is almost impossible for them to please their parents, they easily become confused and frustrated, or worse.

    Here's a dry summary from a learned journal: "When bereaved parents give birth to a child or children subsequent to a perinatal death, their constructions of the family necessarily change. The subsequent child is thought to be at risk of psychopathology (the replacement child syndrome) if parents have not sufficiently grieved their losses."  "At risk of psychopathology" is a hesitant, euphemistic formulation. 

    The term "replacement child" has also been defined more broadly: it may, for example, refer to any child in a family that has lost one or more of its offspring (rather than solely to one conceived as a direct consequence of a death). In an even larger sense of the term, there are all kinds of 'symbolic' replacements: one psychologist has gone so far as to suggest that any Jewish child born after the European holocaust should be so considered. This idea seems extreme.

    In pre-industrial societies, replacement children received no particular notice because infant deaths were so very commonplace. While there must be many replacement children in traditional literature, the earliest who comes to mind is Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which was written in 1595. 

    Juliet's biological mother is aloof and distant, but she has a second and more loving parent — her nurse — who does much of the actual work of mothering. The nurse has lost her own daughter, Susan, and has become wet-nurse to Juliet. "Susan and she — God rest all Christian souls –/Were of an age. Well, Susan is with God;/ She was too good for me." Clearly, Shakespeare suggests, Susan has been idealized in her natural mother's mind. The Nurse has a replacement child in Juliet, a state of being that goes far to explain the profound bond between surrogate mother and surrogate daughter.

    It is uncharacteristic of Shakespeare to discuss the infancy of his heroines, nor can I think of any other pre-modern work that devotes so much space to wet-nursing or to the trauma of weaning. Although he depicts in detail the relationship between Juliet and her nurse, Shakespeare does not seem to anticipate or foreshadow the interest that later centuries would take in the replacement child syndrome. Instead, he focuses on Juliet's sexual alacrity.

    The nurse tells a pertinent story (and leaves us with the impression that she has told it many times before): when Juliet had just learned to walk, she fell and "broke her brow"– cut her forehead, as we would say. "And then my husband –God be with his soul,/ He was a merry man–took up the child,/ 'Yea,' quoth he, 'dost thou fall upon thy face?/ Thou wilt fall backward when thou has more wit,/ Wilt thou not, Jule?'  And by my holidame,/ The pretty wretch left crying and said 'ay.'"  "Falling backward" is bawdy talk for a woman's posture in sexual intercourse. Retelling her husband's tale, the Nurse dramatizes her expectation that when Juliet comes of age, or "has more wit," she will be eager to fall backward. To this proposition Juliet — "the pretty wretch"– says 'Ay.'  Juliet's personal psychology, Shakespeare seems to hint, formed itself to gratify the suggestions of her surrogate mother.

    The vigorous sexuality that might be appropriate for the nurse's natural daughter Susan, who would have been a servant girl, has been transferred to the bourgeois Juliet, who, if she had followed the example of her birth mother, would have been properly restrained, repressed, and diffident. In effect, the nurse contrives to live her own desires through her replacement child; the result is Juliet's sexual impetuosity and subsequent death.

    William Shakespeare was born in 1564, but an older sister Joan was baptized in 1558 and another, Margaret, in 1562. Both died in infancy. The future playwright was therefore doubly a replacement child.

    There's an additional complexity in the family drama because the infants he replaced were female. How this oddity affected his own psychological development is open to speculation. Perhaps because he was the oldest son in a family that had lost two daughters, he was especially cherished. Or perhaps a boy who replaced girls developed the empathy to create complex female characters in an English drama that, until Juliet, had limited itself strictly to one-dimensional stereotypes.  

  • One of the Only

    Call me prescriptive, but the all too common phrase "one of the only" offends both ear and logic. What does it mean to say that "the $11 billion Crusader artillery rocket system is one of the only weapons systems canceled by the Bush administration?" If it's the "only" cancellation, say so. If it's "one of the few," or even, one of "very few," why then, let's just go ahead and say that. "One of the only" is an unpleasant and chilling redundancy — it means no more than "one of the one."  What's wrong with the word "only" that it needs help?  Isn't "only" only enough?  Perhaps "only" is wearing out, and "onliest" — now confined to rural or comic speech — will someday replace it. Onliest has the appearance of a superlative, but, logically speaking, "only" can't have a superlative. But logic, as we know, doesn't always govern the path of language. Redundancies and illogicalities abound, and awkward formulations such as "one of the only" aren't all that very one-of-a-kind singly unique.   

  • What We Read in the Fifties: Blackboard Jungle

    In Blackboard Jungle, neither the author Evan Hunter, nor his lead character Richard Dadier, who recently started to work at North Manual Trades High School, can keep their eyes off teacher Lois Hammond's "full and rounded breasts." She's so "busty" and "big-breasted" that every time she so much as shrugs her shoulders, both Hunter and Dadier continually focus on the way that "her breasts move." These remarkable bazooms are at some times concealed by a blouse that is "thin nylon" and at other times by one that is "peekaboo." There are occasions when the Hammond breasts are enhanced by "the delicate lace of her slip and the slender straps of her brassiere," and other times when the "firm abundant cones of her breasts [are] caught tight in a white cotton bra." But whether enhanced or restrained, not only the "thrust of her brassiere," but even more so "the obvious thrust of her breasts" are under constant scrutiny. After an inadvertent sighting, Hunter and Dadier are able to report that one of these breasts (it isn't specified whether the left or the right) is "a youthful breast, firm, with a nipple large and erect."

    It is dispiriting to recall that for high school students in the 1950s, this romance-novel twaddle seemed like a breakthrough in the direction of realism. But consider the context: in the novels that were read in Erasmus Hall English classes, none of the heroines (Eppie, Rebecca and Rowena, Lucy Manette) had any breasts at all, or at least, none that came to the attention of author or reader. The Blackboard Jungle seemed to be frank, honest, down-to-earth, and it was recognized in the schoolyard-and-drugstore culture of mid-century adolescents as a "hot" book, and along with The Amboy Dukes and Forever Amber was passed in cheap paperback editions from hand to sweaty hand. It reflected a reality (bad language, sexual urgency, near-anarchic disorder, gratuitous cruelty) far more present and immediate than did our 'official' reading. 

    Returning after all these years to Blackboard Jungle has been a sad revelation. As a work of literature, it's piss-poor. The tough-guy prose aims to be hard-boiled, but it's undercooked ("the boys in the class considered English a senseless waste of time, a headless chicken, a blob without a goal"). The story is padded with interminable didactic digressions, and many of its episodes are either woefully overwrought or just simply meretricious — Dadier's infant son, for example, is stillborn for no earthly reason except to squeeze a sob from the reader.

    Nevertheless, and in spite of its amateurism, it's still a disturbing book. Blackboard Jungle covers the first four months of Dadier's teaching career: in the course of one melodramatic semester, he prevents the rape of a fellow teacher, he's attacked and beaten on the street by a gang of students, and he's slashed in a knife-fight in his own classroom. So much violence in so short a period of time seems to be beyond belief. Does it accord with the facts?  Wasn't it the case that the local bully-boy, Herbie W.,, attacked Mr. Proshan, our seventh-grade social studies teacher and wrestled him to the classroom floor?  Didn't the gang leader Runzi Marfeta terrorize the schoolyard? Weren't there fights outside the Bedford Arch almost daily? Wasn't it the case that every tenth student wore a "garrison belt," the three-inch buckle of which was ground razor-sharp, just in case? It was the heyday of "juvenile delinquents" and zip-guns and gravity knives and gang fights, and in many of my classrooms the out-of-control ambience was established and sustained by the psychopaths and sociopaths among whom I was educated. And isn't it also the case that Blackboard Jungle doesn't even tell the whole truth but is a sanitized version of real life? There's not a single mention of drunkenness, of heroin and other widely-used drugs, of accidental pregnancy and illegal abortion, or even of what used to be called, euphemistically, "broken homes."

    Almost entirely anti-nostalgic, the novel did nevertheless provoke an occasional smile: Delaney cards, "official class," "daddy-o," street corner harmonizers. There's also one very brilliant comic touch in Blackboard Jungle. At North Manual Trades High School, there's a men's teacher's lounge in which Richard Dadier seems to pass a lot of his time, smoking. In the lounge is a couch, and on the couch is a man — a teacher — lying prone, his face concealed. He's asleep at the beginning of the novel, and he's still asleep at the end; Dadier never sees his face and never learns who he is or what subject he's supposed to be teaching. It's an exquisite metaphor for an exhausted and overwhelmed educational establishment. Blackboard Jungle is a bad book, but Evan Hunter earned his place in the story by bringing the scandal of high schools like North Manual Trades to public attention. 

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  • Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944)

    Laura is a stylish noir whodunit that holds up well even after the passage of sixty years. It is cleverly written and handsomely cinematographed but it also comes with some murky psychological baggage that may or may not make sense. At the heart of the enigma is Waldo Lydecker (played by Clifton Webb). He's so head-over-heels in love and so ferociously jealous of Laura (the ingenue Gene Tierney) that he'll resort to anything, even murder, to keep her from other men. The premise is good whodunit fare, but it would make more obvious sense if Lydecker weren't both old and gay.

    Clifton Webb was fifty-five when the picture was made, but he looks and acts ten or fifteen years older. He may be a bachelor, but he's not an eligible one. There's a rumor that Webb had a clause in his contract with Twentieth-Century Fox that barred the company from alluding to his homosexuality, but the prohibition, if it existed, didn't stop him from playing Lydecker with a pronounced gay affect. He's fussy, he's bitchy, he's a queen — in short a stage homosexual in every aspect except that he's not obviously interested in men. (Well, almost never;  he does expose himself to the detective Mark McPherson [Dana Andrews] when he steps out of the bathtub and asks McPherson to throw him a robe.)

    One clue to Lydecker's character occurs in the first scene. He's spying on the detective, who's wandering around Lydecker's apartment, browsing an extensive collection of fragile objets d'art. McPherson goes to pick up a piece of glass and Lydecker calls out "Careful, that's very valuable" (I'm quoting from memory). From this incident we learn two things: Lydecker is a collector of beautiful works of art, and he's willing to let people look but not touch. This same attitude controls his relations to Laura: he cherishes her beauty, he molds her in a Pygmalion-like way, but he's also hyper-protective. For him, she becomes an untouchable work of art (the portrait of Laura, on which the camera focuses so obsessively, is the metaphorical signifier of her place in his mental world). His cool sexuality (he's perfectly content with twice-a-week dinners) and his age (he's more interested in fathering Laura than in making love to her) are less significant than his pygmalionism. 

    By transforming Laura into a work of art, he attempts to preserve her virginity. He therefore shoos away her potential lovers: he destroys the career of Jacoby, the painter, by writing a vitriolic attack on him; he collects revealing information about the southern gigolo Carpenter (Vincent Price), and he competes with McPherson. It's a neat turn that to do so he becomes a detective himself — loitering in the snow outside Laura's apartment, eavesdropping behind a post in a night club, etc. Eventually he comes to understand that he can't preserve Laura's "purity;" it's then that the film turns to violence. After all is lost, he gives away the game when he says to McPherson, with horror, "I suppose you'll have a disgustingly earthy relationship" [i.e. with Laura]. 

    It's fascinating that McPherson, though he has all the outward marks of the macho gumshoe, is himself tepid about sexuality, lacks charisma and emotion, and that the film allows him and Laura only one slight awkward peck of a kiss.The detective is not a creature of passion, but he may be, like Lydecker, a lover of art; it's revealed that Laura's portrait will be auctioned and that McPherson has put in a bid on it.   

  • What We Read in the Fifties: Women and Thomas Harrow

    Women and Thomas Harrow was John P. Marquand's last novel. It was published in 1958; Marquand (born in 1893) died in 1960. It's another good but not great book. Despite the witty surface, it's very sad. Thomas Harrow (clearly a surrogate for Marquand himself) is a successful but not brilliant playwright; in the course of the novel, he comes to realize that he's squandered his talent and made a mess of his personal relationships. The last line of Women and Thomas Harrow: "In the end, no matter how many were in the car, you always drove alone." 

    I'm still trying to figure out why my father thought so well of the novels of John Phillips Marquand. For one thing, Pop was clearly in tune with the author's relentless anti-modernism. In form, Marquand's novels are Victorian. There's no experimentation, nothing unusual or original in content or presentation. Moreover, in all the novels, not a landscape but has been destroyed, not a custom but has deteriorated, not a value but has been compromised. The modern world in Marquand's view has become too subject to analysis, too Freudified. Sometimes Harrow employs, with some resistance, the exact words that I heard without irony from my father's mouth: "No one could escape from convention for long….  It was advisable to accept the mores of one's time, no matter if they shifted. It was better to be in tune… with the beat of marching music."  No dancing to a different drummer either in Marquand or in my father.

  • The Caucasus; Hadji Murad

    When I read Neal Ascherson's Black Sea, I had to admit that I knew nothing at all about a huge and contested part of the world. I followed up on Ascherson's bibliography and read a series of ethnographic studies of ancient Black Sea peoples — Scythians, Sarmatians, etc. — and from there moved eastward to the Caucasus and leaned about the Abkhazians, the Ossetians, the Chechens, etc. Yesterday I finished Nicholas Griffin's Caucasus (2001), which is half travel book and half a biography of Imam Shamil. Shamil, of whom I also knew zero until a few days ago, is the legendary Avar guerrilla leader who led the opposition to the Russian conquest of the mountains in the mid-nineteenth century. He's the national hero of the Chechens, and is a compound of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo– with a little Islamic fervor added in. The Russians conquered the Caucasus with a combination of overwhelming force, superior technology, and ruthlessness: they systematically obliterated villages, murdered as many civilians as possible, and when all else failed, cut to the ground the primeval beech forests — defoliation not then an option — in which Shamil and his Murids found refuge.

    Reading about Shamil led me to Hadji Murad — Tolstoy's extraordinary last novel and one in which Shamil is a minor character. In 150 pages or so, Hadji Murad says as much about the brutality, the stupidity, and the vanity of war as War and Peace says in ten times as many pages. Tolstoy, who had soldiered in the Caucasus, wrote in his diary (according to Griffin) that the war was "so ugly and unjust that anybody who wages it has to stifle the voice of his conscience." Hadji Murad is a charismatic leader who's involved in a foolish feud with Shamil; he surrenders to the Russians, tries to escape, and is killed and beheaded. That's the plot, but the genius is in the telling. After recounting an atrocity in which the Russians, in sport, destroy a small settlement, ruin the crops, and bayonet a small child, Tolstoy describes the feelings of the remaining villagers as they set about the hopeless task of rebuilding: "It was not hatred, because they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them  — like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves  — was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation." Tolstoy is disgusted by the Russian actions, but he's equally repelled by the brutal mountaineers, and he goes out of his way to draw parallels between the utterly cruel Imam Shamil and the fat, ignorant, vainglorious Nicholas, the Czar of All the Russians.

    In the nineteenth century, the Russians cut down the forests; in 1999, they conquered Grozhny (the capitol of Chechnya) by dynamiting every significant building in the entire city.       

  • What We Read in the Fifties: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

    Sloan Wilson's 1955 best-seller is saturated with alcohol. Nary a character can carry on a conversation without first mixing a highball, a scotch, a manhattan, or a batch of martinis. "Let's have a drink" is the lubricant without which the novel couldn't proceed. In The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the characters not only drink like fishes but they also smoke like chimneys. There's not a social interaction that isn't punctuated with lighting up, puffing, flicking, extinguishing. But the use of alcohol and tobacco do not pose moral challenges; they're just there, like food and water, and do not become issues for either the characters or the author. Were the 50s so rich in nicotine?  I think they must have been: our house, like everyone else's, was a thick blue haze. Between my mother's cigarettes and my father's pipes and cigars, I must have inhaled many lifetimes worth of second-hand smoke during my childhood. On the other hand, we departed from the norm in that we were not spiritous. While there was always a bottle of something or other on hand to offer to the very occasional guest, I never once noticed either of my parents drink liquor, or beer or wine for that matter, unprompted. Omnipresent alcohol, or rather the manners that surround its consumption, dates The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Right there, in the middle of the Beat Generation, is an old-fashioned Bourbon Generation novel. 

    The "gray flannel" of the title refers to the ubiquitous 50s costume of the upwardly mobile. I re-read the novel, which I remembered more from the Gregory Peck-Jennifer Jones epic than from the book, with the expectation that it would be another Marquand-like story of conformity and thwarted rebellion among the aspiring execs. In truth there is some of that, for Tom Rath, the central figure, is for a while caught up in corporate climbing. But the button-down world is not as vividly realized as is the prevailing suburban angst. Basically, the novel is a story of a marriage that's lost its juice. Rath, a good man but one who's become extremely cautious and tightly-wound, had been a paratrooper who dropped behind enemy lines in Europe and in the Pacific. He's killed seventeen men, most with his bare hands — one an eighteen-year-old, and one (accidentally) his best friend — but he's never been able to tell his wife Betsy about the war and about the way the war altered his values. In the last chapter he finally breaks through the barrier, but only because he has to admit to Betsy that, while waiting to be shipped from the European to the Pacific theater, he lived with and fathered a child with a Roman "soldier's girl." Rath asks a very good question — why is it that he's not ashamed to have killed, but he is ashamed to have loved. Rath's revelations are the heart of the novel, but they're given curiously short shrift (as though Sloan Wilson unconsciously allies himself Tom Rath's impulse to suppress the truth).

    I think the book was so popular because it must have helped to purge some of the psychological traumas of the war. It's a moderately good story written in moderately bad prose.      

    It was sad to read Sloan Wilson's obituary (he died in 2002) and discover that he was an alcoholic for much of his life.            

  • “Crosspatch, draw the latch” and Industrial Capitalism

    One of the most joyful of nursery rhymes, and a personal favorite, is this:

                                   Crosspatch,

                                   Draw the latch.

                                   Sit by the fire and spin.

                                   Take a cup,

                                   And drink it up.

                                   Then call the neighbors in.

    The clicky rhymes and jaunty meter are undeniably beautiful — and there's much more meaning than poems of this kind usually contain.

    In the first triad, a "crosspatch," — a "cross or ill-tempered person, usually a girl or woman" — is at work, spinning. In the second triad, she's exhorted to drink and also to invite her neighbors "in" — presumably into the room, or just as likely, the tiny cottage — where she lives alone. In the first strophe, the theme is isolation, but in the second, isolation is challenged by the calls of society and by the hope of a more satisfactory and convivial life.   

    What can we know or imagine about the surly individual addressed by the evocative designation, "crosspatch?"  The first element in the name –"cross"– implies not only sourness, but also resistance, as in "cross-grained." The second element — "patch" — suggests that the crosspatch's discontent is not without cause. We can infer that she's poor because she's a person whose garments are either assembled from various rescued materials, as in "patchwork," or that her clothes are, in another sense of the word patch, repaired. In addition, it's possible that ill health has caused her skin to become "patchy."  But "patch" also signals a degree of mental stress, as in Shakespeare's "patched fool." In this signification, patch derives from Italian pazzo, crazy. The crosspatch is therefore disabled physically, socially and psychologically.

    At the outset of the poem, our "crosspatch" sits glowering, impoverished, perhaps muttering indistinctly, friendless, without family, her youth blighted by poverty, huddled against the last embers of her dying fire. What is it that she is spinning? No doubt she ekes out a meager living in the impersonal mercantilist "putting-out" system. Some exploitative proto-capitalist venturer has delivered to her lonely door a quantity of unspun wool or cotton;  her job is to return the material to him in the processed form that will then be passed on to an equally poor weaver, then to a tailor, etc. She works alone and never sees the fruits of her labor except for the occasional, paltry farthing that allows her a bare subsistence. No wonder she is slightly barmy and has "drawn the latch" — closed herself off from her fellows. But then, suddenly, comes the antistrophe, and in a series of importunate injunctives the crosspatch is asked to rejoin the company of humanity. "Take a cup,/ And drink it up,/ Then call the neighbors in."  What's in the cup?  Spiritous liquors, no doubt, which, though designed to dull the pain of wage-slavery, also act to augment the revelry with which the poem climaxes. The wine is not sipped, but it is drained to the lees. And once the door is unlatched, and the neighbors — neighbors of both sexes, no doubt — are called "in," why then, let the libations and the wild rumpus begin! Alienated labor is suddenly set aside and replaced by the natural bonds of one human being to another, and the stasis of the opening lines of the poem transforms in a flash into a wildly kinetic bacchanal. Emotional weakness transmutes into healthy liberated pleasure. Dour Puritanism, with its punishing work ethic, yields to the spirit of holiday and to pagan, perhaps even dionysian, excess. Here, in miniature, is the essence of the comic vision. In a few powerful lines, freedom, good humor, and natural appetite triumph over bondage, artificiality, social constriction and repression; the justifiably sullen crosspatch, in a burst of energy, reintegrates herself into the social nexus from which she has been banished.

    Whether or not the crosspatch can permanently liberate herself from the oppressions of industrial capitalism, or whether the anodyne and spurious relief of alcohol is a merely transient solution is left unresolved. To ask a short poem, however dense with meaning, to answer so difficult a question would, just possibly, be to ask too much of it and, perhaps, to push the evidence the merest tad too far.

  • Flower Names

    When I was a just a young sprout, every summer I would grow, from seed, in my father's crowded backyard garden, a small plot of snapdragons. Inasmuch as I had, or seemed to have in those years, endless time, I became a connoisseur of the plant's growth habit: its elongated long smooth leaves with their pastel undersides, its spikes of buds, opening from bottom to top, its varied colors, and especially its unusual flower. I'd watch the bees lift the "dragon's" jaw, squeeze inside, sometimes to temporarily trap themselves within. As much as loved the flower, I think I loved its name even more. "Snapdragon"– a euphonious, crunchy, satisfying, evocative sound — scary too, but how can a flower be scary? 

    I recently opened the first of this year's seed catalogs to find the favorite flower of my springtime listed as "antirrhinum." The scientific name is not inaccurate — it's Latinized Greek for "snoutlike" — but I have to say that antirrhinum is not a word that sings to me. It sounds less like a border annual than a cold remedy..

    The modern plant breeders, intent on appearing to be learned and scientific, have gone too far. I want the old names back. Not lathyrus, but sweet pea; not achillea, but yarrow; not dianthus barbatus, but sweet William; not calendula, but marigold. Let us even do away with the almost naturalized name of delphinium; bring back the larkspur. Not veronica, but speedwell. I want a garden that's filled with stocks, lilies of the valley (not convallaria), loosestrife (the yellow variety, not the invasive purple), love lies bleeding, love-in-a-mist, marguerites, brushwood.

    I make one exception: liverwort. Not that anyone would want to grow it, but just in case. In fact, I banish all flower names that contain the element "wort." In my garden, spiderwort grows under the name tradescantia. (Tradescantia, poor thing, has a second and equally unacceptable name: cow slobber.)

    Am I alone in this preference?  Not a bit.  I'm in the best company. In the noblest poem in the English language, John Milton lists the flowers that "strew the laureate hearse" of the dead poet Lycidas. ("Rathe" means "early"– it survives in "rather," which used to mean "earlier";  "freaked" is "streaked.")

                                             Bring the rathe primrose, which forsaken dies,

                                             The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine;

                                             The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,

                                             The glowing violet,

                                             The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,

                                             With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head.

    It's a great swelling litany. Savor again the music of that lovely last line: "With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head." Instead of cowslip, Milton might have written "primula veris, family primulaceae," but he was too smart to do so. Words like cowslip, lady's mantle, goldenrod, forget-me-not, and, yea, snapdragon live and breathe and are laden with metaphorical perfume. Cowslips hang their heads; primula, like antirrhinum, have no heads to hang. Moreover, if Milton had been looking about for alternatives for the cowslip, he would not have consulted the plant breeders but returned to popular lore and he would have chosen from such tasty words (alternatives all to cowslip) as herb peter, peggle, key of heaven, fairy cups, mayflower, lady's keys– all of which are human, humane, and evocative. But John Milton, who exhorted "daffodillies to fill their cups with tears," had an ear, and I can therefore affirm with absolute, unimpeachable, and total confidence that he would have rejected with horror another synonym for the common cowslip: the palsywort.   

  • Edward Gibbon Comments on Randall (Duke) Cunningham, Halliburton, etc.

    "At this important crisis (i. e. the attack on Rome's Balkan outposts by Huns in 375 A. D.), the military government of Thrace was exercised by Lupicinus and Maximus, in whose venal minds the slightest hope of private emolument outweighed every consideration of public advantage; and whose guilt was only alleviated by their incapacity of discerning the pernicious effects of their rash and criminal administration."  Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXVI.

  • Bush’s Knowledge of Geography

    Our president's knowledge of geography is famously shaky. He seems to be under the impression that the Kingdom of Jordan is a gulf coast country, that Africa is a nation, and that Europe is one of America's key allies. On being shown a map of South America, he said, to the president of that continent's largest country, "Wow, Brazil is big." Perhaps he merely misspoke when he said that "border relations between Canada and Mexico have never been better," but you never know, do you?

    Iraq is a large country — over 170,000 square miles. It's larger than California and two-thirds the size of Texas. In population it's just about the same as Texas– about 22,000,000 people. Does our president know these facts?  Did he know them when he decided to invade and occupy Iraq?  Did anyone on the diplomatic side say to him: Iraq is comparable in size and population to Texas. Imagine that Texas was invaded and occupied by Iraqis who overthrew a native Texan dictator and tried to replace him with a sharia-based government. How would Texans respond?  Will it be a cakewalk?  Will Texans throw flowers at the Iraqi soldiers?  Or will they, possibly, make a bit of a fuss?"

  • What We Read in the Fifties: Point of No Return

    Still another novel by John Phillips Marquand, this time Point of No Return, a great big book (550 pages) that's too long by half. A blockbuster, I think, in its day — 1947 — but disappointing to re-read after fifty or so years. Just as in Marquand's earlier novels, the central figure, Charles Gray, feels himself bound down like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. The many ropes are the social ties that connect him, not this time to Boston, but to a small Massachusetts seafaring town which Marquand calls Clyde but which is most likely modeled after the Newburyport of the author's own childhood. Charles is deeply in love with Jessica Lovell, who's a step above him in the social ladder (everything would have been just fine if he had been born one street over and had gone to Harvard instead of (gasp!) Dartmouth), but the marriage is blocked by Jessica's scheming dad, and Charles escapes to New York, where he marries a sensible, no-nonsense kind of gal with whom he subsists in something that more resembles a partnership than a romance. He finds work with the Stuyvesant Bank, and the plot revolves around two suspenseful topics: a) will Charles be promoted to vice-president of the bank, and b) (more important to me) what will be the outcome when Charles returns to Clyde and meets Jessica after a twenty-year absence. I read this very long novel waiting for the climactic interview between the long-separated lovers, and I felt cheated when Marquand dodged what I felt ought to have been the novel's resolution. It would have been an opportunity for fine writing and a proper resolution to the novel. Instead, I was forced to settle for an anti-climax: Charles makes V.-P. Nor is his promotion reported ironically, as it might or should have been– Charles gets his promotion, but then comes to realize that he's jumped through hoops all his life and that the Stuyvesant Bank is just another piece of equipment.  No, no. Nothing but rhetorical drums and trumpets for his achievement. Worse yet, the long anticipated meeting with Jessica never comes to pass.  Marquand evades the issue. Charles returns to Clyde, meets various friends and relatives (including his doppelganger Jackie Mason — not the cornball pseudo-Semitic comedian, but the accountant from Clyde) — who's recently become engaged to Jessica, and then hightails it back to the big city, leaving in his wake at least one very frustrated reader.

    What to make of a novelist who has made a career of satirizing the stuffy, constricted business world and who then gives us a novel in which we're expected to rejoice because someone makes vice-president! There's always been a certain glamor to the lonely entrepreneur, the Thomas Edison figure, puttering in his garage and coming up with a Big Idea, struggling to find support among the banker-skeptics, and then, against all odds, becoming rich and successful, providing employment for untold thousands, leading Americans to a new world of progress, etc. etc. But what in the world can be glamorous about climbing the corporate ladder (an action, which, as Samuel Johnson said, is performed in the same posture as creeping)?

    Charles is the conformist, not one who rebels inwardly against conformity, but one who embraces it and turns conformity into achievement. It's no wonder that the Fifties were so oppressive.  While in The Late George Apley, Marquand punctured social constriction, in this novel he's come around to the dark side. 

    Not only that — the linguistic surface of the novel is bland. There's no style — just serviceable gray prose.There are a number of good moments: a little flirtation — just winks and nods — carried on between Charles and a bored daughter-in-law while Charles discourses on stocks and bonds that's insightfully written and suggests that there might be a bit of distance between our hero and his chosen profession. But it's a loose end that goes nowhere. 

    Is this the end of my Marquand project, or do I have the initiative to tackle yet another big novel? Stay tuned.

  • Thing Is

    Here are two consecutive sentences written by Neill Woelk, a writer for the Boulder Daily Camera. They appeared in today's paper. "Simply, if Bohn decides to leave for another job, CU should be fairly compensated. Thing is, Bohn doesn't have a contract yet." My questions: is "thing is" an acceptable substitute for "moreover," or "the point is that"? and b) if it is, when did it come to be so? To my ear, it's lazy, substandard writing far too colloquial and slangy even for a provincial newspaper. Our of electronic curiosity, I googled "thing is," but 43,200,000 hits was too big a basket to sift. 

    I take "thing is" to be a sloppy distillation of "the thing of it is." It turns out that "the thing of it is" is well-established in American speech. Rush Limbaugh's a big "thing of it is" guy. On the missing weapons in Iraq, "the thing of it is, this is a serious matter"; "thing of it is, no substantive evidence has been offered to justify any of this." So is Pat Robertson. In answer to the question, "is it possible to receive a specific answer to a prayer directly from the Scriptures, Pat hedges:  "Well, the thing of it is that you can't force the Bible to say,`Judas hanged himself; go thou and do likewise.' " So too, surprisingly, is the supposedly erudite William F. Buckley: "Now the thing of it is, we don't know — and we won't accumulate this knowledge, without experience…." But it's not only a right-wing locution. Here's Robert Frost, in 1915 (in "A Servant to Servants"): "Bless you, of course, you're keeping me from work,/ But the thing of it is, I need to be kept." And it's older: Bret Harte also used the expression. 

    I can't track "thing is."  It's well established in speech, but it ought to be beneath the dignity of a morning paper. Can anyone comment on the history of "thing is?" I suspect (without evidence) that it's rural in origin.

  • What We Read in the Fifties: H. M. Pulham, Esquire

    I re-read J. P. Marquand's H. M. Pulham, Esquire, which was published in 1940 and was still widely read during the 50s. It's disappointing that the new novel repeats so much of The Late George Apley. Pulham is a mock autobiography, and once again Marquand satirizes social norms by using the device of the dim narrator (in this case Harry himself). Pulham is an upper-class Bostonian who should have married the enterprising and highly sexual Marvin (sic) Myles (played by Hedy Lamarr!!! in the King Vidor film version) but instead finds himself fastened to a whiny woman of his own set. He's stuck in an unrewarding job, his children dislike him, and he clings so blindly to respectability that he cannot see that his dear Kay is sleeping with his best friend. It couldn't happen because "Bill King is a gentleman." There's much about the suffocating miasma of Boston society, but also a pointed critique of the only alternative that's offered — the hollow world of New York advertising. It's a post WWI novel, and Harry served in combat, but he can't seem to leverage the lessons of the war to free him from his Bostonianism.

    Re-reading brought to mind that the buzzword of the 1950s was "conformity." It was an age of mass-produced housing, the routinizing of jobs, and of the ascent of mass advertising. So far, the two Marquand novels that I have read have both taken conformity and the failed resistance to conformity as theme. Next up: Point of No Return. I'm curious to discover whether Marquand repeats himself again or whether he tackles other aspects of American culture. He certainly knows how to tell a story. 

  • More on Malapropisms in Bushlingo

    In a recent post, I conjectured that some Bushlingo malapropisms must have originated when their bookless coiner parroted words that he had heard in speech but had never seen in print.  I gave two examples:  the meaningless "resignate" for "resonate" and the wildly off-target "commiserate" for "commensurate."  Bushlingo offers other examples of such self-betraying approximations.

    Drawing from his profound well of historical knowledge, our deep president has mused that Americans are endowed by their creator with "uninalienable rights."  He has also proclaimed his disbelief that advertisements contain "subliminable" messages;  he has threatened that an Iraqi who does not cooperate with us will be "persecuted"; he has made the claim that corporate "malfeance" has affected our economy. The inerrant President has also whined that he's been "pillared" in the press. "Pillared" might mean "strapped to a pillar," just as "stocked" used to mean "set in the stocks," but more likely it's a Bushlingo invention for "pilloried" — an unusual word far beyond the President's ninth-grade ken. In all these cases the President, whose attention span appears to be minuscule, has managed the first syllable –"res," "com," "sub," "mal," "pil" etc. — just perfectly but hasn't had the old-fashioned American stick-to-it-iveness to persevere all the way to the end of the word.

    Though no doubt Bush embraces a dark belief in the "fallacy" of human beings, his Calvinism would be more theologically orthodox if he had pushed past the opening "fal" and managed the full five syllables of "fallibility."

    The transformation of misunderstood or incorrectly reproduced oral forms also occurs in the incomprehensible assertion that "however they delineate, quotas vulcanize society." To vulcanize is to add sulfur to raw rubber to make it tougher and less elastic. What sort of mysterious social alchemy is envisioned in the presidential use of the word vulcanize? Is it possible that he meant to say "Balkanize?" Balkanization generally refers to a political situation in which larger entities are subdivided into small competing units, as occurred in the Balkan peninsula. But where in the world would Bush have encountered such a hard word? Only orally. My guess is that he was briefed by some foreign policy assistant who insufficiently dumbed down his presentation, and the Education President heard a V where a B was in fact spoken. 

    On occasion, POTUS reveals that he's using a word that he has recently stumbled upon, as in his observation that there are enemies of the United States who "had been trained in some instances to disassemble–that means not tell the truth." It sounds very much as though he had recently been introduced to the word "dissemble" and, monkey-hear, monkey-speak, attempted to replicate the word in his own conversation. He generously added a bonus syllable, and then, evaluating his audience by his own dim light, thoughtfully explained the meaning of the novel word.  No doubt his audience was galvanized.   

  • Addendum to Lermontov

    On November 27, writing about Lermontov's A Hero of our Time, I found it offensive that Azamat trades his sister for a horse. I found fault with Lermontov for employing what I judged to be a fraudulent plot device. I've since read Amjad Jaimoukha's The Chechens (2005) where the following appears: "In Ingush society, a man had the right to give away his sister in marriage without her consent." (The Ingush, like the Chechens, are a subset of the Vainakh.) What appears to be a bit of crudeness in A Hero of our Time might in reality be an accurate representation of nineteenth-century Caucasian society. Apologies to Lermontov. 

  • What We Read in the Fifties: The Late George Apley

    My father was a great admirer of the popular American novelist John P. Marquand and I remember that he specifically urged me to read Marquand's best known work, The Late George Apley. Marquand's heyday was in the 1930s and 1940s, and I don't think that he's much read now, although it's good to see that two of his many novels are still in print. Yesterday I re-read The Late George Apley. It's a fine book. The conceit is this: George Apley, an extremely wealthy Bostonian of the Cabot-Lodge-Saltonstall class, has recently died, and an old Harvard chum has been hired to condense Apley's letters and papers into a biography. The fatuous editor, who portrays Apley as an exemplary being, reveals to his readership much more than he himself can possibly understand. We hear of Apley's rectitude, his generosity, his civic-mindedness, his loyalty to his class — but along the way we indirectly learn many truths; for example, that Apley should have married the beautiful and intelligent but alas Irish Mary Monahan, but instead was hustled into a ceremony with a drab woman of his own circle. "Remember," his father assures him, "beauty is only skin-deep." Apley upholds proper Louisburg Square values, but occasionally he catches a glimmer of the idea that the rules of upper-class Boston have circumscribed and warped his life. At the end, his daughter has married (gasp) a journalist and his son (double gasp) a divorcee. In his last weeks, Apley becomes just a trifle less unbending: "It even occurs to me tonight, although this is simply a whim of the moment and probably not quite sound, that you (he's writing to a long-time friend) and I may have missed something in our day." But he can also say of his daughter's husband, that "his peculiarity of speech and manner indicate that he comes from a very long distance, probably the Middle West, a place I have not seen, nor do I wish to see it." 

    Here's Marquand at his best. Young George (we're now in the 1870s) has a daft grandmother. One day, at a "festive occasion," she turns to her aged contemporary the Reverend Nathaniel Pettingill, and blurts out:  "Young man, should you ever go blackbirding, be sure to select Negroes that are brought down from the mountains, they are stronger and healthier than the Blacks from the coast." Our brainless narrator explains that her outburst "displays the vagaries of a dear old lady's mind," but readers now know that the great Apley fortune was built on slave-trading. (The artistry of the moment is borrowed from Dickens, and specifically from Mr. F's lunatic Aunt in Little Dorrit, who, at dinner, for no discernible reason, suddenly cries out to the company that "when we lived at Henley, Barnes's gander was stole by tinkers." But on the whole Marquand owes far less to Dickens than to Howells).

    I can't help wondering why my father was so insistent that I read the book. My father had as much rectitude as anyone I've ever known, and perhaps he was attracted to the nobler side of Apley's personality. Or was he trying to warn me away from the kind of conformity which stifles poor George? Or, a very conventional man himself, did he suspect that he himself was enmeshed in Apleyan-like coils?  Or did he simply enjoy long ironic narratives? 

    Is it time for a Marquand revival?

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