Dr. Metablog

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

DR. METABLOG’S
GREATEST HITS

  • Rodent Wars

    The house was unoccupied for a month and the mice moved in, bigtime. I peanut-buttered some mouse traps and caught five or six adults. But I'm not finished with the mice; there's some compelling evidence that an occasional mouse is still attempting to share my food. Meanwhile, the lawn and garden are dotted with mole-holes. The moles are harder to deal with than mice, but they stay outside, so they're less offensive. In the compost pile, chipmunks are at work, but I don't begrudge them their scraps of vegetables. I'm more worried about the groundhogs, who can strip a flourishing garden in an evening. I've patrolled the places in which they've installed themselves in the past, and, so far, there are no signs that they've returned. One of these years, though — the garden is a tempting target. But the big news is the beavers. When we arrived, two weeks ago Friday, the pond was up a good eighteen inches. It was also stagnant and there was a huge heap of mud and sticks where the water should have been flowing out rapidly. I tore out some of the material and produced a little Niagara  –  a couple of acre-feet of water leaving us in a hour. But by Saturday morning the dam had been re-built and the water was up again. I got out the shovel and hoe and totally dismantled the dam. I must have sent several hundred pounds of mud and a big pile of twigs and branches downstream. Sunday morning I made my inspection: no repairs. This meant one of two things: either the beavers had moved on, or they don't work Sundays. But it's now two weeks, and they haven't returned, so I'm declaring victory in the rodent wars. 

    This morning I found some suspicious stuff that looks like bat-droppings in one of the shed rooms. Are bats rodents?

    The north American beaver, Castor canadensis, is a formidable creature — males characteristically weigh 60 pounds and a big one can reach a hundred. But the extinct local beaver was 5 to 6 times larger –bear size. It's a good thing I didn't have to use shovel and hoe on the dam of one of those babies. I wouldn't want to get on the bad side of a four hundred pound rodent –even if it were a vegetarian.

    July 5.  Sarah (see comments below) asks:  what's the problem with beavers. Well, they render the pond unusable, for one. No more grandchildren peacefully paddling. Because they create a new dike which water flows through, not over, algae, twigs, and scum of all sorts accumulates, rots, and sinks to the bottom.  The size of the pond expands very rapidly as the beavers move to create a suitably large habitat — so the fields become flooded.  The beavers cut down all the trees that I've been carefully cultivating.  In a few months, the land will be totally transformed.

    I'm hoping that the beavers find a new home on someone else's land. I didn't want to trap or kill them, but I'm certainly happy that I was able to discourage them from taking up permanent residence. 

  • Travels with Dorcas

    We've named our GPS navigatrix,  who gives instruction with a schoolmarmish London accent, Dorcas (which is, along with Prunella, one of my very favorite English given — or as they call them,"Christian"– names).  Dorcas has proved to be, on the whole, a reliable friend. She had a little trouble in Cincinnati, where, it turns out, there are two entirely distinct 225 Hill Terrace addresses. She took us to the wrong one — but I confess that in this case the error can fairly be traced to information-inputter, Dr. M. himself.

    Dorcas also had a royal hissy fit when we had to detour onto a single-lane-on-the-other-side-of the-road somewhere in Ohio — she "recalculated" twenty or thirty times, until I had to temporarily stop her mouth.   It could only be my imagination, but I thought I detected a trace of exasperation in her tone of voice. 

    Despite these failings, the Dorcster is a dream at finding her way around unfamiliar towns. No longer will I have to stop at gas stations for incomprehensible advice about how to get back on the highway.  I just call on Dorcas and I've got a friend, oh yeah, I've got a friend.   

  • World’s Largest Ball of Twine

    Today In Cawker City, Kansas, we made a pilgrimage to the world's largest ball of twine. It's enormous: 40 feet in circumference and 14,000 pounds (when last measured and weighed in 1986). And still growing. We were offered some twine to add our bit, but declined. It would be desecration — like adding a stone to the great Pyramid at Giza or to Stonehenge. Instead, we paid silent homage.

    We didn't stop to see the world's largest prairie dog in Oakley. Or the Russell Stover birthplace in Alton. Nor even the Evel Knievel Museum in Topeka. Can't do everything.

    And yet there are these pseudo-sophisticates who say that there's no culture in Kansas.

  • King Lear, V.i

    Today's contribution is the work of resident Shakespearean Pauline Harlem, the internationally-acclaimed author of Anagrams for Fun and Profit (2005) and The Naked Anagrammatist (2007).

    William Shakespeare, culture hero and playwright, is so often idolized for the great iconic moments and the big megaphonic speeches that quieter but equally luminous effects may go unnoticed. A good example of such an oversight is the extremely brief scene that graces the end of the History of King Lear — eleven lines in total that have never been granted the praise they deserve.

    As King Lear winds to a close, readers (or playgoers) are exhausted. Not only are their emotions wrung, but their capacities have been taxed just trying to track the crowded details of the plot. Even the author had trouble keeping King Lear's entangled stories in mind — perhaps because he revised the play several times. Yet although Shakespeare may have slipped on a detail or two, he never lost sight of the main lines of the parallel plots. In the one, Cordelia marshals her army against that of Lear's enemies, which is led by her wicked sisters Goneril and Regan; in the other plot, old Gloucester, cruelly blinded, is carried to Dover by his faithful son Edgar. Gloucester intends to put an end to his own life. Edgar has a different agenda; it's his plan to rescue his father from suicidal despair and by doing so save the old Earl's soul. 

    In the third-from-last scene of the play, Cordelia tenderly and reverently reveals herself to her father. The tragedy's very last scene is long and complex, encompassing a formal duel between Edgar and his half-brother Edmund in which Edmund is mortally wounded, plus the suicides of the wicked sisters and the murder of the good one, and finally the deathbed speeches of Lear himself. Between the weighty matters of the last and of the antepenultimate scenes, Shakespeare tucks in a brief enactment that can easily be overlooked — but which shouldn't be. It's one of the pinnacles of playwriting, as splendid a piece of art as the world will see between the last big bang and the next — or until all molecular motion ceases — and even afterward. 

    Shakespeare carefully sets off the scene from its surroundings. It both begins and ends with a child taking a father by the hand and attempting to draw him to safety — an image of care and concern with deep roots in both "real life" and the western literary tradition. First Cordelia wordlessly leads her maddened father across the stage. Just as the pair exit, Edgar stumbles on stage with his own father in tow. The brief exchange between father and son pauses while Edgar secludes Gloucester. Then comes the conflict between good and evil figured in the offstage roar of battle. Edgar returns, exchanges another couple of sentences with his father, and then takes his hand and leads him on. It's an unobtrusive scene, brief and understated — and for Shakespeare, relatively languageless. But every single word tells.

    Here is the scene exactly as it appeared in the quarto of 1605. For you internet wanderers who have accidentally found your way to this blague and who've never been offered the opportunity to look at Shakespeare in the raw, unedited and unmodernized, this passage offers some good examples of the playwright's quirky spelling and of his characteristically minimalist punctuation. (The medial u's — standard in Elizabethan printing — should be read as v's; i.e. "thrive" for "thriue.") 

    Alarum.  Enter the powers of France over the stage, Cordelia with her father in her hand.  Enter Edgar and Gloster.

     

       Edg.  Here father, take the shadow of this bush

    For your good hoast, pray that the right may thriue

    If euer I returne to you again ile bring you comfort.  Exit.

      Glost. Grace goe with you sir.  Alarum and retreat.

      Edg.  Away old man, giue me thy hand, away,

    King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter taine,

    Give me thy hand, come on.

       Glost. No farther sir, a man may rot euen here.

       Edg.  What in ill thoughts againe men must indure,

    Their going hence, euen as their coming hither,

    Ripeness is all come on.

    Let me provide just a bit of historical context. Before Shakespeare tackled the story of King Lear, it had been told many times on stage, in poetry, and in mythic history. In every previous versions, the armies that are led by Cordelia triumph in the battle that comes to pass in this scene. Because the story is nowadays so familiar, it's hard for us to imagine exactly how surprised and shocked early audiences would have been at the battle's outcome. Doubtless they would be entirely confident that Lear will succeed. Even today, anyone reading or hearing the scene's first lines would reasonably assume that the armies of justice will conquer and that the long British nightmare will finally end. Shakespeare deliberately raises such hopes only to dash them. Edgar's first sentence lulls us into false security. "Pray that the right may thrive" is plainly a signal to the audience that everything is going to come out just fine. There's an even stronger "foreshadowing" of success in Edgar's definitive announcement that "if ever I return to you again, I'll bring you comfort." Sly old Will has set a grand trap. And it's not just the plain import of the sentences; it's the warm and cozy vocabulary: "host," "pray," "right," "thrive," "comfort," "grace." It's all light and clarity and optimism. But King Lear is a play, as the audience well knows, in which "the worst is not/ So long as we can say 'This is the worst'"  There's no bottom to this play's misery. And so Edgar, briefly absent, returns to the stage with the blunt, four-word message that is an arrow to every sentient heart: "King Lear hath lost." And onto this mountain of grief Shakespeare piles even worse news: that Lear and his innocent, loving daughter have been "taine" — ta'en, taken, or as we would say, captured. In the first moments of the scene the audience might be comforted that Lear is in the charge of his daughter and Gloucester in that of his son, and that young and sensible people have finally come to the aid of the old fools. But good things do not last — not in this play. The forces of evil that King Lear unleashes are far from exhausted. They will continue to ruin lives and blight hopes right to the end. 

    It's Shakespeare's usual practice to lead his audience to anticipate one thing, but to give them another; this scene, like many such, is carefully constructed to overturn easy expectations. It seems impossible but it's true that in these eleven lines Shakespeare has embedded a second reversal that is equally momentous as the first.

    Here we are at last, at the very end of the play; the audience has every reason to believe that it will be gratified with a big, climactic, flashy battle. It's always been the way. But once again, expectations are defeated and the audience gets both less and more than it anticipated. Instead of lances and swords and duels to the death — he allows us simply some offstage clatter. Why?  Before he wrote King Lear, Shakespeare had staged many such battles. But he wasn't a film director with an unlimited budget and with all sorts of technological resources at hand; all he had at his disposal was a sunlit stage thirty-four feet wide and a handful of supernumeraries. Not nearly enough. Shakespeare adepts will be well aware that the playwright had already expressed, some half a dozen years before, his great frustration with the limitations of his martial scenes. In Henry V, the Chorus, speaking for the author, had apologized for inadequate representations of warfare: "our scene must to the battle fly,/ Where – O for pity- we shall much disgrace/ With four or five most vile and ragged foils/ Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous/ The name of Agincourt." In King Lear, Shakespeare shocked his audience with the outcome of the battle, but he shocked them even more, if possible, by not giving them the battle at all. King Lear is too serious, too desperate, too sad for yet another ridiculous brawl. Nor did Shakespeare take the other easy option — the long narrative of the sort with which messengers had been regaling audiences from the days of Aeschylus. Instead, Shakespeare offers his audience a profoundly revolutionary experience: noise, followed by four monosyllables. "King Lear hath lost."  Could any artist be more economical — or more devastating.

    These eleven lines therefore constitute an entire tragedy in little. Hope, followed by loss and despair — succeeded by a moderately uplifting moral. Hearing the horrid news, Gloucester once again falls into suicidal thoughts. "No further, sir.  A man may rot even here." The defeated old man is weary of the world and anxious to leave it behind. But Edgar will have none of his despair. "What, in ill thoughts again?" he says.  (The word "ill" is stronger in Elizabethan English than it is now; it's closer in meaning to our "evil.") "Men must endure/ Their going hence, even as their coming hither."  Shakespeare doesn't say, "You must endure." It's the more general, "men must endure"; not the individual, but the species. We're on this planet and we're human and the world may be, as Chaucer says, "a thoroughfare of woe" and we're born in pain and we die in pain, but it's our burden and our obligation to endure, to hold on. It's not exactly an optimistic statement, but it's realistic, and stoic, and appropriate to the context, and it's wise. And then Edgar/Shakespeare adds a further expression of condensed and gnomic wisdom: "ripeness is all."  "Ripeness is all" — to expand the metaphor — signifies that we human beings can't opt out, can't surrender until the cycle of life draws to its natural close. We, or men, or humanity, must continue the struggle to the last breath. Shakespeare doesn't say, if you commit suicide, you're going to go to hell. He doesn't, at this point in the magnificent eleven lines, threaten Gloucester with eternal damnation. Instead, he exhorts him to persist, to endure, to live life to the bitter end. And when Edgar says to Gloucester, "Come on," and father and son leave the stage hand-in-hand, we appreciate and admire, even in the midst of all the horror, the perennial human virtues of endurance and loyalty and love.

  • “Penultimate”

    At our local farmer's market last Saturday, an enthusiastic young man was bragging to his out-of-town guests about the various vegetable and food stands. "Here's where you buy the best bread in town," I heard him say. "It's the penultimate bakery." "Penultimate?" There's no doubt in my mind that the young feller meant to say that this particular bakery — a very excellent one, in fact — was the best of the best. Not just the "ultimate," but more than ultimate. In his mind, "ultimate" means best, and the prefix "pen" signifies "more than" or "extremely."  I'd never heard "penultimate" used in such a way, but I googled the word and found a number of such uses, including a Penultimate Wine Bar in St. Louis and a quotation from the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Delegates, who, arguing in support of a proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, specified that "voters must be given the chance to speak. They have the penultimate constitutional authority, not four judges."

    Of course, according to every dictionary on the planet, "penultimate" is not a superlative of "ultimate." It means, as it has always meant, "next to last." It's from the common Latin word "paene" — nearly or almost, and from "ultima" — last. Penultimate is almost the last in the same way that penumbra is almost a shadow.

    One of the reasons that I'm taken aback by this novel use is that for me, penultimate isn't at all an unfamiliar or exotic word. It entered my life in high school Latin, in the early 1950s, and therefore dates back to my earliest adventures in literacy. In Miss Beulah Withee's classes, we spent many hours learning to scan Virgil and Ovid. (I don't really know why we did so; you don't need to master metrics in order to appreciate the poetry. I imagine that the practice dates back many centuries to a time when gentlemen were expected to compose Latin verses.)  We students of first-year Latin were taught that the last syllable of a line was the ultima, the next-to-last the penult, and third from last the antepenult. Thanks to Miss Withee, "penultimate" has never posed any mystery for me. But let me hazard a guess that neither the bread enthusiast, nor the owner of the St. Louis watering hole, nor the Massachusetts speaker were ever required to scan Latin hexameters.

    Although penultimate in the sense of "the very best" is, so to speak, "wrong," I can feel it gaining fast.  It's breathing down my neck. And if it's used often enough in the new signification, "very best" will soon supplant "next to last."  Let me predict that in fifty years of so, "penultimate," which even as I write these words yearns to mean "better than best," will be only used in its original Latinate sense by a handful of old fogies who will cling to the antique meaning with all the feeble strength in their ancient bony fingers. I can even imagine a time when the prefix "pen" will become detached from "penultimate" and will be used to create a whole series of imaginative new "cranwiches": "penexcellent," for example, or "penpenurious."

    I'm of two minds about such changes. I'm well aware that language is inherently unstable and, intellectually speaking, I'm a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist. I try to be tolerant of new words; in fact, I'm proud of the handful that I've invented myself.   don't want to turn into some kind of mossbackosaurus convinced that any innovation in usage signals the demise of western civilization as we've known it. Nevertheless, I can't deny that the phrase "penultimate bakery" grates very harshly on my sensitive ears. 

    Moreover, I'd feel mighty squishy if I had to suppress my instinctive desire to rail against contemporary linguistic collapse.       

  • A Mental Prosthesis

    Regular readers of this blague will remember that Dr. M. has long ago confessed that he suffers from a serious case of "directional disability," or as some call it, "geographical dyslexia" — which means that he regularly loses his way, is subject to travel-based panic attacks, and is consequently abused by friends and family who refuse to recognize that he's not stupid, just utterly lost. 

    Advanced technology rides to my rescue. I now own a mobile navigator. It affixes to the windshield of the car, and, using signals bounced off three or four satellites, instructs me how to get from point A to point B. I've fallen profoundly in love with the disembodied female British voice who doesn't criticize me when I make a wrong turn: she just says, very politely, "recalculating."  Then she says, "drive point five miles and turn left."  What a boon to the chronically lost! I now drive as accurately as a migrating bird. My only reservation: I think that my friend should congratulate me when I get to where I'm going. She should show a little enthusiasm. But all she says is "arriving at destination, on left." What would it hurt her to offer congratulations?  I'm not asking for a commitment or for flowers.

    The navigator has now moved into first place among my prostheses, supplanting the incisor.      

  • Fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri; Anthroponomastics

    Last week I read and was much impressed by Jhumpa Lahiri's collection of short fiction called Interpreter of Maladies (1999), especially the first story "A Temporary Matter," which shouldn't leave a dry eye in the house. I've now read Lahiri's only published novel, The Namesake(2003). It's a fine book. I didn't know, although I should have, that a film of The Namesake, directed by the great Mira Nair, is now in release. I'll try to see it.

    Lahiri writes about Bengali immigrants in America. Acculturation is not a new subject in our fiction. Like other groups, the Bengalis bring their own flavor to the American gallimaufry. In The Namesake, the first generation keeps the customs and the food and largely self-segregates; members of the second generation go to good colleges and become engineers and doctors, understand but don't write Bengali, eat pizza and Chinese takeout, and aren't keen about arranged marriages.

    In Bengali society, individuals apparently have two names: an official public name, and what Lahiri calls a pet name, but which anthropologists call a hypocoristic. The central character in The Namesake was supposed to be called Nikhil, but through a bureaucratic error, his pet name, Gogol, became his school name. So he goes through the first years of his life as Gogol Gangulia. The name inhibits and embarrasses him. Before he matriculates at Yale, he changes his name back to Nikhil, yet he's always caught between the two identities signified by these rival appellations. 

    Jhumpa Lahiri is a pseudonym for Nilanjana Sudeshna. She's married to Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush. I can't imagine what's on her passport or what's she's named her two children, but it's a sure thing that she's thought more than a little about nomenclature  — as must anyone who feels that his name doesn't properly fit his character. I myself am ambivalent about my own name.  Vivian de St. Vrain isn't exactly "me," if the truth by told. It's French, and I don't always feel French. My teachers couldn't always pronounce my given name properly, and I had to correct them, which was embarrassing for a shy youth. And Vivian — it's so ambisexual. I would have preferred to have been named something decisive and less ethnic. I should have had Gogol's courage. Or Nilanjana Sudeshna's. 

  • Boustrophedoniana

    I'm fond of a passage in Gulliver's Travels where Jonathan Swift describes Lilliputian script. In a single sentence, Swift manages to attack and nail two of his favorite targets: "ladies" and "England." The Lilliputians "manner of writing is quite peculiar being neither from the left to the right, like the Europeans;  nor from the right to the left, like the Arabians; nor from up to down, like the Chinese, nor from down to up, like the Cascagians, but aslant from one Corner of the Paper to another, like Ladies in England. 

    In good satirical fashion, Dr. S. supplements truth with fancy: the "Cascagians," who write from bottom to top, may sound like the Carpathians or Sarmatians or some other trans-Caucasus people, but they don't exist. It appears that Swift invented them in order to complete his survey of the directions in which writing might flow.

    Yet even including the fantastical Cascagians, Swift's list is not comprehensive. There are other possibilities for writing beside up and down, right and left or aslant.      

    In boustrophedon (a lovely Greekish word that signifies "turn like an ox plowing"), alternate lines move in opposite directions. Lines one, three, five and seven and so on proceed from left to right; lines two, four, six, and eight from right to left. Ancient languages such as Safaitic were written in boustrophedon; some Etruscan inscriptions, still undeciphered, seem to follow the same pattern. Boustrophedon is not unreasonable, but it's certainly awkward for those who have made a fetish of left to right.

    Here's how Shakespeare transforms boustrophedonically.      

    It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,—

    !srats etsahc uoy, uoy ot ti eman ton em teL

    It is the cause. Yet I'll not shed her blood;

    ,wons naht sreh fo niks retihw taht racs roN

    And smooth as monumental alabaster.

    .nem erom yarteb ll'ehs esle, eid tsum ehs teY. 

    Survival of the fittest, applying even to scripts, no doubt led to the extinction of boustrophedon.

    Query: would our brains be more supple and more imaginative if we had retained this style of writing? Or would we simply be more perplexed? Or dizzy? And would we, as a civilization, prize as the peak of wit and award the laurel to the palindrome? 

    Incidentally, Rongorongo, the indigenous language of Easter Island, was apparently written in reverse boustrophedon, i.e. bottom to top — a compositional practice that any satirist, even Swift, would have been delighted to invent.

    May 26.  Marion Morrison, Ph.D., an associate professor of English at the University of Iowa, writes: "I'm confused about 'reverse boustrophedon.' Is it real, or is it another Dr. Metablog 'invention'?  Is Rongorongo a metablogian Cascagian?  I'm skeptical. And how does it work?  Can you favor us with a few lines in so-called 'reverse boustrophedon?'

    Vivian replies:

    Devoutly to be wish'd….

    noitammusnoc a siT' .ot rieh si hself tahT

    The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

    dne ew yas ot peels a yb dna ;emor oN

    And by opposing end them. To die- to sleep-

    ,selbuort fo aes a tsniaga smra ekat ot  rO

    The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

    reffus ot dnim eht ni relbon sit' rehtehW                                                      

    To be, or not to be- that is the question:

  • My New Career

    Ever since I retired a few years ago, friends and relations have been asking what I intend to do with the rest of my life. It's time to start on a new career, and after much deliberation, I've decided to fulfill a lifelong dream. I've always had the soul of a power forward;  now I'm going to make it happen. With this blague entry, I declare my eligibility for the NBA draft.

    Let me confess:  I don't expect to be a lottery pick. There's too much college talent and too many 7-foot Lithuanian teenagers. High second round is what I aspire too.  I might even have to play a year or two in a European league to sharpen my game — no problem. 

    I figure that to play in the NBA, a guy needs three things: the game, which I have; the attitude, which I certainly have; and the body, which I am working on. 

    Let me point out that at 5' 10 1/4"  (formerly 5' 10 3/4") I am a full five inches taller than Earl Boykins. Plus I can get into the air higher than Yao Ming; I'm a better three point-shooter than Shaquille O'Neal; and I'm a more consistent at the charity stripe than Ben Wallace. Those are some big names there. Not only that, I'm a better interview than anyone in the league past or present–even better than Sir Charles himself. I'm a team player. I don't need to play 48 minutes;  I don't need to take the game-winning shot. On defense, there's not a player in the league whose flopping will be more authentic. 

    Because I've lived a more-or-less bookish life, my body is still in tiptop shape. No gimpy knees or repaired Achilles tendons or fused vertebrae. True, the A-fib could be a problem down the road, but I don't imagine that the apical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, of which I have the merest tad, will hold me back in the slightest. 

    To the club owners and general managers who are reading this blague entry — let me point out that I appeal to an entirely different demographic than players now in the league. Until now, there was no one to be a "spokesman" for Beltone hearing aids or Avodart or AARP. Untold, untapped commercial opportunities waiting to be seized!!

    I've been running this idea by my friends and family for the last few weeks, and I'm sorry to say that there's a lot of ageism and size-ism and negativity out there.  Let's leave that skepticism behind us! I'm ready to roll! I just have to decide on the appropriate tats.   

    (For an update on this subject, read more here.)   

  • An Overheard Anecdote

    We were flying Frontier from DC back to Colorado. Two old guys (old, but younger than I) were swapping stories. Here's one. "Rosie and I were at a hotel in Vegas, in bed.  About one in the morning, we hear a hooker knock on the door across the hall.  'Anyone want a little action.' No answer. Then, sure enough, she knocks on our door. 'Want some action?'  Rosie says, 'Move on, honey, I'm working this room.'" 

    Good dialogue. 

    I assume that Rosie is the wife.  But the story, at least to my tired old ears, has a slightly different valance if she's a date, a business associate, or a mistress.

  • A Violent Literary Dream

    Last night I dreamed that I was in conversation with two English professors (both male and middle-aged) from a college in New Orleans (query — why New Orleans?). One of them said, "Rex is a very good baseball player. Thanks for recommending him." I said, "Yes, he's good, even though he has two prosthetic shoulders. But I didn't recommend him to you as a baseball player. I recommended him as a novelist. He writes detective stories."  One of the professors said, "I like his stories, but he doesn't transcend the genre"  ("transcend the genre" is an actual verbatim quote from the dream. I don't invent the dialogue; I only report the facts.)  And then I said, and I think I remember this accurately, "if you want to read someone who 'transcends the genre,' you should read novels by Leonardo Sciascia." Once those words were out of my mouth, I started to feel foolish — did I mention the name Sciascia because I was genuinely trying to add to the conversation, or was I just showing off?  (I often bother myself with such questions in 'real life'.)  While I was cross-examining myself, a young woman appeared on the "set."  She was no one I recognized, but I can report that she was wearing a white blouse and a long, dark skirt. She held a gift-wrapped package and she opened it, pulling out a book. She said, "here's something that will transcend the genre." And then she shouted, "Transcend the Genre."  "Transcend the Genre."  Just at that moment I heard shooting and realized that a sniper was firing at at her. She took a bullet to the stomach and another to the head, and lay there at my feet, dead and bloody. It seemed like a good time to wake up, and I did so.

    May 18. Marion Morrison, associate professor of English at the University of Iowa, who has contributed to this blague in the past, writes:  "Dr. Metablog, or Vivian, or whatever you're calling yourself today, I'm embarrassed for you. That's the most mysognynistic dream I could imagine. As soon as true creativity arrives on the scene of your dream, in the form of a young, attractive and obviously creative woman, your unconscious killed her with a shot to the heart. Your dream admits no other interpretation." 

    May 19.  Spike Schapiro writes:  "Marion, that's a crock of you know what. The dream is not a bit 'mysogynistic' — I presume you mean 'misogynistic'. It's about pretentiousness. The woman who shouts "transcend the genre" is an pretentious intellectual bully. She deserves to be obliterated — incidentally, not with a bullet in the heart, as you claim, but in the head and stomach. You can't even get the facts right. But what can you expect from someone who thinks that Rider Haggard wrote a novel called King Solomon's Minds, which is what you called it in your pretentious little slice of literary you know what. Hey everyone, click on "in the past" in the preceding paragraph and check out what I'm saying. Marion, go back to the classroom where you can poison the brains of another generation of vulnerable children."

  • What We Read in the Fifties: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

    The Bridge of San Luis Rey, although published in 1927, was still widely read in the 1950s both by the  general public and by students in classrooms all over America. It's a fine novel but it's unfortunate that Thornton Wilder's philosophical premise is so naive and lame. In 1714 a rope bridge over a gorge in Peru breaks and five people perish. Brother Juniper investigates the lives of the fallen, assuming that the good lord wouldn't have allowed them to die without a reason. Eventually, the well-meaning priest learns that the five victims were no worse and no better than any other quintet of ordinary mortals. His conclusion is displeasing to officialdom and both he and his compilation of facts are burnt by the Inquisition.

    By the oddest of odd coincidences, I had recently read an essay on the rope bridges of the Incas, in which I learned that, though brilliantly designed, these bridges required annual renewal. My reading of The Bridge of San Luis Rey was therefore colored by questions not of theology but of engineering. Why didn't they repair the damn bridge?  Why did they think that a fiber bridge wouldn't rot?  Why doesn't Brother Juniper investigate the bridge maintenance department? The conclusions to which the novel seems to come — that a) sometimes good people die for no good reason, b) that god is either indifferent or not there at all, and c) the Spanish inquisition was unpleasant — don't seem particularly challenging. Is it possible that the novel's theses were daring in the 50s classroom?  They seem mighty tame today.

    Though the frame of The Bridge of San Luis Rey is bland, the accounts of the five people who die are sharp and colorful and imaginative and rather beautifully written. There are moments, in fact, when Wilder's storytelling seemed almost post-modern. Here's part of a paragraph about the twins Manuel and Estaban. To me, it sounds like an extract from The Hundred Years of Solitude.

    Because they had no family, because they were twins, and because they were brought up by women, they were silent. There was in them a curious shame in regard to their resemblance. They had to live in a world where it was the subject of continual comment and joking. It was never funny to them and they suffered the eternal pleasantries with stolid patience. From the years when they first learned to speak they invented a secret language for themselves, one that was scarcely dependent on Spanish for its vocabulary, or even for its syntax. They resorted to it only where they were alone, or at great intervals in moments of stress whispered it in the presence of others. The Archbishop of Lima was something of a philologist; he dabbled in dialects; he had even evolved quite a brilliant table for the vowel and consonant changes from Latin into Spanish and from Spanish into Indian-Spanish. He was storing up notebooks of quaint lore against an amusing old age he planned to offer himself back on his estates outside Segovia. So when he heard one day about the secret language of the twin brothers, he trimmed some quills and sent for them. The boys stood humiliated upon the rich carpets of his study while he tried to extract from them their bread and tree and I see and I saw. They did not know why the experience was so horrible to them. They bled…. 

    I think if this extract were presented to ten literate readers, nine of them would immediately guess "Marquez." Of course, its Marquezness would be even more obvious if Manuel and Estaban would fly up to the ceiling or be transformed into a thousand glorious butterflies. I don't know whether Marquez ever read The Bridge of San Luis Rey, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised to discover that he had done so.       

    Incidentally, Manuel dies and his twin Estaban wrestles with "the guilt of the survivor." Is it relevant that Thornton Wilder's own twin died at birth?  And does it follow that Wilder, despite the fact that he came from a large and accomplished family, might well be thought of as some curious sort of replacement child? 

  • Favorite Royal Cognomina and Sobriquets

    Reading an introductory history of Spain (I'm appallingly ignorant about the Iberian peninsula), I learned of the dark age king with the excellent name of Wifred the Hairy. Wifred stimulated me to recall other monarchs with colorful sobriquets: Vlad the Impaler, Ethelred the Unready, Ivan the Terrible, Charles the Fat, Edward the Confessor, Pippin the Short, Eric the Red, William the Conqueror, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Joanna the Mad, Suleiman the Magnificent. When my learning and memory failed, wikipedia rode to the rescue: Sviatopolk the Accursed, Ismail the Bloodthirsty, Ivailo the Cabbage, Alfonso the Chaste, Louis the Indolent, Denis the Farmer, Piero the Gouty, Fulk the Ill-tempered, Edgar the Outlaw, Louis the Pious, Eric the Priest-hater, William the Silent, Olaf the Stout, Bayezid the Thunderbolt, Garcia the Tremulous, and Alfonso the Wise. Then I thought, how sad that in this formal age of first and last names we no longer make use of such picturesque appellations. Let's return to the earlier tradition. I propose, as a start, Mel the Bigot, Mike the Ear-biter, Rush the Blowhard, George the Truculent (or George the Decider), Alberto the Forgetful, and Dick the Dick. Suggestions are very welcome. The world is all before us, where to seek. 

    May 15.  Pauline Harlem, acclaimed author of The Joy of Anagrams, suggests these two: Woody the Perplexed and Warren the Promiscuous.

    May 16. Spike Schapiro comments:  "Who in the living heckola is 'Ivailo the Cabbage.'  Did you make that up, Vivian?  Do the rules of your game allow me to invent vegetable sobriquets?  Suppose I said, 'Ivana the Beet' or 'Penelope the Melon'?  Would that be amusing or pertinent?  What's the deal here?

    Vivian replies:  Spike — Ivailo the Cabbage, King of Bulgaria, was also known as "Ivailo the Lettuce" and "Ivailo the Radish."  Why would I try to deceive you?  Besides, I'm not nearly so inventive.  For more info, click  here.

  • Another “Loyal Bushie.”

    In the previous post, I recorded two archetypes of "Loyal Bushies" — the Moronotron and the Henchdoofus. Here's another one.

    The Spoiled Rich Prick. Typically, the SRP attended boarding school at Phillips something-or-other or at St. Somebodies in New Hampshire. Although he learned nary a thing, and his SATs were under 1000, he was admitted to Yale (which his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather attended) and in his senior year was tapped for membership by Numskull and Boners. The SRP went on to study at the Harvard Business School, where he graduated dead last in his class. Although eligible for the draft, through his father's influence he was able to secure a place in the National Guard, from which he was frequently absent-without-leave.  For a decade or so after Harvard, the SRP was distinguished for booze, cocaine and drabbing. Friends of the family set him up in a business, which failed, and then bought him out for many millions. Then the SRP's father decided that he was too incompetent to enter the family business, so he had him elected governor. He still holds high political office and is famous for his laziness, rhetorical incompetence, anti-intellectualism, partisanship, ignorance, truculent stubbornness, petulance and bonehead errors in matters of national consequence. 

    Spike Schapiro comments:  "Thanks for this portrait. I guess you had Dan Quayle in mind."

  • “Loyal Bushies”: Two Archetypes

    Here are two types of "civil" "servants" prominent in the Bush era.

    A.  The Moronotron. Just under 30 years old, he/she (let's say she) comes from a large family of home-schooled children, five of whom are still active in the LifeForce Harvest Church of Milan, Ohio, pastored by the Reverend Mike. Family trauma (one of her brothers committed suicide; another had to be disowned when he moved to San Francisco with his friend Gabe; that her mother recently entered alcohol rehab has only strengthened her faith. She graduated from Brethren College, where students and faculty bask in an "authentic relationship with the Lord," with an honors degree in Christian Communication. After Brethren, she attended law school at Regent University, where she chaired the debate team and counseled pregnant teens. She was making fundraising calls for the Santorum campaign in 2004 when she was offered the position of assistant undersecretary for policy in HHS — her roommate's cousin was a fraternity brother of a 'prayer partner' of Lynne Cheney's aunt Sylvia's husband. As White House liaison, she "relayed" information from the President's "closest advisers" to the Secretary. Now undersecretary of HHS, she oversees 160,000 employees and a budget of 800 gajillion dollars. She is unmarried and doesn't date, enjoys Fruit Loops, and someday, when her life is less busy, hopes to travel to third-world countries to bring good news to the unenlightened.

    B. The Henchdoofus. He is now close to 60, a graduate of the Chadron State College in Chadron, Nebraska, with a degree in marketing. At Chadron, he captained the cheerleading squad and made a complete recovery from the illnesses (depression, fatigue, etc.) that made it impossible to for him serve in the military during the Vietnam era. He joined Exxon Mobil right out of college. He had worked his way up to a moderate-sized cubicle when he left to head up Patriotic Americans For Clean Energy (wholly funded by Exxon). PACE lobbied for a "balanced approach to offshore oil drilling." In 2000, President Bush appointed him chair of the Advisory Council of the Food Safety and Inspection Service. In 2001, he founded a K Street lobbying firm called ACS Associates which had as its principal client the American Melamine Council. ACS (from which his wife Christine continues to draw a $30,000 monthly stipend) is often credited with the resurgence of profits of both the melamine and the pet-food industries. He was recently appointed Undersecretary for Nutrition Policy in the Department of Agriculture. He's a dedicated environmentalist and hunter, and enjoys the wilderness in his SUV, his ATV, and especially in his Arctic Cat Panther 360 snowmobile equipped with an ATN 24x75LU peak performance titanium night vision telescope mounted on a Remington X-40 high-powered assault rifle.

  • Book Report: Peter Pouncey, Rules for Old Men Waiting

    Rules for Old Men Waiting (Random House, 2005) is both a good and bad novel. Some of the time it's rather wonderful, but there are long stretches that are maximally pedestrian. It's distinctly odd that the story-within-a story — a WWI morality about good and evil in the face of combat– is gritty and real and exciting, while the frame is flaccid and unconvincing and also offers some of the woodenest dialog I've read in the new millennium. Rules for Old Men Waiting is a first novel by a sexagenarian that recounts the story of an old man who's decided to devote his last days to writing fiction. It's less involuted than it sounds but still a little too self-consciously theatrical. Pouncey must have had tons of trouble bringing the novel to a close, because in the last few pages he invents a new character to help him staple on an ending. Nevertheless, the novel is an honest, respectable effort — and extremely effective when Pouncey sticks with his strengths. 

    My geezer group is going to read Rules for Old Men Waiting later this month, so stay tuned for a fuller report.

  • “The Answer” is not the Answer

    I never, ever, thought that the Denver Nuggets' acquisition of Allen Iverson was a good idea. He has skill, he has speed, and he's the most resilient guy in the world. He can do everything on a basketball court except win games. These last four losses against San Antonio prove the point. It's not just that last night he was 6 for 22;  it's that when the Nuggets come down the floor, whether Iverson eventually shoots or not, he clings to the ball and dribbles around while the rest of the team stands and watches. Iverson turns his teammates into spectators. Last night, Carmelo had three points in the fourth quarter; he barely touched the ball.  Nene, who can score off almost everyone down in the post, might as well have sat for the last twelve minutes.   

    Of course it's clear that the Nuggets can't advance in the playoffs until they find themselves a reliable three-point shooter.

    It's just as obvious that Iverson isn't going to become a team player; he's 31 years old and he's averaged 23 shots a game with a .422 percentage for an entire career. He's not going to alter his game, but he's definitely going to deteriorate. I'm afraid that we're stuck with him. Meanwhile, Philadelphia has done better with Andre Miller than with The Answer. In addition, we gave Philly two first-round draft picks to help them fill in their gaps. I like Philadelphia's chances;  I don't like ours.   

  • A Bad Case of Irony Overload (IO)

    O m' god. I'm having a serious attack of Irony Overload. This is no joke. In the last few days, the news has been saturated with extreme instances of Natural Irony. It's dangerous stuff. Left unchecked, you know, IO can progress to Morbid Cynicism (MC), which is terminal. The cases to which I refer are not your run-of-the-mill family-values preacher caught pants-down with a male prostitute. These are more colorful, more exotic performances.

    Paul Wolfowitz, World Bank prexy and ferocious campaigner against corruption and nepotism, "directed" that his very own girlfriend or house mate or whatever she might be called, be hired at a handsome tax-free salary at a State Department agency where she's to be guaranteed superior evaluations and inordinately large salary increases. It's a variety of cronyism that we can call "nepotistical irony."

    Another: Robert E. Coughlin, deputy chief of the criminal division of our very own US of A Department of Justice, which is overseeing the investigation of Jack Abramoff, suddenly needs to spend more time with his family when investigators scrutinize his financial relationship to Kevin Ring, an Abramoff stooge. What are the odds? The investigator supervising his own investigation! There's enough irony in this story to fill a barrel with monkeys or, alternatively, an industrial size hen house with packs of famished foxes. And there's more to the story. Last year, the very same Robert E. Coughlin received, at the hands of Alberto Gonzalez himself, the highly coveted Attorney-General Award for Fraud Prevention.

    And just yesterday, when I thought that my IO index couldn't rise any higher, Global AIDS Ambassador and Deputy Secretary of State Randy (actual name!!) Tobias, a big abstinence guy and the overseer of a program designed to help men in poor countries "develop healthy relationships with women" resigned "for personal reasons" when it was revealed that he had been regularly dialing up an "escort service" that sent shady ladies to his home.  Asked "if he knew any of the alleged call girls," Randy replied that in "he didn’t remember them at all. He said it was like ordering pizza." Women are like pizza?  To a man whose mission is "to help men in poor countries develop… etc., etc."  In the face of such a revelation, how's an ordinary guy supposed to keep Morbid Cynicism at bay. 

    By the way, Randy T. has chosen to go with the Ted Haggard defense. Yes, he frequented prostitutes, but not for sex, only for massage.

    So here we go again, dear readers. Pop quiz, multiple choice. Your back is hurting and you need a massage. Whom do you call?  Two choices:  a) massage therapist, or b) a notorious madam.

    If you answered A, you win a lifetime membership in the Committee to Stamp out Morbid Cynicism.  If you answered B., you receive a lucrative patronage appointment in the Department of Justice plus a secret e-mail account with the Republican National Committee. 

  • What We Read in the Fifties: Scaramouche

    For the life of me, I cannot remember whether I read Scaramouche because I was entranced by the movie, or whether it was the other way around, and I surrendered my 16 cents to the Leader Theater because I had already fallen in love with Rafael Sabatini's historical romances. I know that I gorged myself on huge helpings of Sabatini — not only Scaramouche and Captain Blood, but everything else in the rich collection of the McDonald Avenue library. Scaramouche, first published in 1921, enjoyed a second burst of popularity when the Mel Ferrer-Stewart Granger Technicolor swashbuckler hit the screens in 1952. I've now re-read the novel, and while it lacks the magic that it had for my 13-year-old self, and, moreover, is awkwardly plotted, and stilted, and thin, and obvious, it's nevertheless an engaging adventure story. The central figure is the dashing and resilient Andre-Louis Moreau, who survives crisis after crisis with a witty, devil-may-care sprezzatura. The novel itself overlays elements of picaresque (on-the-lam Moreau becomes an itinerant actor, then a fencing master, and finally a politician) onto a traditional romance plot (in the novel's final pages, our bastard hero discovers that he's an aristocrat by birth). At heart it's yet another version of the secret-sharer, doppelganger, Jekyll-Hyde plot so common a hundred or so years ago. Moreau is haunted by his wicked double, the Marquis Gervais de la Tour D'Azyr, with whom he competes for not one but two different women  — one fallen and one pure, as was the custom in those days. D'Azyr claims that Moreau has been "the evil genius of his life," but he's got it backwards: he's Moreau's evil twin. In the thrilling climax, so-called, Moreau wins Aline de Kercadiou — the upper-class paragon whom both he and his double desire. The novel is set during the French Revolution, but the historical context is dimly realized  — a much paler embodiment than The Tale of Two Cities, which, like Scaramouche, is also a novel of doubles (remember Charles Darnay and his dissipated friend Sidney Carton!).  A dyspeptic reader might assert that the novel is nothing but dilute Dumas; it would be hard to challenge such an opinion.

    The film, which I remembered fondly, was a bitter disappointment. It's appallingly, embarrassingly bad. There's some good theatrical dueling, but the plot is a mess, the dialog is ghastly, the humor infantile, and the acting vaudevillian. Eleanor Parker is hopeless as a cliche "spitfire" who alternately kisses and smacks around her admirers; however, a young and rondelet Janet Leigh, swathed in whole hectares of taffeta, manages to redeem the part of Aline. All the characters, even Aline, wear their hair in the oddest configuration: highly artificial, upswept white wigs. They look like well-groomed sheep. I suppose it's too late to shoot the hairdresser.

    The Sesquipedalian Sibilance Society would like to extend its appreciation to Mr. Sabatini for popularizing the word "spadassinicide," which is much-used in the novel. It's from Fr. spadassin, "assassin," and from the Latin verb meaning, "to kill."  Etymologically speaking, spadassinicide ought to denote a person who murders murderers, but the author uses it to mean a person who kills by taking advantage of the etiquette of the duel. It's a handsome old neologism, although not easy to work into everyday conversation.

  • An Informal Survey

    OK, it's time to get going. Could we put the house lights on, please. Here's the first question. Raise your hand if you think that the loss of 5.000,000 e-mails by the White House was simply an accident. That it was unintended. Anyone?  Yes, I see a couple of hands in the back, and there's someone here on the left. I guess most of you think it was 'accidentally-on-purpose.' Fine. OK now, here's another question. The White House claims that Karl Rove didn't use the Republican National Committee e-mail address to bypass the records act, but just simply to keep politics and government business separate. If you believe that, please raise your hand. I'm not seeing any hands at all — oh yes, there's someone, and there's someone else near the center aisle. There's two hands — no, I'm sorry, three.  Ready for another question?  The President is willing to let his advisers talk to congressional investigators, but not under oath, not publicly, and with no transcript. If you believe that he's not trying to hide something, raise your hands, please. Did I make that question clear? Let me say it again. If the president's argument is persuasive to you, raise your hand. If you think he's just protecting himself and his advisers, keep your hand down. Hands? I see two on the left, and one there in the back. Same person as before, I think. OK now, — next question. Karl Rove's lawyer admits that Rove systematically erased his e-mails, but only because he thought that they were preserved elsewhere. Anyone believe that one?  Please raise your hand. Nobody?  OK, there's someone down here. Sorry, I almost missed you, ma'am. So we have only one person who believes that story. Ready for another question?  Attorney-General Gonzalez says that he would never fire anyone for political reasons or to interfere with an investigation in progress. Do I have any hands on that one? No, none at all?  Interesting?  I'll wait. Still nobody? Let me try another question. Anyone here believe that Gonzalez is a tool of Rove and that he does exactly what Rove tells him to do?  OK, now we're finally getting some response. I thought no one was paying attention. Looks like about two-thirds, maybe three-quarters of you. Maybe more. We only have time for one last question.  Anyone here convinced that Karl Rove is a vicious liar who deserves to hang by his thumbs in a Gitmo prison, please raise your hand. Whoa, almost everyone. Please, I can't keep count if you raise both hands. Just one hand, please. Look, shouting isn't necessary  — I just need to count the hands. What's that you say?  I can't hear you — there's so much noise. Oh, you think he should hang by his nuts. Very good. OK, thanks a lot, everybody. Thanks for your cooperation. That was very helpful.         

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