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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  • More Oxymora; Love’s Labour’s Lost

    I'm detecting oxymorons in everything I read. Perhaps I'm even imagining them. Love's Labour's Lost is a "great feast of languages" and also a savory banquet of rhetorical figures. Here are some of the oxymorons (or "cross-couplers," as Puttenham called them) that I came upon in my latest re-reading of the play. Some require explanation.

    "Civil war," not 'civil" as in the American Civil War but civil as in "civility" or good manners (like the "merry war" between Beatrice and Benedick). "Trencher-knight" because a trencher was generally a wooden dish, not suitable for knights — and therefore a trencher-knight would be a low-born knight. "Living art," where the art is a portrait or a statue, and therefore not living and breathing. "Loose grace,' where "loose" means worldly rather than spiritual. "Profound simplicity." "Evil angel." "Dainty Bacchus," because Bacchus was notably disorderly. "Sweet misprision," because misprision is a dereliction of duty and therefore not sweet but sour or bitter. "Rational hind," whether hind refers to an animal or to a person of exceedingly small intellectual gifts. In addition, two near-oxymora: "merry days of desolation," "as swift as lead."  

    These figures of speech are not as obvious as those in Romeo and Juliet, but they allow us to observe Shakespeare at work, experimenting with the ingredients of language, just as he was hitting his stride.

  • Pitfall (1948)

    Pitfall is just shy of sensational. Error and evil intrude into a normal postwar American suburban family. Jay Dratler and Andre de Toth, writer and director, hit all the necessary film noir notes but without descending to cliche. The beautiful blonde, is, for once, neither a temptress nor a gold-digger, but a decent, troubled young lady; the private eye is not a lonely warrior for justice but a brutal stalker; the police are not jerks; the wronged housewife is not simple and materialistic but strong and resilient. Moreover, the plot is not predictable and its ending neither pollyanna-ish nor disastrous, but balanced, credible and inconclusive. There are no car chases. 

    Lizabeth Scott, Jane Wyatt, and Raymond Burr are terrific; Dick Powell is, alas, Dick Powell. 

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  • Shakespeare at Work: the Oxymoron

    The oxymoron, a figure of speech in which there is a sharp contradiction between modifier and noun, has become a boon to humorists: "business ethics," "military intelligence," "pretty ugly," "jumbo shrimp," "Christian Science," "Utah Jazz."  But it's a figure that has a serious side as well. The oxymoron expresses very well the contradictions inherent in literary and also human life.  Life is a mingled yarn, is it not?  Both fair and foul, sometimes in the same moment; sweet sorrow. Because Shakespeare tried to convey the complexity of things, he employed oxymorons  throughout his career — in simple straightforward formulas at the early plays, but in his maturity in innovative and sometimes startlingly beautiful ways.

    The oxymoron has a long pedigree. It may go as far back as to a classical trope called the adynaton, or collection of impossibilities. There is a treasure-trove of oxymora in Alain of Lisle's thirteenth-century poem (or, more exactly, prosimetron) De Planctu Naturae in which "amor" is described as "pax odio, fraudique fides, spes juncta timor… mistus cum ratione furor,/ Naufragium dulce, pondus leve (peace in hatred, faith in fraud, hope joined to fear, madness mixed with reason, sweet shipwreck, light heaviness); there is a similar passage, from the same century, in Guillaime de Lorris extremely popular Romaunt of the Rose that begins "Love is a hateful peace and loving hate."

    The oxymoron was given new life and vitality by Petrarch, whose sufferings for young Laura famously caused him to freeze in summer and burn in winter. Many sonneteers, continental and English, were indebted to Petrarch, among them Thomas Watson, a poet who flourished in the years of Shakespeare's adolescence. One of Watson's poems, which contained the lines "Love is a sour delight, a sugared grief/ A living death, and ever-dying life" lay behind young Romeo's modish and easily parodied oxymoron-rich rhetoric: "O brawling love, o loving hate,/ O heavy lightness, serious vanity,/ Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,/ Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health…. " Romeo was so besotted by his own rhetoric that Juliet couldn't resist a joke at his expense: "You kiss by the book." Romeo in 1595 owes a lot to Will in 1580.

    Shakespeare knew that Romeo indulged too much of a good thing. Half a decade later, in All's Well That Ends Well, Helena imagined her perjured promiscuous lover Bertram at the French court dancing attendance on the ladies in a series of tired oxymora: "his humble ambition, proud humility,/ His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet,/ His faith, his sweet disaster."  In these lines, Helana, and Shakespeare as well, repudiated fashionable oxymoronic couplings. On the other hand, it is not love but hatred and anger that give rise to Timon's oxymorons. For him, the loathed Athenians, those "smiling smooth detested parasites, are "courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears."  

    In Hamlet, Claudius's insincere but brilliantly accomplished oxymorons camouflage his sin. He has

                 as 'twere with a defeated joy,
    With an auspicious, and a dropping eye,
    With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage,
    In equal scale weighing delight and dole

    taken Gertrude as his wife. The pairing of "auspicious" (the root meaning of which is looking to the heavens to prognosticate by the flight of birds) with "dropping" is especially wonderful.

    Claudius's "delight and dole" were anticipated by Richard II's rhetorical theatricality upon his return to England:

    As a long-parted mother with her child
    Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting,
    So, weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth.

    And there's the "wholesome iniquity" of the bawdy house in Pericles – a play in which calm comes in the form of "litigious peace."

    In King Lear, a play about, among other subjects  a "precious unprized" daughter, there is a submerged but stunning oxymoron when (in Edgar's words) Gloucester is at last released from his suffering: "his flaw'd heart…/ 'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,/ Burst smilingly." "Burst smilingly" is a phrase which the younger Shakespeare could not reach; nor could any other poet before or since.

  • “Bisson Conspectuities”

    "Bisson conspectuities" is one of my all-time favorite Shakespearean oxymorons. Although it's not as transparent as, say, "hot ice" or "living death," it's much more quirky and colorful. "Bisson conspectuities" appears in Coriolanus in one of the scenes in which Menenius banters with the Roman crowd. They attack and he parries by enumerating his own strengths and weaknesses. He concludes with an insult that flaunts his patrician education: "What harm can your bisson conspectuities glean out of this character?" (In this case, a "character" is a summary statement of a person's habits or nature, a "characterization".)

    The odd word "conspectuities" is an invention of Shakespeare's. He derived it from the participial form of the Latin verb "conspicio" — to observe, gaze, or watch. It's a nonce word, a hapax legomenon; unlike some of Shakespeare's more inspired coinages, conspectuities never domesticated into English — the OED lists only this sole appearance. "Bisson," on the other hand, which means "blind," was not new to the language but was in fact an ancient word of Germanic origin — and already obsolescent in 1608, although the venerable proverb "the bysom ledys the blynde" might still have been current in the provinces. In Hamlet, the deliberately archaizing First Player uses the expression "bisson rheum" for "blinding tears." 

    "Bisson conspectuities" means "blind sight" or "blear vision." It's an especially striking oxymoron because its component parts are drawn from opposite ends of the word hoard — old and new, plain and polysyllabic, Germanic and Latin, rustic and citified.

    But there's a complication. The word "bisson" doesn't actually appear in the Folio; there it is "beesome." "Beesome, usually spelled besom, meant and still means, "broom." But in the context of Coriolanus, broom is meaningless; and so, beginning  with Lewis Theobald in the 1720s, editors have uniformly substituted "bisson" — an inspired conjecture but still a guess. It's possible that Shakespeare wrote "bisson" and a scrivener or printer incorrectly read 'beesome" — but perhaps not. An oxymoron of transcendent genius might be merely an illusion — a creation not of Shakespeare but of editorial tradition.

    "Bisson conspectuities" puts quite a burden on members of the Blackfriar's audience. It's hard to believe that Shakespeare thought his first hearers would grasp the phrase's meaning on the fly. It's easy for us to understand it now, four hundred years later, with a treasury of annotations at the foot of every page. Perhaps Shakespeare didn't care if the audience comprehended? Is it possible that he was writing just for his own delight, for his pleasure in words? For readers rather than playgoers? Or perhaps he had already divined that he was writing for enthusiasts and scholars of a latter age.

  • Money

    I don't know much about economics and never did –it's an area of knowledge that has lived up to its reputation as a dismal, arcane science. It's not only economics — I don't even understand money, which has become more ethereal and symbolic during the course of my lifetime.

    In my first real job, at Sears, Roebuck during the now-historical 1950s, I was handed, come Friday at 4:00pm, an envelope containing a few bills and coins. Money as I understood it.

    A guy had bills in his wallet and put some in the bank and blew some on CrackerJacks at Ebbets Field. 

    vintage  

     

    That was before credit cards and electronic transfers and bitcoins, whatever they are. Of course I understand that money is not just currency. It's a mysterious commodity — much prized, but  also the root of all evil. It has no value until you spend it, and then, once you spend it, you don't have it. The monetary value of things is often inversely proportionate to their utility: diamonds, pearls, paintings. To have money in the bank gives you a sense of security. Then you die. 

    Most people have way too little money, but some people have more money than is necessary and more than is good for their souls. I'm enthusiastic about taxing wealth. Let's say a guy has $100,000,000. Suppose there's an annual 2% wealth tax and he has to contribute $2,000,000 a year to promote the general welfare. How is he harmed?  He now has $98,000,000. What can you do with $100M that you can't do with $98M? And moreover, how incompetent must you be if you can't make your $98M generate a few million and restore you to $100M. You can do good and still stay rich — what a blessing!

    In my opinion, many Americans think about wealth and money incorrectly. They're like the Johnny Roccos who always want "more." I was fortunate to be taught by my father, who explained to me that "no one owns anything. The most you can say is that you have a lifetime lease." He believed in this maxim even though he spent his life negotiating real estate deals. He wasn't much concerned with money and it didn't seem to harm him a bit. He had enough, and "enough is as good as a feast."

    To me, wealth means very little, but standard of living means a great deal. My standard of living is very high because my town has an excellent public library and a thriving public school system. And fine mountain trails and other recreational possibilities. These amenities aren't "mine" — they're not money in my personal bank. But they contribute immensely to my standard of living.

    What would improve my standard of living? That's an easy question. I would enjoy my life more if other people lived better. If there were no homeless people panhandling on the mall or sleeping under bridges. If unregarded old folks weren't thrown into corners. If refugees were welcomed. If medical help was available to all as a birthright. Etc., etc., etc.

    I would gladly pay more in taxes if my tax money was spent wisely. I'd be "better off." There would be less money in my personal pocket but more joy in my life.

  • My Two Alter Egos

    Famous literary doppelgangers include Mr. Hyde, William Wilson, the picture in Dorian Grey's attic, Leggatt, and Golyadkin Jr. In film, there are the sisters, or twins, Kate and Patricia Bosworth, both played by Bette Davis and no doubt many more that I don't know or remember that professional movie historians could add. Doubles abound in the world of make-believe, but also occur in "real life." I've had two doppelgangers of my very own. They are not official or clinical doubles but they definitely manifest or "outer" fears that are embedded in the less accessible parts of my brain — they're my own personal Sir Smiles. They have haunted me because they embodied the terror of what I might have been or what might have happened to me if I dropped my guard. I never spoke to either of these individuals — only observed them at a fearful distance.

    Many decades ago, when I was a graduate student, there was a rumor in circulation among my peers that 50% of the students who finished their classwork and comprehensive exams never completed their dissertations. Naturally, I was afraid that I that I might fall into that ABD black hole. In those days, I haunted Widener Library's vast reading room and there it was that I encountered my first dreaded doppelganger. He was a bespectacled gloomy fellow, not unlike me, but taller, ganglier, and, I think, homelier. The story was that he had been working on his dissertation for 17 years. After I would sit I down to work in a morning, he'd wander in, choose a place, open his briefcase, spread out his books and papers on the table, sharpen his pencils and then, after a quarter of an hour, get up and walk out and come back a few minutes later with a copy of The New York Times. He'd read the paper in a leisurely manner, then put it aside and turn to his dissertation. After a while, he would check his watch and then go out for a cup of coffee. Shortly afterward, it was lunchtime; then it was time for tea, and then came the hour to pack up and go home. Did he do an hour's work during the day; not much more, maybe less.

    Of course I feared that I could turn into this fellow. I suspect that it was good for me to be presented with such a scary doppelganger. His negative example forced me to keep my nose to the grindstone. Without Sir Procrastination, who knows, I might be sitting at that library table to this day, pretending to write that damn dissertation.

    My second doppelganger is equally frightening but more contemporary. He's a pathetic guy who lives right here in Boulder — somewhere nearby, because he frequently passes my window on his way to the mall, where he hits people up for spare change. He looks alarmingly like me — same size, same shape, roughly of my age, though grayer and balder and dirtier. I could have been him if a single one of my genes on a single chromosome had failed. There I would be, living alone in a small room stacked to the gills with newspapers and magazines, living off welfare and emerging only to shout leftist slogans at passers-by. Doppelganger #2 is a crazy defective version of myself; a secret sharer who embodies my deepest fears. 

    I confess that I hate these two guys, not for themselves but because I know that I could have been them if I hadn't been lucky.

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  • Sir Smile

    Sir Smile is a "character," in a way of speaking, in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. He's one the play's most fully-realized figures, even though he says no words, doesn't appear on stage, and exists nowhere but in King Leontes' diseased, paranoid fantasy life– and then only for an evanescent second. Truth to tell, Sir Smile also appears to be an emanation from a dark corner of Shakespeare's own individual imagination. 
     
    When does Sir Smile make his momentary appearance?  Leontes has gone off the deep end. Without the least shred of evidence, he generates the extremely destructive fantasy that his wife Hermione has been a-bed with his best friend and fellow king, Polixenes. He's in a rage, so much so that in the course of a stunning soliloquy, he busts right through the inviolable fourth wall and addresses himself directly to the men in the audience. He looks them right in the eye. "There have been," he laments, "cuckolds ere now"
    And many a man there is, even at this present,
    Now while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm,
    That little thinks she has been sluiced in's absence
    And his pond fish'd by his next neighbor, by
    Sir Smile, his neighbor.
     
    Leontes' soliloquy is "to the moment." "This is not make-believe. Look to your left and right, guys — while you're clutching your wife's elbow, enjoying the play, that sly impudent fellow standing there, Sir Smile, has been fishing in your pond, ploughing your field, sleeping in your bed. It happens to everyone. Men — we're all victims, all of us. We're drowning in sea of betrayal. You can't trust your neighbor, you can't trust anyone. And worse — the seducers, the enemy, don't just diddle your wife; they triumph, they grin, they fleer. They amuse themselves at your suffering. Every one of them, sitting or standing in this theatre, is now or will be a such a person."
     
    Sir Smile embodies Leontes' deepest fears. He distills humiliation and jealousy into a figure who is half nightmare and half allegory. In psychological terms, he's Leontes' doppelganger or double.
     
    But why does Shakespeare call him Sir Smile? Why not Lord Lewd or Viscount Vice?
     
    The honorific, the "Sir" part, is easy. Shakespeare regularly employs the word almost as a nickname. Sometimes his "sir" can sometimes be affectionate — Leontes himself calls his son Mamillius,"sir page." Similarly, Lucius is "sir boy" to Titus. There's even a "Sir King" in Cymbeline. "Sir" can also be hostile: "sir knave." And sometime it's neutral; timid Viola would rather "go with sir priest than sir knight."  Sir-ness becomes more meaningful when its use is exemplary or abstract: "Sir Valor" in Troilus and Cressida; "Sir Prudence" in The Tempest; "Sir Oracle" in The Merchant of Venice. The Sir in Sir Smile has an instructive history.
     
    But why is he a smiler?  Why does Shakespeare offer us a profligate or a roue who smiles as he goes about his amorous business?  To followers of Shakespeare, there's a ready answer. It's well known that false and hypocritical smiles transfix the Shakespearean imagination. The locus for this is Hamlet, where Denmark's prince is beside himself, furious at what he has seen in the face of Claudius, who is a
     
        villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
    My tables! Meet it is I set it down
    That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
     
    Smiling and villainy merge inextricably. Exactly as in the case of Leontes' imaginary neighbor, there's evil lurking beneath Claudius' smiley face. When Hamlet writes in his "table" — we would say "tablet" –that "one may smile and be a villain," his characterization has the force of revelation or of a proverb or gnomic utterance.
     
    But it's not only Claudius. The smile in "Sir Smile" emerges from a Shakespearean underworld. There's Richard of Gloucester, an unequalled villain, who can not only "cry 'Content' to that which grieves my heart,/ And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,/ And frame my face to all occasions" but who can also, most pertinently, "smile, and murder whiles I smile." And then there are the "smiling smooth, detested parasites" of Timon of Athens; the "villain with a smiling cheek" and the "smiling rogues" of The Merchant of Venice; "the smiling pick-thanks" –sycophants or flatterers — of The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth as well as the assassins whom Calpurnia dreams "came smiling" to bathe their hands in Caesar's blood. Shakespeare's smiles are often linked to danger: Iago of Cassio; "Ay, smile upon her, do." Kent, in King Lear is enraged by condescending smiling Oswald: "A plague upon your epileptic visage! Smoile you my speeches, an I were a fool?"
     
    Hence loathsome "Sir Smile." 
     
    Fortunately, even for Shakespeare there are redeeming moments when when a smile is still a smile. Touchstone (in As You Like It) is in love. He remembers kissing his beloved's batler, "and the cow's dugs that her pretty chapt hands had milk'd; and remember[s}  the wooing of a peascod instead of her; from whom I took two cods, and giving her them again, said with weeping tears 'Wear these for my sake.'" The name of Touchstone's lovely rural mistress is "Jane Smile." No "sirs" in this Smile family, no sirree!

  • Baddest Girl of All

    Everyone has their favorite 1940s "bad girl." Some of mine: Ann Savage in Detour (1945), Jane Greer in Out of the Past (1947), Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street (1948), Yvonne de Carlo in Criss Cross (1949), Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai (1947, and Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) but for my money the baddest of them all, the baddest of the bad, is sultry homicidal Lizabeth Scott as Jane Palmer in Too Late for Tears (1948). It's not just that she murders her first husband, shoots her second, and poisons her accomplice. Or that she sleeps with blackmailer Danny Fuller (Dan Duryea) to enlist him to her cause. Or that she betrays friend, foe and family.Or that she's manipulative, vengeful, hedonistic ("I want money") and depraved. It's that she's utterly soulless, conscienceless, and heartless. Not a tinge of fellow-feeling. She could out-Goneril Goneril, bad girl of the canonical classics.

    The ending of the film is a disappointment. Instead of Jane Palmer sent to the electric chair or locked in the hoosegow for life, she's allowed to fall out of a window and die. Not fair — I wanted retribution.

    On second thought, if she had been arrested, she would have corrupted the police, compromised the judicial system, and caused the death of a handful of fellow prisoners and prison guards. Maybe it's just as well to kill her off and be done with it. 

    Here's Lizabeth Scott holding a gun on her nemesis (Don DeFore). Is she bad or what?

  • Petruchio and Othello?

    It's an unlikely pairing — what possible connection could there be between Petruchio, a creature of farce, and Othello, distinguished general and tragic victim of the green monster. Yet there is a surprising point of contact — two similar (but very different) reminiscences. It's not usual for Shakespeare's characters to have a "backstory," but both P and O attempt one.

    Petruchio brags that a shrew can't scare him, because he's been there before. "Think you a little din can daunt mine ears?" 

    He riffs on the word "din." He's inured to noise, he claims — and how he came to be so adds a new and improbable dimension to his character.

    Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
    Have I not heard the sea puff'd up with winds
    Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?
    Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,
    And heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?
    Have I not in a pitched battle heard
    Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets' clang?

    I, for one, don't believe a word that Petruchio utters and I doubt whether Shakespeare expects us to do so. It's all bluster, the words of an accomplished bullshitter. Petruchio is a youthful fortune-hunter, full of bravado and effrontery to be sure, but except in this passage, he lacks an adventurous past or a military history. When did he hear lions roar?  While on a Roads Scholar tour of Scythia or central Africa? And where was the sea like an "angry boar?" Where was the "great ordnance" and "loud alarum?" More likely at Saturday afternoon serials than in the tented field. 

    Othello's story, on the other hand, though more extravagant and fantastic, is grandly persuasive. Here's a piece of it: 

          I spake of most disastrous chances,
    Of moving accidents by flood and field
    Of hair-breadth scapes i' the imminent deadly breach,
    Of being taken by the insolent foe
    And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
    And portance in my travels' history:
    Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
    Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
    It was my hint to speak,—such was the process;
    And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
    The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
    Do grow beneath their shoulders.

    Othello veers into the mythological yet his story comports with what we otherwise know of him.  

    Petruchio's tale is an instance of "just-in-time" characterization. Shakespeare needs to display Petruchio's bravery in the face of a scolding woman — so he produces a soldiership story. It doesn't accord with Petruchio's history, but it doesn't need to, because it serves an immediate necessary dramatic function. Othello's speech is part and parcel; Petruchio's is a loose end.

    And the language! The first passage, in early The Taming of the Shrew, is perfunctory; the second, in the mature tragedy, is simply magnificent. Anyone looking for evidence of Shakespeare's progress of a poet could do worse than compare these two passages.

  • A Dream of “Agency”

    I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that the most terrifying words in the English language were, "I want to tell you about my dream."  

    Nevertheless, I persist.

    Last night, I came out of a train station in Berlin (a city I've never visited in my daytime life) but instead of a valise or luggage I had only a banjo case, with a banjo inside and room for a couple of pair of socks at most. But I thought, I have cash and I can buy clothes. Then I looked in my wallet and found only a couple of one-dollar bills. I thought, now I'm in trouble. Nevertheless, I persisted, and set out for my hotel. Then it started to rain, pour actually, and I realized that I wasn't wearing proper shoes, just flimsy slippers. Next I came to understand that I had no idea where to find my hotel. 

    So there I am with a banjo on my knee but nowhere to go, no cash, no proper clothes, no hotel, in an unfamiliar strange city.

    But now comes the "agency" part. I announce, to no one in particular, "I don't want to be in this dream." And I woke up.

    I'm very proud of myself for taking charge. A good precedent for tomorrow's nightmare.

  • Shtisel

    The Israeli TV program Shtisel, about an ultra-orthodox, Haredi family, is soap opera, but with a hair fetish.  It's all about beards, peyot, and sheitals; one female character cries the whole night through because her wig slipped and an inch of her own natural hair was visible — to men. Sometimes it's taxing to be empathetic to the Shtisel clan.

    But even fanatics are people, and the business of the program is the same as the business of all soap operas — getting married, staying married, and healing frayed marriages.

    Shitsel sustained our interest through 24 episodes because the characters are recognizable human beings and their problems were familiar and real. What is different and foreign about the Shtisels and their Haredi compatriots is their triumphalism — they are correct and everyone else is wrong — and the many ways in the silly rules of doctrinaire religion constrict the characters' choices and inflict upon them unnecessary misery. Shulem, the family patriarch, enjoys funny radio shows, but he stops doing so because it's wrong. Zvi Arye is a splendid singer, but he can't join a musical group because joy in music might lead him in a secular direction. Uncle Nuchem loves classical music, especially Mahler, but he destroys his tape of the Tragic Symphony because it is worldly and therefore endangers his piety. The lead character, attractive young Akiva, is a gifted painter, but his father and his uncle and his fiancee pressure him to chuck his talents and become respectable, and pious, and a travel agent. Will he give up on his genius?  Perhaps Season 3, if it ever gets made, will tell us. I have nothing against travel agents, but Akiva's painting touches his soul. The writers of Shtisel are right to see art as a danger to orthodoxy. It's a solvent. Put religion up against art, and religion might dissolve. Which would be a very proper outcome, in my opinion.

    Here's my favorite line from a week of watching:  "When you see a Jew with a dog, either he's not a Jew or the dog is not a dog."

  • A Serious Presidential Lie

    No question but that he's a serial liar: just think of the birther thing, the attendance at the inaugural, Sharpiegate, "the best economy in the history of the world," that Hilary Clinton received 3 to 5 million illegal votes, "total exoneration," the 16,000+ lies and misstatements since 2016 that the Washington Post has catalogued. Enough falsehoods to circle the earth several times, or more likely, stretch from here to Alpha Centauri. 

    Nevertheless, all these falsehoods pale in comparison to the latest revelation.  

    He repeatedly boasted that he was such a baseball star at the New York Military Academy that he could have gone to the majors. Someone finally investigated. Box scores from the 1950s show that he batted .138, with 3 rbi's and scored one run. Said one baseball guy, “You don’t hit .138 for some podunk, cold-weather high school playing the worst competition you could possibly imagine" and go pro. “It’s absolutely laughable. He hit .138—he couldn’t fucking hit."  

    OK, he lies about everything. But about baseball? Some things should be sacred. Off limits.

  • Who Knows, Who Remembers?

    I don't know what is signified by DBMs or EIDE. I am boggled by hard tokens. Defragment leaves me all a-quiver. Shortcuts generally take me the long way around. Does a firewall keep them out or me in?  Kibibytes are things you would feed to a pooch. A logic gate is beyond my capacity of reasoning. My netiquette is primitive and when I have nodes I take them to the surgeon. Do I have a KVM switch?  Dunno. My firmware, frankly, is not what it used to be. My warmboot is frayed; my virtualization illusory.

    I may not speak or understand the language of the present generation, but like most members of my age cohort I can identify the skate key, "the cheese stands alone," the alligator pear, a mustard plaster, "you owe your crowning glory to,/ your something something shampoo," "L-A-V-A," "and away-y-y we go," House Jameson, cod liver oil, Adrien Baillargeon the Canadian strongman, J. Scott Smart, "close but no cigar," "the call letters of the stars," Mrs. Calabash, a "rhubarb," bluing, "Well, King, this case is closed," Spider Jorgenson, Horn and Hardart, "Pow, right in the kisser."

    Alas for a youthful population who imagines that the Pontiac 13 was a group of anti-government demonstrators or that Apples Kudelka was a middle European dessert. And doesn't know the difference between Sparkle Plenty and Good 'n Plenty.

  • Sarcasm in the News

    It's not often that a figure of speech makes the headlines — as happened this week with the rhetorical term "sarcasm." At a press conference a couple of days ago, the present occupant of the White House, Donald J. Trump, whose use of language is occasionally infelicitous, let fly with a giant whopper. He announced that the horrid new coronavirus could be cured by (gasp!) an injection of bleach. When his foolish advice  attracted scorn, he backtracked by claiming that his words were merely "sarcastic."
     
    To put the blame on sarcasm is a transparent lie, of course, believed only by one person in the entire universe — Trump himself — although no doubt his brek-a-kek-keks of toadies will pretend that his analysis was pure genius.
     
    But did he truly mean "sarcasm" — a trope generally marked by a mocking tone of voice and "a sharp, bitter, cutting or caustic expression, a contemptuous gibe or taunt in which hostility is disguised as humor." Trump seems to define sarcasm rather more loosely: to him in means "I didn't say what I said yesterday and, besides, it's all the fault of the media." What a curious line of defense, and what a misuse of a rhetorical term! 
     
    Besides, one should think twice before invoking sarcasm, because the term has a bad name among the psychologists, who consider it a "maladaptive coping mechanism for those with unresolved anger or frustration." There's a class of people who employ sarcasm because they have "certain forms of brain damage as a consequence of lesions in the right parahippocampal gyrus." I have no particular knowledge of Mr. Trump's parahippocampal gyrus, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's taken a bit of a beating these last few years.
     
    Sarcasm has even been banned by Trump's great friend Kim Jong-Un. No sarcasm in North Korea — a rare instance of a figure of speech being consigned to a firing squad.
     
    Besides, Trump is already the master of a number of the tropes of traditional rhetoric. There's enellage, a sentence that ignores the usual grammatical rules and conventions; solecism and tautology, gross violations of syntax and logic; hyperbole, or exaggeration, and its less well-known cousin, adynaton, a collection or list of impossibilities; aposiopesis, the sudden end of a sentence before completion; and paraprosdokian, the unexpected truncation of a clause. But all would agree that the figure of speech that Trump deploys most regularly is prevaricatio.

  • Amnesia on Film: The Third Day (1965)

    I don't know why, but It's mandatory, in movieworld, that if a man stumbles away from an automobile accident, he must suffer from amnesia and he must suspect that he's murdered someone.  On top of that, it's required that it will take the full ninety minutes to prove his innocence. The Third Day splits all these notes right down the middle. But it's not just an amnesia/murder mystery/police procedural. It's also a soap opera/marriage on the rocks movie; it's a save-the-small-town-factory from corporate raiders story. And it's a maniac-on-the-loose horror film. The Third Day is a crowded conflation of genres which doesn't quite succeed in finding a concord to all that discord.

    The first ten minutes are the best. Steve Mallory, played by George Peppard, returns to pre-amnesia life only to discover, and be dismayed, that he's a lout, barroom brawler, a drunk, and a womanizer. Peppard is perfectly cast because "baffled" is his default expression. It's his gift.

    Sally Kellerman, later Hot Lips Houlihan, is the vamp. Arte Johnson, later Laugh-In's Wolfgang is the maniac. Herbert Marshall has the worst role of his career, but if there were a lifetime achievement award for finger-acting, he would win it. Robert Webber is the detective hot to prove that Steve Mallory is guilty, but he should have been more empathetic because earlier that same year he had himself suffered a full ninety minutes of amnesia in Hysteria (1965).

    I could almost bring myself to admire this picture. It's well-paced, well-directed, beautifully photographed, mysterious in parts; a couple of luminous supporting roles. It flagged somewhere half way through. So did I. 

  • Blood and Lust

    There are so many overlaps between Richard III (1593) and Macbeth (1606) that it sometimes seems as though Shakespeare pillaged and reformed the earlier play when he composed the later. Both plays feature cynical upward strivers ("hellhounds," the playwright calls them both) who risk damnation to murder their way to the throne, and then lose their kingdoms in battle and are succeeded by spotless young heirs. Both Richard of Gloucester and Macbeth kill innocent children and both are haunted by the ghosts of those they have murdered.

    Yet the two plays are very different. Macbeth is a tidy economical play (Shakespeare's second shortest), while Richard III (his second longest) is sprawling and redundant, sometimes bewildering, stuffed to the gills with incident and declamation. Moreover, Richard III lacks witches, moving forests, young Malcolm, Macduff's mysterious birth, and above all, ambitious Lady Macbeth. While Richard is famously amusing, Macbeth hasn't the slightest sense of humor even though he can be unconsciously ironic. 

    When similar circumstances arise, as they must, it becomes obvious that the rhetorical strategies of Richard III are rudimentary compared to the richer and more satisfying language of Macbeth.

    Here is one passage in the earlier play that has an echo or correspondence in the later. Richard instructs a follower to slander King Edward ("luxury" means "lust")"

              urge his (i.e. Edward's) hateful luxury,
    And bestial appetite in change of lust;
    Which stretch'd unto their servants, daughters, wives,
    Even where his raging eye or savage heart,
    Without control, listed to make a prey.

    In Macbeth, Malcolm slanders himself.

                     There's no bottom, none,
    In my voluptuousness. Your wives, your daughters,
    Your matrons and your maids, could not fill up
    The cistern of my lust, and my desire
    All continent impediments would o'erbear
    That did oppose my will.

    Unbounded lust is the subject of both speeches – "servants, daughters, wives," expands into the even more inclusive wives, daughters, matrons, and maids. Richard's statement is strong, its power strengthened by the litany of allusions to the uncivil wild: "bestial," "raging," "savage," "prey." Macbeth's is considerably more powerful, primarily because of the extended metaphor in which lust is conceived as some sort of fluid. Many an acre foot of lust could be contained in a "cistern" without a "bottom."  Yet in fact a bottomless cistern would impound only a portion of Malcolm's gusher of lust which, it seems, is many times more abundant than a single cisternfull; it's a deluge that "continent impediments" such as embankments or dikes or dams cannot restrain. It's a flood. 

    A second correspondence occurs when Richard engages in a moment of self-evaluation. "But I am in/ So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin;/ Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye." Macbeth's improvement: "I am in blood/ Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more/ Returning were as tedious as go o'er." Blood in both, to be sure, but there are improvements. In the earlier passage, the key terms are sin and pity, abstractions which are rooted in the antecedent allegorical drama. "Sin" becomes a personage: "sin will pluck on sin." And pity or perhaps Pity, is also vivified through the use of the modifier "tear-falling." But these harkings back to allegory hint at the less abstract and more imaginative figure adumbrated in the phrase "so far in blood." It would be more ordinary and idiomatic to say not "stepped in so far" but "stepped in so deep." Unless, of course, the playwright had an idea lurking in the recesses of his brain which he didn't quite articulate. Ten years later, Richard's puddle became Macbeth's river or lake or even ocean, deep enough that it required the usurper king to "wade" in it. Shakespeare pursues the metaphor to its completion: "should I wade no more/ Returning were as tedious as go o'er" — a figure which makes it clear that Macbeth is overshoes, knee deep — or even hip deep –  in a nightmare swamp of his own making, There's no side channel, no bridge, no way out.

    So apprentice "sin" and "pity" are superseded by masterly "cistern" and "blood" and "wade." 

    It's not by accident that Macbeth is so deeply unsettling.

  • Amnesia on Film: Hysteria (1965)

    Another automobile accident and another hospitalized amnesiac. Once again, the poor guy might have committed a murder, but he's not sure. And once again, there's a loyal young woman (Gina McConnell, played by Jennifer Jayne) to help him reconstruct his past. As well as a beguiling dangerous femme fatale and a double-dealing psychiatrist. Knockout drops, hallucinations, an escape through a window, a clever detective, a disappearing corpse, multiple flashbacks. The usual stuff.

    The gimmick this time: Chris Smith (Robert Webber) has recovered his memory but keeps up the pretense so he can solve the murder. Everyone is kept in the dark, including the befuddled audience. It's a tricky move and highly unpersuasive. The last line of the Wiki plot summary tells you all you need to know in the way of cliche: "Chris is reunited with Gina." 

    Hysteria1965Poster.jpg

  • Amnesias on Films: Two in the Dark (1936) and Two O-Clock Courage (1945)

    I've now reported on thirty-two separate amnesia movies and there are surely many more out there to which I am oblivious. Why so many? How come Shakespeare didn't write an amnesia play? Why are there no classic novels about amnesia? Didn't unsuspecting folks get themselves bopped on the head in previous centuries? Didn't knights ever fall off their stallions and thwack their helms and beavers?

    Here's an obvious answer to the gimmick's popularity: amnesia provides three of the major elements of all story-telling: Mystery, Quest, and Identity (or as King Lear puts it, "Who is it that can tell me who I am?") But why is it repeated so obsessively in film?

    Today a twofer, bringing the grand total to thirty-four. In Two in the Dark (1936), an amnesiac (Walter Abel) comes to awareness on a street corner and suspects that he has committed a murder. Rest easy; he didn't do any such thing. But he needs the help of a good-looking out-of-work actress (Margot Grahame) to establish his innocence. His amnesia is garden variety, "bang-bang". One blow to the old bean and he forgets who he is; later a second  whomp and it all comes back in a flash (in the form of a flashback). Very convenient, very tidy, but not very imaginative. The film is languidly paced, almost slow-motion.

    Curiously, Two in the Dark was remade nine years afterward as Two O-Clock Courage with the director of the earlier film serving as the producer of the later. It was a good idea to try again, because the later film was directed by Anthony Mann, who keeps things brisk. Although the plot and a great deal of the dialog was copied wholesale, it's a much better and different film, mostly because the amnesiac's fellow investigator is now a wise-cracking female taxi-driver — a character straight out of the screwball comedies. When she's on screen, the film becomes a feast of badinage. Tom Conway as the amnesiac is dignified and expressionless, but Ann Rutherford steals the show as the fast-talking cabbie. 

    "Bang-bang" or "thwack-thwack" amnesia arrives and departs easily. It comes with an on-off switch. Contrary to human psychological experience, it leaves no residue except for a couple of neat Band-Aids — one on each side of the head.

     
    Two O'Clock Courage – The Film Noir File
     
    Two O'Clock Courage (1945)
    Ann Rutherford and Tom Conway.

  • Ten Things I Dislike about Films

    I'm a movie lover, but I'm not indiscriminate. Here follows a list of common movie occurrences that compel me to return to nineteenth-century novels or force me to bury my head under the blankets. 

    1. Cute puppies, especially when the boy and the girl kiss for the first time, and the director, unfazed by cliche or rank sentimentality, cuts to the pooch's just darling head-tilt. Even worse when the doggie covers his cute eyes with his cute paw. Aaargh.

    2. Child actors, with rare exceptions. Some few gifted children know how to be natural, but most just make me cringe. 

    3. Gratuitous killing of "redskins," especially when aestheticized. How gracefully, when shot by the cavalry marksmen, do the Comanches plummet from the face of the cliff or tumble down the scree. In Western after Western, they take huge losses — presenting themselves as targets while they ride crazily around the circled wagons — a strategy that is cinematic but nonsensical. And also: all the retrogressive, antediluvian blackface and yellowface stereotypes that make us gasp with horror at our racist forebears.

    4. Those far too frequent scenes, where the guy, pursued either by the police or the husband, goes out the 16th story window of his hotel and works his way across a narrow ledge to another window (always unlocked). Such scenes give me the willies.

    5. Car chases. Boring, boring, boring. I've discussed this in the past.

    6. Montage dating scenes: boy and girl meet cute. After the mandatory misunderstanding, they reconcile, and then we see five seconds of them sitting in a restaurant, smiling; next they're rowing in a boat in the park; then they're on a ferry, or at a picnic etc. etc. From this we are supposed to deduce that they're in love. Predictable cut to the predictable soft-focus bedroom. Romance, which ought to be thrilling, becomes, through repetition and want of originality, almost as boring as a car chase.

    7. Funny drunks. They're not funny. Alcoholism is a destructive disease. 

    8. The scene in which the stoic hero has taken a bullet in the shoulder and it's going to be extracted by an amateur. No anesthetics. "Here, bite on this." Even worse, if possible, when it's not a bullet but an arrow.

    9. Background music that dictates the emotions we are supposed to feel. Worse still, the background noise that is currently so fashionable. Not music, just a loud drone, which sometimes drowns out the dialogue.

    10. Zachary Scott

    Also, movies adapted from cartoons: Batman, Superman, etc. Horror films, designed to scare the pants off you. I can't bear to watch them (I've never recovered from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein [1948]). Action films, especially ones in which a retired CIA agent or detective or whatever is called back to duty for one last assignment. And finally, anything with zombies, cyborgs, extraterrestrials, robots, demonic children who vomit blood, or tentacles.

  • Amnesia on Film: The Unsuspected (1947)

    This time, amnesia minus the amnesia. Heiress Matilda Frazier, presumed to have perished in a shipboard fire, returns home where she's met by Steven Howard who claims to be her recently-wedded husband. She fails to remember him for the good reason that she's never met him and hasn't lost her memory. It's a case of "attributed amnesia." Not a disease at all — merely a handy plot device, credible in black-and-white 40s murder mysteries where amnesia is as common as a slight cold. Matilda is temporarily deceived by Mr.Howard. So are the spectators.

    Terrific direction by Michael Curtiz, fine performance by luminous Joan Caulfield, reliable work by steady Fred Clark, effortful ventriloquism by Constance Bennett in a part originally written for Eve Arden.

    The Unsuspected borrows much too much from Laura (1944). In addition to the prominently-displayed portrait, there's Claude Rains channeling Clifton Webb. Plus the heroine's return from presumed death, the curious sexless relationship between an older man (the murderer) and a much younger woman. A smitten investigator. Good thing there's a dollop of fake amnesia to help differentiate the two films.

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