Dr. Metablog

More Absolutely Real Captured-in-the-Wild Dialog

Dr. M. (at the spacious Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, to a guard);  "Can you tell me how to get to the new American Wing."

Guard:  "You go straight ahead, through the main courtyard, through two more doors, when you hit Egypt, you take a left."

Cymbeline at the Barrow Street Theatre

I have a sour relationship with "the stage" -- and especially with staged Shakespeare plays. The theatre and I just don't get along. I think it's because my expectations are too grand. When I go to the theatre, I want to be ravished, but more often I'm bored, or worse than bored, embarrassed. I long to laugh, to cry, to be transported --but instead, I find myself to be entirely too conscious of the efforts and the contrivances of directors and designers and actors. Moreover, how am I supposed to achieve ecstasy when the guy in the next seat is snuffling and fidgeting and making inappropriate sounds at the wrong moments. And besides, I probably know more about the Shakespeare play that I'm watching than my comrades in the audience and I have opinions about what the play is supposed to mean and how it should be performed, and so I become intolerant and over-critical. And when one is busy criticizing, and one misses one's inexplicably-deleted favorite lines, one has strayed from the path that leads to rapture. When I sit still and concentrate on the book, I can achieve moments of private transcendence. When I'm at the theatre, the theatre gets in my way.  

Despite all, I went to see ("hear," Elizabethans would say) Cymbeline at the Barrrow Street Theatre and, I joyfully confess, had a good time. Cymbeline isn't performed much and I had never seen it done (except for the pedestrian BBC-TV version, which doesn't count). I was in doubt whether such a long, complex, plot-heavy play could be performed. But the young Barrow Street people were earnest and enthusiastic and pretty and well-rehearsed. Their Cymbeline was swiftly-paced and offered some delightful moments. I was genuinely impressed.

But I was not satisfied. I was not transported.

Was it a problem with the delivery, or was it the fault of the listeners, that when Imogen learns that her husband/lover Posthumus Leonatus is at Milford Haven, and cries out, "O for a horse with wings," the audience laughed. Oh, please, audience, don't laugh, and please, actors, don't play it for laughs. Imogen's imaginative expression is designed to capture her frustrated yearning for the mate from whom she has been forcibly separated and to express all the sexual longing of vibrant youth. She's head over heels in love and she's not making a joke of it.  A "horse with wings" is not a piece of grotesquerie, as the audience and the actors seemed to assume -- it's simply the fastest means of transport that anyone could imagine until 200 years after Cymbeline was written, when engineers started to play with the idea of a steam-driven engine. I so much wanted  last night's Imogen to express, with that line, the kind of emotion that brings me to tears in my study. But alas.

And similarly, when Imogen and Posthumus are reconciled at last, and they embrace (an act that the  the audience has been anticipating for hours), Posthumus is given the most poetically resonant line in the play. "Hang there," he says, "like fruit, my soul,/ Til the tree die." The line, compact of images, is just outside our easy comprehension, but we know at a minimum that trees take a very long time to die and that Posthumus and Imogen are now linked into one soul and that Imogen is like "fruit" in the sense of sweetness and juiciness and fertility -- indeed the ramifying plot has found its way to fruition. And so has the chain of imagery that began in the first moments of the play, when Imogen told us that her father, "like the tyrannous breathing of the north/ Shakes all our buds from growing." It took five acts, but those blighted buds finally ripened. I'm sorry to say that in the Barrow Street version, this touchstone of poetry was not emphasized but swallowed; if you weren't waiting for the line, you would have missed it entirely. Another moment of potential ecstasy surrendered.

But in all honesty, I must admit that if the players had paused to underline the sentence, I would probably be complaining that they treated the poetry too "poetically" and too portentously. Shakespeare is hard to play, and I'm hard to please.

But I'm not principally concerned that the Barrow boys and girls misread or neglected a line here or there. I'm concerned about their big compromise.

While enjoying the first four acts, I could not help but wonder how six performers on a rudimentary stage were going to deal with the theophany in the fifth act, when Jupiter himself descends from above on the back of an eagle and tells the audience not to worry, that everything is going to work out just fine. The scene is the most important in the play and it's what distinguishes Cymbeline from Shakespeare's earlier and easier and more-easily-performed comedies. But the theophany is hard, and hard to explain, and also, I'm sure, expensive. In my view, Barrow Street should have pulled the goalie and thrown a hail Mary downfield; lay it all out there. But instead, they took an intentional pass. O my gosh! they took a razor to the entire business. No Jupiter, no eagle, no wondrous, mystical, symbolic appearance of Posthumus's lost family, no soothsayer, no riddle, and therefore, I'm sorry to say, no enchantment and no miracle. No miracle, no Cymbeline, at least no Cymbeline as it is known and loved by such as I.

Here's what I think happens in Cymbeline. For four and a half acts, human beings make a mess of things. The king is blinded by uxoriousness, the queen is a machiavellia, Posthumus is vain, Cloten is simply stupid. The characters tie themselves into plot knots and everyone is deceived in part or in whole (although Shakespeare witholds nothing from the audience). Cymbeline thinks his sons are lost, Posthumus thinks Imogen is dead, Lucius Brutus thinks Imogen is a boy, Imogen thinks that Posthumus has been beheaded, and so on. Everyone is wrong; no one knows the whole truth.

And then comes the miracle. Jupiter descends, and 20, or 21, or 22 (depending on who's counting) mistakings are unravelled in five amazing, astounding minutes. Cymbeline is a tragedy for four and half acts and a comedy at the end. And should be played so. Take away Jupiter and take away the miracle. A play about human folly and divine intervention becomes nothing more than Twelfth Night or As You Like It. which is not a bad thing to be, but not what Shakespeare was doing in 1610. It's like scissoring Marina's magical virginity out of Pericles, or Hermione's rebirth out of The Winter's Tale, or Prospero's magic out of The Tempest. It's not right. It undervalues a most thrilling, most remarkable piece of writing. Even those of us who don't believe in miracles want to believe in Shakespeare's miracles.

But -- the Barrow Street guys and gals inspired me to re-read Cymbeline, and, all alone, just me and my Kindle, I once again indulged my ecstasy. So thank you.

Bird, Bigbird, and Little

One high noon, many years ago, when I was myself barely fledged, and was an undergraduate at a "large Eastern university,"  I spotted three well-known members of the humanities faculty on the hunt for lunch. They were Ephim Fogel, David Grossvogel, and Don Kleine. An unforgettable assemblage!  Fogel, Grossvogel and Kleine, I thought -- sounds like the name of a law firm invented by Tom Pynchon.

I had not reflected on this  -- to me  -- amusing incident until this week, when I was reading the bird book that I mentioned in a previous post. There I discovered that the largest known bird was the recently extinct elephant bird, a distant Madagascan cousin of the ostrich, which stood 10 feet tall and tipped the scale at 880 pounds. Its eggs were 3 feet in circumference and would have provided three chicken-size egg omelets for about 55 people. I also learned that the smallest bird is the bee hummingbird which the calipers says is two inches long and which weighs .06 of an ounce. Its egg is the size of a pea, which means than it would take a small flock of hummingbirds many days to make me a decent breakfast. 

Here's a bee hummingbird:

And here's an imaginative reconstruction of the elephant bird, a grossvogel if there ever was one.

 

They are not drawn to scale.

Quiz

What is a currawong? a gonolek, a boubou, a tchagra, a brubru?  a sitella, a minivet? a drongo? a common koel?  Do you think that I've invented these words?  Heck no. Each one is absolutely genuine and furthermore, far beyond my powers of invention. And from the same large family come the zitting cisticola, the bulbul, the cacique, the oropedola, the po'o-uli, and the 'o'u. Not to mention the rhabdornis, the oxpecker. the rockjumper, the babbler, the treecreeper, the tapaculo, the cotinga, the manakin, the pitta, the assity, the yellow rifleman, and the logrunner.

You've probably figured it out by now. They're all passerines.

These great and new-to-me words come from The Bird (New York, 2008), a whimsical, idiosyncratic survey, by the appropriately--named ornithologist Colin Tudge. "What's that on that branch over there? Is it a grinning tudge?"

Nugget-Watching

This year's Nuggets are now at 3-2 and each game has been worth watching. Because there are no superstars, there's a different plot every game. The ball moves and doesn't stop as when, in the old day, it came into the hands of Carmelo, or, even worse, The Answer. Everyone plays defense; everyone runs, almost everyone gets into the game. Arron Affalo is the key, I think, because he sets the example of constant effort. As soon as he gets into better shape, and his three starts to fall, he'll be even better. Lawson is fearless and swift as an arrow and he's become adept at pocket-picking. Andre Miller is a player to identify with: he can't run, can't jump, has no range, has no weight-room/steroid muscles and his mid-range is more of a leaner than a jumper, but he's smart, resourceful, tricky, and throws a better alley-oop than anyone in the league. He's the kind of steadyEddie you want to be in there for the last five minutes. Al Harrington, who was injured and out of shape last year, has come back strong and is now a classic sixth-man-scorer-off-the-bench-instant-offense-go-to-guy. The Birdman is as erratic as all get out but he remembers to swat a couple away every game. Unfortunately, he's mutilated his body to the point that any person of aesthetic sensibility must fast-forward through his foul shots. The furriners give the team great balance (and because they're untattooed, provide a welcome relief for the eyes.) Gallinari, the Italian, shows great promise, especially when he goes to the rim with two-handed authority. When Nene, from Brazil, plays up to his ability, he's sensational, and the more time he gets at PF the happier he'll be, which is why it's crucial that Timofey Mozgov, the massive Russian center. learns to move his feet and avoid the fouls. Mozgov will improve as the season progresses. Rudy Fernandez, the lone Spaniard, plays good man D., but won't make a real contribution until the outside shots start to fall. And then there's the half-Greek 7-footer, Kosta Koufos, who plays with great enthusiasm.

Not to mention Kenneth Faried, college rebounding sensation, who's chomping at the bit, waiting for one of the regulars to go down.

Other reasons to watch the Nugs: no J. R. Smith (a most talented nutcase), no Kenyon Martin (effective on D but always borderline thuggish, and with the ugliest no-spin set shot ever); no Carmelo playing matador. Addition by subtraction.

It's a short long season, ths year. Stay healthy, guys.

Polanski and The Ghost Writer

The Ghost Writer, which I saw last night, is a very good "thriller." It's co-written and directed by Roman Polanski and therefore inevitably dwells upon the menace that lurks beneath quotidian events. Once again, Polanski offers us a naif  who gradually comes to realize that the world is under the control of dark, implacable, omnipresent forces of evil. In The Ghost Writer, it's the CIA -- a most convenient bugbear.  Just as soon as the unnamed ghost writer cracks the mystery, he's run down and killed in the street by a mysteriously summoned agency vehicle. Ewan McGregor is convincing as the naive ghost, Jim Broadbent is wonderfully malevolent as the string-puller behind the scenes, and Olivia Williams steals the show as the intelligent angry betrayed wife the English PM. But it's pure Polanski from start to finish.

In Shakespeare's Macbeth, the reign of the usurping tyrant is preceded and succeeded by the benign and holy kings Duncan and Malcolm. In Polanski's 1977 Macbeth (in my opinion one of the few great Shakespeare movies), there's an appended anti-Shakespearean coda: Donalbain (Malcolm's younger brother) goes off to engage the witches. Polanski suggests that evil is not anomalous to the reign of Macbeth but eternal and, so to speak, normal. The witches who control men's fates are the medieval Scotland analogues of the CIA.  

In Polanski's best film, Chinatown, J. J. Gittes is the naif who gradually comes to discover that villainous Noah Cross controls all of Los Angeles. Semi-demonic Noah takes bullet but like the witches and the CIA, he can't be killed. In the original Robert Towne screenplay, Evelyn Mulwray had escaped with her daughter/sister, but Polanski altered the ending to emphasize Noah Cross's unassailable power. 

And then there's Rosemary's Baby (witches) and The Pianist (Nazis).

Polanski's point of view cannot be a surprise to anyone who is familiar with his biography.

New Horsey Words

I'm sure that everyone but I knows these excellent words, but each one is an absolute novelty to me.

A quadriga is a chariot drawn by four abreast horses. They must have been quite a trick to control. Wide chariot, I guess, or skinny horses. Quadriga racing was the nascar of the classical world. The "ga" in quadriga is from iuga, or yoke, hence the biga, a word of predictable meaning that I would probably have known if I did crossword puzzles or played scrabble. The ancient Greeks called a quadriga a tethrippon, which was their privilege. I haven't encountered the word, but I bet that there's also a triga, and if there is a triga, I imagine that it's linked, somehow or other, to troika.

A cataphract was a heavily-armed horseman.  Here's an c. 440 CE Chinese statue of a cataprhact.

 I don't believe that horses had legs so stout in those days.  I suspect that the medium (terracotta) required them. 

Schabraque appeared in my horse book as an English noun, and perhaps it is, but the only definition that I could find was in a French dictionary: nom feminin singulier: 1  ancienne couverture de cheval de cavalerie 2  femme laide ou sotte. I don't have the slightest idea how the two meanings are related, but I'm glad to know them. And the next time that I encounter une femme sotte, which isn't very often, I'm going to try to insinuate "schabraque" into the conversation.

I'll try not to use the word quiff, which is a horse's forelock, especially one hanging over the eyes, but which might easily be misunderstood by guys from my old neighborhood.

And finally, the piaffe is a dressage movement in which a horse essentially trots in place. A ridiculous word for a ridiculous performance. I don't know the origin of the word and I doubt that it's related to French piaf, which, I think I remember, is a demotic or slang word for sparrow.  

Birthday Gift Suggestions

I've been studying (or more exactly being dazzled by) the illustrations in a magnificent four-pound coffee-table extravaganza called The Horse From Cave Paintings to Modern Art. It was first published in France (Cheval dans l'art) in 2008 and came to me through the Abbeville Press on Varick Street in NYC and also through the generosity of our local public library (it's too expensive to purchase). The history of the horse in art begins with the Chauvet Cave and includes thousands of years of wonders. But I don't write merely to extol the book, however great it be. 

I call it to your attention because I have a birthday coming up soon and any number of my friends and relatives and readers of this blague have been asking me what I would like as a gift. This book has given me a few ideas. At the outset I'd like to say that I'm not really interested in the monumental paintings that fill most of the pages of the book: battle scenes, hunting scenes, royal processions. Not my cup of tea. Besides the fact that they are too large for the condo, most of them are a little on the pretentious side, frankly. I don't think they'd work with our understated decor.

However, I'd like to suggest that friends, relatives and constant readers might want to pool their pennies and present me with one of the smaller, more discreet objects. 

My first choice:  

It's known as the Chariot of the Sun sculpture. It's bronze with a little bit of gold leaf and was found a hundred years ago in a Danish bog, where it had apparently sat for about 3500 years. It might be a little the worse for wear but I don't mind. At three feet long and two feet high it would sit nicely on the dining room table. No longer bog-bound, it presently resides in the National Museet in Copenhagen but I'm sure the museum would entertain a reasonable offer. I think you can assume that unlike the callous Danes, I would treat the sculpture right and not stick it a swamp somewhere.

If the Chariot of the Sun is unavailable, or the Museet (the phone number for the "butikken" is 33 47 38 30) proves to be sticky to deal with, I have another suggestion. It's not as good, but good enough.

 It's Charlemagne.  A ninth-century bronze equestrian statuette. The picture is misleading because the statuette is only nine inches tall, which makes it just right for a window sill or the top of one of the stereo speakers. The rendering of the emperor himself is a little stiff, and the sword that should be in his right hand is missing, but the horse, imitating Roman models, is pretty damn good. Charlemagne and his horsey are in the Louvre just waiting for an offer. The statuette is so small that it shouldn't cost much.  

And please, friends, no tacky reproductions.

"War on Christmas"

If the profoundly Christian seventeenth-century founders of our country had a single favorite Biblical passage, it might be the one in which the Lord (speaking through His minor prophet Amos) severely condemned the empty vanity of holidays. "I hate," said the Lord, "I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies." The Lord of Hosts specifically enjoined against the attempt to placate him by sacrificing animals (a matter of topical concern in Amos' time). "Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them; neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts." Nor did He rest with these easy-to-follow injunctions, but He went on to condemn all musical tributes as well. Not for him any chants, glees or carols: "Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols." Our Puritan forefathers interpreted these lines correctly and enthusiastically; they recognized that the Lord opposed not only ritual sacrifice and music but all formal observance and rote piety. The Ancient of Days made it abundantly clear that what moved him was not empty ceremony but genuine morality. HIs solution: "let justice run down as the waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." Taking these uncompromising sentences as their guide, our founders dug in their heels against the ostentatious celebration of all holidays, especially Christmas. Instead, they did as they were enjoined: they looked into their hearts.

Would they not have been reduced to angry and impotent sobs by the grotesque consumerism -- the burnt offerings and squeaking timbrels  -- that once again this Christmas season displace justice and righteousness?  Could there be anything more loathsome either to Amos or to our devout ancestors than "Silent Night" amidst shopping-mall tinsel and gimcrackery? Or than the attempt to gin up conflict or to gain a partisan political advantage by inventing a mythical "war on Christmas"?

 

 

Further observations on the "holiday season" can be found here.

Silly Dreams

In last night's dream, I was back in college anxiously sitting a final exam in a literature course. I remember that the exam was titanically difficult and unnerving but I can recall only one specific question. "Discuss Ernest Hemingway's father's Buddhist leanings." I must say that my dreamatorium was working overtime to come up with that one. Also on the exam: I was presented with pictures and was asked to supply their literary significance. The one I remember was a photograph of a generic urban street with five unoccupied parking spaces. My answer to the question was this: "These spaces were left open when Ernest Hemingway and four of his friends left for the bar in order to get themselves soused." I remember thinking that my answer was pretty damn clever and should get me full marks. I also dreamed a short-answer quiz. In this case I can't recall the questions, but only that I gave as one of my answers the word "praestorium." I have no idea what "praestorium" means, except that it sounds like a portmanteau of the names of two ancient Roman officials (praetor and quaestor) with an attached (and redundant) noun suffix.

It's sad that fifty years after the fact I'm still dreaming about examinations. I'm thankful these recent dreams were foolish rather than nightmarish. Nevertheless, I think it's time to read up on Hemingway, a writer to whom I've clearly paid too little attention this last half-century. You never know when someone's going to ask a hard question about Hemingway or his father.

Onagers

It's absolutely astonishing that I've lived all these years in total ignorance of onagers. And would have presisted in abysmal onagerian oblivion hadn't read David Anthony's fascinating monograph, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (2007). Anthony's thesis is that "proto-Indo-European" -- from which the Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Romance, and Indic languages, among others, are descended, originated in the steppes north of the Black and Caspian seas. The inhabitants of these areas domesticated horses and invented or adopted the wheel and the wagon, which gave them the technological advantage to spread their culture and language across the steppes eastward as far as China and westward to the Atlantic. This same people also invented  the chariot -- a horse-drawn single-axle vehicle, which, manned by a warrior armed with bronze-headed javelins, was the principal engine of war for the thousand years that began about 1700 BCE and ended about 700 BCE. It's a lovely hypothesis, bristling with the evidence of hundreds of archeological digs. 

Pre-proto-Indo-European speakers ate horses long before they domesticated them and rode them before they learned to harness them to chariots and wagons. However, horses weren't the only equid in the neighborhood.  There were also onagers.

But all they could do with onagers was feast on them. The evidence lies in the thousands of midden heaps that are loaded with onager bones. Here are two onagers:

 

Onagers are half the size, or less, than the horses with which we are familiar. They are apparently untamable, like zebras, but, uniike zebras, edible. (So tasty, in fact, that fewer than a thousand of them survive in the wild.)

Anthony doesn't say so, but if there had been only onagers, and not those noble and cooperative horses, we would certainly not be speaking and writing an Indo-European language -- and, for that matter, we might still be trundling across the wide Missouri in oxcarts. 

From the Bronze Age down to the second decade of the nineteenth century, the horse was the fastest and most reliable way to travel, the quickest way to convey information, the backbone of armies, and the most conspicuous index of wealth and status.

Horses are handsome and intelligent. Onagers are ugly, awkward, and stubborn, and could never have taken part in the creation of complex civilizations. Poets have celebrated "fiery Pegasus"  for millenia; no one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever rhapsodized the onager. 

Being "Occupied"

Here in peaceful, progrressive Boulder, two commissioners' seats are coming open next election. Commissioners are important officers: they directly govern the half of our citizens who live in unincorporated areas of the county, they employ 1800 people and administer a $300 million budget, they manage all the social services, and they set policy on land use, open space, transportation, etc. They also put out fires.

Even though we're six months away from the primary, campaigning is well under way. And should be. Deciding on he right county officer is important. We're a functioning democracy.

This afternoon there was a forum to allow the six candidates to answer questions and state their views.  But just as the meeting was called to order, we were "occupied."

About fifty or sixty people filed into the room, took up places around the perimeter, interrupted the moderator and announced that they had a statement to make, which they did in a peculiar and theatrical manner. Their leader read a few words, and then the rest of the folks repeated the same phrase, in chorus. Their demands were well known: control the big banks, put an end to corporate dominance, stop the foreclosures, support the homeless, reduce pollution, prohibit fracking, end uranium mining, and prevent any GMO crops from being grown in Boulder County. 

Then they left. Just vanished.

And so we got back to work.

What was so odd is that every single one of the candidates stated positions that were at least as far to the left, and sometimes further to the left, than the Occupiers -- which makes me wonder whether these very sincere folks wouldn't be doing more good by helping us stuff the envelopes and do the lit drops and help with the GOTV. To tell the exact truth, I found it just a little offensive to be hectored so dramatically by political novices.

At very least, the "Occupiers" should give up the choral speaking, which sounds not like thoughtfulness but rather like authoritarian groupspeak. A little dictatorial.

As the political philosopher and social critic Doll Tearsheet long ago remarked, "the word occupy... was an excellent good word before it was ill sorted."

Trollope's Old Old Man

Having just read the posthumously published An Old Man's Love (1884), I believe I can now claim to have read every single one of Anthony Trollope's forty-seven novels. Who would have guessed, when I encountered The Warden and Barchester Towers back in 1958, that it would have taken fifty-three years to complete the task?  

I'm glad that I saved An Old Man's Love for last. It's very much a valediction to love and to life. 

William Whittlestaff, the "old man," is fifty years in age, which, to my occluded septuagenarian eyes, seems barely beyond adolescence. He falls in love with his ward, Mary Lawrie, who is a generation younger than he. She agrees to marry him, but then her first love, John Gordon, returns from Kimberley, where colonial diamonds have convenientlly cured his poverty. Eventually, Whittlestaff ungraciously concedes the bride to the younger man. Self-abnegation does not come easy.

My interest focussed on Mary Lawrie, who is so paralyzed by notions of duty and honor that she cannot lift a finger in her own interest. It would be wrong, in her conception (and in Trollope's), for her to imply, however slightly, that her commitment to Whittlestaff may be re-assessed. In fact, to avoid becoming the much-dreaded jilt, she has to argue against her own inclinations. Gordon and Whittlestaff are allowed to be active in working out their interests; Miss Lawrie remains entirely passive and therefore virtuous. As is always the case in Trollope's novels, no courting couple are allowed to engage in forthright conversation until after matters are settled.

Even after completing the forty-seven novels, I cannot help but marvel at this strange Victorian ethic.

It's surprising that Trollope doesn't conclude by granting Whittlestaff an avuncular or grandparental role toward the new couple and their putative children. What would it have hurt him to have created a scene in which Whittlestaff, a white-haired gentleman, walks the balmy Barset woods with nine-year-old John and seven-year-old Mary Gordon?  Not such event takes place, and Whittlestaff retains his gloom to the end.  Charles Dickens, always warm-hearted, would have been more generous.   

Amnesia on Film: Blind Horizon

For the record, Blind Horizon (2003) may be the most confusing, confused, and derivative film ever perpetrated. It's a failed memory-assassinate the president movie, a genre of which The Manchurian Candidate stands as head and font.

Blind Horizon offers one picturesque moment -- when a giant tanker truck decorated with a Confederate flag and carrying a load of gasoline spills across the highway and blows up. The truck could have driven through the monstrous holes in the plot with room to spare. In fact, it would have been more appropriate if the truck had been carrying a load of red herrings.

Once again, amnesia is whatever Hollywood says it is. In this case, the amnesiac remembers that there's going to be an attempt on the president's life, but he doesn't remember his name, his occupation, or his fiancee -- an unlikely scenario. He has flashes of memory that are copied, almost exactly, from the Bourne series, which we must now anoint as the movie amnesia template of the future.     

Val Kilmer is wasted as the - wait, is he the would-be asssassin or is he the Federal agent trying to prevent the assassination? I never did quite figure it out. Neve Campbell is dark and mysterious and Amy Smart is blonde and perky -- that's the way women are packaged in this expensive turkey. If the writers (F. Paul Benz, Steve Tomlin) were allowed to choose between remembering this film, or amnesia, they should definitely go for the latter. 

Hypothesis: the amnesia mcguffin liberates the screenwriter from any allegiance to probability.

Newt

William Blake asks us to beware "venomous Newt" -- venomous because the skin of this lizard-like creature contains the extraordinarily dangerous poison tetrodotoxin  which it secretes through its granular skin glands. It is unwise to befriend or embrace a Newt and they should never be swallowed. Tetrodotoxin blocks sodium channels and can therefore cause heart arrhythmia or heart arrest.

Shakespeare did not love the Newt; among the ingredients in the witches' potion in Macbeth, along with the fenny snake, toe of frog, wool of bat, tongue of dog and owlet's wing is "eye of Newt."

In Timon of Athens, a list of "abhorred births" includes the "black toad and adder blue" along with the  "gilded Newt." "Gilded," for Shakespeare, could mean "gilt" but also "guilty" and sometimes even  "false."

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Second Villager claims that a witch has transformed him into the most loathsome of critters: "She turned me into a Newt." He then withdraws the charge: "I got better."

It's definitely better not to be a Newt -- or even to get too close to one. 

Landau versus Gottlieb

While in the Bay Area, I visited SF's Museum of Asian Art,  where this grotesque, beautiful piece of maximum conspicuous consumption was on display. 

It's a silver Landau made for the Maharaja of Bhavnagar around the turn of the last century.  Needless to say, I was utterly appalled by the waste and extravagance though dazzled by the workmanship.

 Afterward, I took a trip to Alameda's Pinball Museum. Here's a bank of classic 50's Gottliebs.

I played this magnificent piece of craftsmanship

and, still a master of the flipper, won three (3) free games.

I can't remember whether the silver coach was owned by this couple of dandies (also in the Asian Art Museum) or one of their cousins, 

but no one who looked like either a maharaja or maharani was playing with Gottlieb's silver balls.  I didn't spy anyone at the pinball museum who was nearly so well accoutered.  

Three Observations on "Books"

Charlie Dressen: "You  know something? I never read a book in my whole life... I can read newspapers and magazines. But I never read a book. You think I should?"

Jean Harlow (on her birthday): "Don't get me a book. I already got a book."

Anatole Broyard: "If it hadn't been for books, we'd have been entirely at the mercy of sex."

Fermat's Room; Goldbach's Conjecture.

I reached my peak with numbers when I was a child at P. S. 217 (under the tutelage of Mrs. McNulty).  Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division -- that's my area of expertise. Geometry, algebra, trig -- way too abstract for my pedestrian brain. Calculus and up -- not the least chance.

Arithmetic yes, mathematics no.

Sometimes I try to read popularizations of mathematical theory, but I rarely make it beyond the first few sentences. Once symbols start to appear, I'm done. Especially Greek letters (in parentheses). 

The consolation prize is that I'm better than most people at mental arithmetic. I can do sums and approximations and other stuff in my head.

Last night, we watched Fermat's Room. It's the kind of movie that is often called an "ingenious thriller."  It's also a member of a very small group of films that concern mathematics or mathematicians:  Good Will Hunting, Stand and Deliver, Antonia's Line, Straw Dogs. 

Fermat's Room focuses on a possible proof of Christian Goldbach's Conjecture. I suppose that I should have known about Herr Goldbach and his guess, but I confess to ignorance. Goldbach's conjecture dates to 1742 and is apparently one of the oldest unsolved problems in number theory. In brief, Goldbach theorized that every even integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two prime numbers. For example, 10 is equal to 3 plus 7, 20 to 17 plus 3 (or 13 plus 7), and 100 resolves into 47 plus 53. Although no one has found a number that doesn't work, the conjecture can't be proved -- or, at least, hasn't been proved because there are some very large numbers out there. In Fermat's Room, two of the characters claim to have proved the conjecture. And they are consequently at odds.

I had always thought of prime numbers as a kind of novelty or curiosity. But if primes are a component of all even numbers -- well, that's something.  Goldbach's idea raises the stature of primes in my perennially naive eyes -- in exactly the same way that the Fibonacci series became more important to me when I learned that the chambered nautilis is structured Fibonacci-wise.  

While watching the movie (which is a good one), I ran through the even numbers from 10 to 70.  Everything was in order. But why?

Later in the evening, I read that every even number can also be resolved into the sum of a semi-prime (which is the product of two primes) and a prime. So 100 equals 77 (7 time 11) and 23. I spent a restless  night summing, in my bed, semi-primes and primes from 10 to 100. All in order, once again.

Why should it be so?

Whether it should be, or not, it is.  I remember that I used to answer my children and my students with the response, "That's not a why question?" Goldbach's Conjecture is a fact, not a why.

It's like gravity. I understand that the apple falls to the ground and that the moon doesn't head out into space and that it's harder to walk uphill than downhill. But I still don't understand why. It works, and that's enough. For me.

"Paradise" in Measure for Measure

The word to watch in a most riveting speech in Measure for Measure is "paradise." 

Young Claudio. whose head is scheduled to be lopped off tomorrow morning, is the speaker. He panics -- and why shouldn't he? After all, his only slip is that he has impregnated his ladylove Juliet. A venial sin, yet in newly-puritanical Vienna, the act of love has led directly to the  executioner with his ax and his big black block. Although everyone, certainly including Shakespeare himself, knew that there were many things far worse than to depart this vale of trouble and tears, Claudio is so terrified by his imminent execution that he goes off the philosophical rails. He argues the extreme position (and here comes the speech and the crucial word) that "The weariest and most loathed worldly life/ That age, ache, penury and imprisonment/ Can lay on nature is a paradise/ To what we fear of death." A "paradise?" Goodness gracious!

Although everyone can sympathize, no one should agree with Claudio. Neverthless, the three-and-a-half lines of verse that contain the climactic  word "paradise" (and indeed the long speech in which these lines reside) are so brilliant and colorful that they almost persuade us. One of the reasons the sentence is so wonderful is because Shakespeare brings to bear one of his favorite and most useful figures of speech. To depict Claudio's hysteria, Shakespeare employs a full-throttle hyperbole.

The most transparently hyperbolical words are the grammatical superlatives "weariest" and "most loathed." The hyperbole that resides in the word "paradise" is less obvious but more potent. "Paradise" is the climax -- the word that any good actor or reader must hit hard when he recites or reads the passage. An hyperbolist less gifted than Shakespeare might have written "The weariest and most loathed life is pretty darn good compared to dying," but our author pulls out all the rhetorical stops. To lie in poverty, in pain, in prison is, Claudio asserts, compared to death, a "paradise." 

If, dear attentive and intelligent reader, you will now return to quotation, and read Claudio's lines again, you will feel the hyperbolical power of "paradise." Try it, please. And when you recite the sentence, you will also notice that the initial "p" in climactic "paradise" is prepared for by the plosives in the words that precede it -- "penury" and "imprisonment."

And if you are following instructions and reading aloud, you should be aware that in Shakespeare's time, "ache" was pronounced "aitch" -- a pronunciation that produces a strong and ingenious contrast between the affricates (age, aitch) and the plosives (penury, imprisonment, paradise).

Claudio's hyperbolical lines bring to conclusion a speech which is querulous at the start and panicky at the end.  Here they are in context.  

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where.

To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit

To bath in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;

To be imprison'd in the viewless winds

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendent world; or to be worse than worst

Of those that lawless and incertain thought

Imagine howling.  'Tis too horrible.

The weariest and most loathed worldly life

That age, ache, penury and imprisonment

Can lay on nature, is a paradise

To what we fear of death.  

("Cold obstruction" means that the body no longer moves -- as opposed to "sensible" (i.e capable of sensation or feeling) "warm motion".  A "kneaded clod" is what a "warm motion" is compressed or compressible into by death. A "delighted spirit" is generally glossed as "formerly capable of delight" but is better understood as "darkened" -- that is, de-lighted. "Viewless" means simply "invisible.")

Shakespeare does not feel obliged to distinguish or judge between these painful visions of an afterlife; instead, he prefers simply to heap together naturalistic, Christian, pagan and "lawless" ideas. 

Students of hyperbole will take note of the inventive phrase "worse than worst," where, it seems, "worst" is insufficiently superlative. Here Shakespeare pushes against the limits of grammar. Bad, worse, worst suffices for most writers, but Shakespeare invents a new adjectival category -- a comparative superlative.

Shakespeare's interest in the worstness of things will reappear in King Lear  when Edgar, encountering his blinded father, realizes that he has not yet touched bottom: "O Gods. Who is't can say "I am at the worst?'/ I am worse than e'er I was."  And then an worser insight comes to him:  "And worse I may be yet: the worst is not/ So long as we can say 'This is the worst.'"  For Edgar, of course, death, that so frightens Claudio, is understood to be a relief and a liberation.  Edgar's father dies "smilingly."

Even More on Lola's Language

Let us understand what Lola (the exemplary two-year-old granddaughter) meant when she cryptically observed, "Nay, no ba."

Nay --perhaps better spelled  neigh -- means horse or horses. "Ba" are of course sheep. Lola watched them last summer when the two grazing animals shared the same Vermont pasture. But when her father took her to a Virginia farm, she noticed that there were no sheep among the horses. Hence her succinct formula: "nay, no ba."

As Duke Vincentio says, "all difficulties are but easy when they are known."

Another Replacement Child -- Peter Sellers

A "replacement child," narrowly defined, is a person who is intentionally conceived because an older sibling has recently died. Such substitutes must endure the lifetime burden of competing with a lost and often idealized child. Because it is almost impossible for such persons to please their parents, they easily become confused and frustrated, and in worst-case scenarios, pathological.  

One of the ways in which the "replacement child syndrome" manifests itself concerns the matter of self-identity. An adult "replacement child" might wonder, Who am I exactly?  He might find himself, especially if he has been raised from his earliest days as if he were someone else, uncertain of his own boundaries. 

The great comic actor Peter Sellers, was a classic replacement child. At birth, Sellers was named Richard Henry, but his parents, curiously, always called him Peter, after an older stillborn brother. And Peter he remained. Why would his parents do such a thing?  Would it not effect a child to be called not by his own name but by the name of a missing brother?

Sellers is famous for his ability to subsume his identity into the role he played.  He said that "If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am" -- because even when not acting, he was always Richard Henry playing the part of Peter.

To confuse him all the more, Sellers' father, who was Anglican, and his mother, who was Jewish, sent him to Roman Catholic schools.

Edward Gibbon -- Replacement Child

By strict definition, a replacement child is one who is conceived because an older sibling has died. According to the theory, such a child is at psychological risk, especially if the dead child has not been adequately mourned. 

Because he was an oldest son, Edward Gibbon, the greatest of all modern historians and the most brilliant prose stylist in the English language, would not seem to qualify as a replacement -- except that in his own curious manner of thinking, Gibbon “replaced” children who were born subsequent to him. 

Gibbon preened himself on his status in the family. “From my birth,” he said in his famous Memoir, “I have enjoyed the rights of primogeniture.” But primogeniture was not so much a chronological fact as it was a pinnacle to be defended. As he conceived it, Gibbon triumphed over would-be competitors to his supremacy. “I was succeeded by five brothers and one sister, all of whom were snatched away in their infancy.” Toward his dead siblings, and toward the parents who endured the heart-breaking death of six of their seven children, Gibbon was unnaturally cold and mercenary. “I shall not pretend to lament” the loss of those who would “oppress my inheritance.” Gibbon lacked empathy in part because he felt, with some justice, that his younger siblings were favored over him by his father. How could this be?   

The Memoir supplies an explanation. In an age of high infant mortality, Gibbon was a very sickly child. His life was at risk while other, later-born children seemed to be healthier. As Gibbon himself puts it, “so feeble was my constitution, so precarious my life, that, in the baptism of each of my brothers my father’s prudence successively repeated my Christian name of Edward, that, in case of the departure of the eldest son, this patronymic appellation might be still perpetuated in the family.” This is odd indeed. In five separate instances, according to the future historian, a male child saw the light, and each time the child was named Edward. In one case after another, the outcome was the same. The infant who might have “oppressed his inheritance” succumbed and the heroic oldest son beat back the challenge. The first Edward therefore “replaced,” so to speak, a series of subsequent Edwards who might have superseded him. It's not hard to imagine that a sickly child, pursued by a series of infants each christened with his very own name, would feel threatened and might rejoice rather than mourn at their funerals. 

Although Gibbon attributes the pattern of naming to his father’s “prudence,” it is obvious that the phrase "my father's prudence” is an irony that masks a true fury. Was it prudence or was it his father's hope that the sickly child would be succeeded by an healthy one?  Hostility also shines through Gibbon's jealous account of his mother: "to preserve and to rear so frail a being [as himself], the most tender assiduity was scarcely sufficient; and my mother’s attention was somewhat diverted by her frequent pregnancies, by an exclusive passion for her husband, and by the dissipation of the world, in which his taste and authority obliged her to mingle.”  The irony of this beautiful Augustan sentence conceals infantine rage: to translate into more forthright English, Gibbon objects that his mother conceived other children, claims that she should have preferred him to her husband, and asserts that she should have withdrawn from society to nurse him.   

To what degree Gibbon’s suppressed and ironic but still obvious anger toward his parents contributed to his peculiar temperament is difficult to say, but it is a fact that the bulk of his career was spent not only in tracing the decline and fall of Rome, the father of all European civilizations, but also in displacing an established patriarchal religion from its position of supremacy. The irony that he directed against his parents in his Memoir is the exact weapon that he learned to deploy against Roman failures and against triumphant Christianity. 

In addition, there's an untidy psychological wrinkle. Gibbon’s claim that the male children who succeeded him were all named Edward is a crucial part of his indictment of his parents. But it's an assertion that is not true and is not substantiated by parish records. There was no endless series of Edwards. Apparently, one succeeding child was so named but the rest enjoyed various different appellations. The most scrupulous of historians either invented or misremembered the dreadful slight that so wounded him. What psychological mechanism caused Gibbon to yearn to be even more of a replacement child than in fact he was? 

Reposted: Duke, Duke, Duke

Ain't it shocking that Gene Chandler's excellent song is now almost half a century old?  Seems like just yesterday.

This be the verse in its full splendor.   

Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

As I walk through this world
Nothing can stop the Duke of Earl
And you, you are my girl
And no one can hurt you, oh no
Yes, I'm gonna love you
Come on let me hold you darlin'
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

And when I hold you
You will be my Duchess, Duchess of Earl
We'll walk through my dukedom
And the paradise we will share.

Yes, oh, I
I'm gonna love you
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

I'm gonna love you
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

1)  "Duke of Earl" is classic, though late, doo-wop. Therefore it's lineally descended from songs in which a supporting male quartet sang meaningless syllables: doo wop, wop, wop. In this revisiting of the genre, nonsense doo doo doo de wop has been superseded by words that carry meaning of a sort: duke duke duke of earl. Return we now to the pages of history: in their turn, doo wop quartets were themselves secular offspring of gospel quartets, where a reverent foursome would sing do lord do lord, do lordy lord (a good example: the unnamed backup quartet supporting Georgia Peach in "Do Lord Send Me").

2)  It's a fascinating process: Gene Chandler's replacement of doo doo with duke duke is in fact a return to the roots, except that the previous and inherent religious content has undergone secularization. "Lord" has become "Duke," while the heaven of gospel has transformed into the "dukedom" of doo-wop.

3.  It's easy to deride the naive faux-aristocratic title "Duke of Earl"; but would the song preserve its meaning if it were "Duke of Buckingham?" "Earl" may sound silly, but because it's a generic title rather than a specific one it carries allegorical significance. "Duke of Earl" is no one and therefore everyone. 

4.  It's entirely likely that the word "earl" was chosen because of it echoes "lord": liquids "r" and 'l" and unemphatic vowel. 

5.  The first line of the lyric --"As I walk through this world"-- introduces a secularized religious motif (an inheritance from the song's gospel forbears). Some will notice the echo of the initial phrase of the most famous of all religious allegories, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1672): "As I walked through the wilderness of this world." Gene Chandler, walking through this world, is reborn just as Christian was reborn in the classic allegory. Not religiously, but in a worldly way. He is not saved; he is duked.

6.  Why the aggressive "nothing can stop me now?" What obstacles stopped the Duke of Earl in the past, before his duking? The triumphalist language is highly developed but the obstacles remain vague and unarticulated. Audiences find their own meaning in the lacuna, but indignities historically suffered by the black underclass lurk only slightly below the surface of the lyric.

7.  The transformation from a previous but unknown and unarticulated existence to an aristocratic, unstoppable Duke of Earl takes place offstage, nor is any explanation offered for the metamorphosis.  It's entirely magical.

8.  Because it's magic, it's pure fantasy. Pastoral fantasy in fact, which, curiously, is simultaneously primitive ("paradise") and sophisticated ("dukedom").

9. But it's a shared paradise: the duke along with his duchess. The retreat to domesticity is almost Victorian: "ah love, let us be true/ To one another...."  This particular Duke does not know that "Two paradises were in one/ To live in paradise alone."

10.  The Duke retreats to domesticity and yet he seems to stake out ("nothing can stop me now") new territory to conquer, in which regard the spacious lyric seems to embody contradictory or even incoherent vectors of thought. However, the enthusiasm of the singing obliterates the ambiguity of the lyric; in sum, the song is remarkably optimistic -- which is just one of many reasons for its continued popularity. 

Re-thinking Slugs

Yesterday's post was disrespectful of slugs. I'm chagrined to have been so benighted and bigoted. After all, slugs have mothers too. In a comment, Mrs. KKP --formerly Miss KKH -- (a food safety specialist) reports that many people happily eat slugs, which are a great source of protein and surely taste just like chicken when fried, or blended into a stew. They will no doubt serve equally well in a fricassee or a ragout.

In my defense, I can only say that I've not enjoyed a good relationship with slugs, so far. I remember my first encounter with the slimy tribe -- as a young, innocent boy, in my father's garden on East 9th Street, where six-inch long fat gruesome creatures violated the precious daylilies with trails of goo. Slugs were unlike anything I had previously encountered and seemed to me to be either extra-terrestrial or transplanted from a horror movie. "Just pick them up and throw them into the bucket," my father said, optimistically. Squeamish, I declined.

And then there were the foot-long slugs crawling up the outsides of the windows on Mackinack Island and California's horrid banana slugs. They're all dreadful and voracious beings.

But now, in my maturity, I say, live and let live. Just don't make me eat them -- or any cephalopod, for that matter.

The most popular slug recipe, google tells us, is for slug fritters. It begins with this ominous sentence: "Ingredients: ten freshly slaughtered slugs cleaned of all outer mucous."

Two Good Reasons Not To Eat Raw Slugs on a Dare

Reason A.  Because slugs are hideous and disgusting. 

                    

Reason B:  Because slugs eat rat droppings which can carry a lungworm parasite -- a nematode called Angiostrongylus cantonensis -- which causes fatal brain swelling. According to the NYTimes, a 27-year-old Australian man "has been hospitalized for more than a month after eating the slugs on a dare."

“We hope this will help to remind others to avoid eating raw slugs," said a spokesman.

About "About Schmidt"

I borrowed About Schmidt from our local library because I had seen and enjoyed the Alexander Payne movie, even though it starred Jack Nicholson, who was once again -- yet once more -- still another time -- reprising J. J. Gittes Redux. There was however only the most marginal connection between novel and film. In the film, Warren Schmidt is a insurance executive in Omaha whose nasty wife has recently died and whose Denver daughter is about to be married to an asbestos salesman. In the novel, Albert Schmidt.  an upper-class Harvard/New York/Hamptons lawyer for a white shoe firm, has recently retired, and has lost his beloved, talented and patient wife to a brain tumor. He fusses endlessly about money, of which he has a more-than-ample supply. His major problem is that he don't much like Jews, and that his daughter is about to marry one (a young partner in his law firm). She (the daughter) teases her father with the possibility that she's going to convert to Judaism. Schmidt has a nasty streak but he's a good man underneath it all and one who can return blow-for-blow and flirt for flirt. It appears that redemption from his narrowness will come through an affair with a twenty-year-old Boriquena who doesn't much care about money and who introduces him to a new world of modern sexuality. Just when the novel seems unable to conclude, Schmidt receives a large enabling bequest from his father's second wife and all his financial problems are solved. Thesaurus ex machina, so to speak. Inasmuch as the novel seems to look askance at Schmidt's money worries, it seems odd that it should end with a triumphant, and I suppose comic, infusion of additional cash. I didn't find the conclusion to be satisfying.  

The relationship between Schmidt and his daughter is stressful and painful and rings true -- it's the best thing in the book. It's a wonder that the movie version neglected such rich material. My suspicion (I have no evidence to offer) is that the perpetrators re-shaped the novel into a vehicle for Jack N. I hope that Louis Begley, the author of this urbane tale, was amply rewarded for the use of the novel's title, because the movie made almost nothing of the plot, or the characters, or the dialogue, or the ambience.

It's a good book -- and  certainly intriguing enough to send me scurrying back to the library for other novels by Louis Begley.  

What's the Deal with the Necklaces that Baseball Players are Wearing?

What are those beads with which half of the players now accesorize?  Why, they're magic titanium necklaces. "The necklaces... work by stabilizing the electric flow that nerves use to communicate actions to the body. All of the messages in your body travel through electricity, so if you’re tired or just pitched nine innings, the electricity isn’t flowing as smoothly as it can,” said Joe Furuhata, a Phiten (Phiten is the company that manufactures the beads) spokesman." “Our products smooth out those signals.” Persuasive as all get out, isn't he?  Nothing like smooth-flowing electric signals, though whether AC or DC he doesn't specify. Here's some more science from the website: "Titanium Necklace Benefits have been proven to be many. Some of these benefits include alleviation from discomfort in your shoulders and neck, and it helps the whole body to relax as well. Titanium necklaces are known to ease pains and aches of the upper back, and also enhance the circulation of blood from the upper body to the brain and other major organs. Included in the titanium necklace benefits are that they have anti-radiation and anti-fatigue properties."  So it's not just electricity: it's also pain relief and improved circulation, plus the beads ward off radiation (a major problem in ballparks nowadays). 

Gotta love the use of the passive voice: "Titanium necklace benefits have been proven to be many."  Proven by whom?  Here I am searching for a citation, an experiment, a demonstration, a study, even a minuscule perfunctory footnote. But there's nothing. Not a whisper of evidence. Nor could there be: what sort of double-blind experiment would it take to prove the efficacy of the beads. I guess I'm a non-believer, once again. So is the chief of sports medicine at NYU, who says, "it's all superstition."

OK, so baeball players are superstitious. No news there. But what are we to think when Ron Washington, the manager of the Texas team, sports a magic necklace?  Here he is:

Can you see the beads: trust me, theyre not ordinary; they're genuine "titanium-infused plastic." 

Does "Wash" think that his beads improve the performance of managers, whose job is of the brain rather than of the body?  "Wow, I never would have thought to call for that double steal if I hadn't been wearing my magic beads?"

Altogether, the ubiquitous necklaces lead me into further despair about the quality of American education.  

The Famous First Sentences of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, This Time with Bodies.

     It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, or at least a mistress, especially if he does not wish to indulge with ladies of easy virtue, of which the neighborhood enjoyed an ample stock. 

     However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their pining, inhibited, and frustrated daughters.

``My dear Mr. Bennet,'' said his lady to him one day, `have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?'' As usual, Mrs Bennet's stomach was distempered with wind, which caused frequent eructations and annoying flatulence.

Mr. Bennet replied that he had not. 

``But it is,'' returned she; ``for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.''

Mr. Bennet made no answer.

``Do not you want to know who has taken it?'' cried his wife impatiently.

``You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.''  Mr. Bennet was customarily cranky and irritable, perhaps because he had not enjoyed his lady for the last fourteen years, or ever since the birth of his youngest daughter, when Mrs. Bennet had declared that five pregnancies were sufficient. He frequently retired to his room, where, pretending interest in his extensive library, he surrendered to self-abuse.

This was invitation enough.

``Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week.''

``What is his name?''

``"Bingley.''

``Is he married or single?''

``Oh! single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!''  He must be in the pink of youthful vitality, and if we can only bridle his natural impulses until he has been entranced by Jane or Lizzie, we might capture a prize.  Perhaps out of excitement, Mrs. Bennet let fly an enormous, resonant fart.

``How so? how can it affect them?'' replied Mr. Bennet, pretending not to notice that the air was rent with the sound and savor of the explosion. 

``My dear," replied his wife, ``how can you be so tiresome! You must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them. He'll be so blinded by youthful lust that he'll surely imagine himself to be in love.

On "Cults"

Megachurch Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress, an enthusiast for Governor Rick Perry (the Texax governor for people who think that George Bush was way too bookish) has labelled Mitt Romney's church (Latter-Day Saints) a "cult." Jeffress made the charge while addressing a convention of right-wing "value voters."  (The particular value which Jefress himself exemplifies is "smugness.")

According to Jeffress, Perry's church is a "religion" and Romney's is a "cult."  By which he means, I suppose, that a "religion" is good and true and "cult" is bad and false. 

But to an outsider, like myself, it appears otherwise. It appears that the one is older and the other newer.  The origins of Christianity (not the Baptist part, but the religion generally) are decently obscured by the mists of antiquity. The origins of Mormonism are o so transparent and so unpersuasive. But on any rational scale, the religion (virgin birth, bread-into-wine, three-in-one) and the cult (golden tablets, magic underwear) are equally incredible. There's nothing that would allow one to claim superiority to the other.

A cult is a new religion; a religion is an old cult. How does a cult get to be a religion?  It absorbs a whole lot of converts. It becomes wealthy.  It asserts authority -- such as the power to stigmatize newer religions as cults. 

Similarly, a "myth" is an old but dead religion. A "superstition" is someone else's religion.

Here's a related question:  what's the difference between a language and a dialect?  The standard answer among linguists: "a language has a bigger navy." 

"Mr. Kripke"

When I was in graduate school (fifty years ago, believe it or not), I enrolled for a course called "Modern American Poetry." In the unthrilling days of yesteryear, "modern" still meant the generation of Eliot, and Pound. This particular course, however, was so up-to-the moment that it might have been called "last month's American poetry." Some of the poets whom we studied turned out to be mere flashes in the pan, and none of them, I think, ever came close to Yeats or Frost. Nevertheless, it was good to know about Olson and Hall and Bly and Snodgrass and Levertov. There were major omissions to the curriculum: Sylvia Plath had not yet flashed across the horizon, and Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso and Duncan were far too rude to have been invited to this particular party.

Our instructor was a genial man named John Lincoln Sweeney.  Altlough he was not a bristling-with-bibliography kind of academic celebrity, he knew everything about the subject and was famous as a supporter of poets and artists. I knew that he was "different" -- even my callow unsophisticated eye noticed the elegant bespoke suits and the aristocratic mien. At the Woodberry Poetry Library in Lamont, Sweeney was listed as "curator" but I have not doubt that he was also patron. Woodberry collected not only books but also records and audiotapes and films of poetry readings. It was a spectacular resource. There was a rumor that there were poetry gatherings at  Sweeney's mansion on Beacon Street, across the river, but I was never invited. Why would I have been?

Here's a photograph of Jack and Maire Sweeney:   

Sweeney's letters are nowhoused in the Trinity College, Dublin Library.  "Correspondents include Conrad Aiken, William Alfred, Padraic Colum, e.e. cummings, Richard Eberhart, Leon Edel, T.S. Eliot, Robert Fitzgerald, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Thomas Kinsella, Philip Larkin, Marianne Moore, Edwin and Willa Muir, Wallace Stevens, and Richard Wilbur." The paintings (Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse) were bequeathed to the National Gallery of Ireland.  

There were about twenty students in "Modern American Poetry." Nineteen of them were regular; one was irregular. Whenever "Mr. Kripke," whom I remember as an an exceedingly scruffy young fellow, signalled that he wanted to participate in the conversation, time stopped. Both the instructor and my classmates treated Mr. Kripke, who spoke in halting, awkward, and oracular tones, with extraordinary deference. "What's the deal?" I asked. "He's supposed to be very smart,"  I was told. I myself didn't understand a word that Mr. Kripke said during the entire semester. Not a single word. When I don't understand, it's hard for me to tell whether the speaker is spouting hot air, or I'm just not smart enough.

"Mr. Kripke" dropped from my consciousness. But just the other day, I noticed an advertisement in the NYRB for a colloquium honoring the achievement of Saul Kripke, Distinguished Professor at Princeton and at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Here's the scoop: according to wikipedia, "a recent poll conducted among philosophers ranked Saul Kripke among the top ten most important philosophers of the past 200 years." Top ten??  This is not trival praise. No wonder everyone stopped to listen. It was like having Michael Jordan in your gym class.

Kripke was apparently a prodigy who made important contributions to modal logic, whatever that is, while still in his teens..  For example:

A Kripke model is a triple , where is a Kripke frame, and is a relation between nodes of W and modal formulas, such that:

• if and only if ,
• if and only if or ,
• if and only if .

Which. frankly  I never doubted.

Mr. Kripke had a couple of branches of logic (and mathematics) named after him before he entered college. No wonder I didn't understand (and still wouldn't) what he was struggling to say. The most recent philosopher I can understand is John Locke, and then only the easy parts.  

In retrospect, that class in poetry had more drama than I gave it credit for.  Here was John Sweeney, civilized and be-boutonniered, acquaintance of Yeats, friend to every important poet in America.  And there was Saul Kripke, not only a mathematical and philosophical genius but also the son of "the only conservative rabbi in Omaha, Nebraska." 

And then there was me.