Dr. Metablog

The Entirety of My Career as a Nude Model

A friend of mine was teaching a course in life drawing and was having trouble finding models.  He asked me if I'd be willing to give him an hour.  Hey, it was the drug-crazed 1960s (or perhaps 70s) and I had long since put modesty behind, so I agreed.

It was odd to be naked  among a roomful of the clothed.  I was more sensitive to drafts than I would have guessed.  It was difficult to remain motionless, especially with all the houseflies. It was peculiar and a little flattering to have so many pairs of eyes fixed upon me.  But what I remember most clearly is the student, a young woman, who at the end of the hour, asked the teacher, "Next week, could you try to find someone with a more interesting body?" 

The Golden Age of Sex Ed

I've been reading the novels of Edith Wharton.  It's been one heck of a thrilling experience. The Age of Innocence is a world-class masterpiece, as subtle a novel as any that I've read in years, and The Buccaneers, which Wharton left uncompleted at her death, is almost as good (fortunately, she left behind a plot summary so we know how it was to conclude. (Edith, couldn't you have hung on for just a few more weeks?! In addition, I was dazzled by The Reef and The Children. Also a couple of volumes of short stories.  I'm now reading the very intriguing Glimpses of the Moon.  And all the while, I'm wondering how I could have passed over all this great stuff in my first seventy years and still considered myself a serious reader.  Wharton wrote forty books and I think that until this month I had only read The House of Mirth, which, it turns out, is her most notorious but not her finest work.  But I'll give H of M another chance -- when I come to with new perspective.  

Edith Wharton and her great contemporary Henry James are often bracketed  -- both of them upper-class New Yorkers and writers of "psychological" fiction.  I suppose there's some justice to the comparison, but I prefer to think of Wharton's works as a culmination and also a critique of the great Victorian novelistic tradition.  One (of many reasons) is that nineteenth-century fictions often revolve around the keeping of secrets.  In the archetype, Mr. A loves Miss B, and Miss B loves Mr. A, but some sort of social constraint forbids them to acknowledge or to speak their love until 450 pages have elapsed.  Wharton repeatedly brings these conventions out into the open in order to rip them to shreds.  She scrutinizes and satirizes the imprisoning systems of manners (as well as conventions of fiction) that the earlier era left unchallenged.  She punctures taboos.     

The secret that underlay all of those punishing proprieties was, in one form or another, sex: sexual needs, sexual passions, sexual gratification.  The godawful messiness of it all. 

When the twenty-three year old Edith Wharton was about to be married, she was ignorant and terrified of sex (and this despite the fact that she was then known, and I don't [and couldn't] make this up, as "Pussy" Jones ["Jones" as in 'keeping up with the Joneses', "Pussy" an affectionate diminutive certainly not employed in its modern street-corner signification]).  Like many another young lady, she turned to her mother ( in her case, Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, the 'best-dressed woman in New York') for advice.  The outcome was catastrophic.  So here it comes, sex ed in Victorian America, recollected in anything but tranquility: 

A few days before my marriage, I was seized with such a dread of the whole dark mystery, that I summoned up courage to appeal to my mother, & begged her, with a heart beating to suffocation, to tell me "what being married was like."  Her handsome face at once took on the look of icy disapproval which I most dreaded.  "I never heard such a ridiculous question!" she said impatiently; & I felt at once how vulgar she thought me.

But in my extremity of need I persisted.  "I'm afraid, Mamma---  I want to know what will happen to me!"

The coldness of her expression deepened to disgust.  She was silent for a dreadful moment, then she said with an effort:  "You've seen enough pictures and statues in your life.  Haven't you noticed that men are -- made differently from women?"

"Yes," I faltered blankly.

"Well, then  ---?"

I was silent, from sheer inability to follow, & she brought out sharply: "Then for heaven's sake don't ask me any more silly questions.  You can't be as stupid as you pretend."

The dreadful moment was over, & the only result was that I had been convicted of stupidity for not knowing what I had been expressly forbidden to ask about, or even to think of."

Poor dear Edith, our hearts go out to you and to all the maidens of the last era.  Her "heart beating to suffocation," her pathetic ignorant (not stupid, but ignorant) inquiry, and the imperious mother hiding her embarrassment behind an affectation of anger.  O my!  Along with the ridiculous idea that furtive (I'm sure) glances at "pictures and statues" could convey any bird-and-bee information of value.  Edith's derelict mom punted when she should have pulled her goalie. She missed the "teachable moment."  But then again, how do we know what mamma Lucretia knew about sex.  Perhaps she had nothing to offer.  Perhaps she was one of those Victorian ladies who was taught to lie back and think of England (or, in her case, to think of Washington Square).

Pussy Jones's marriage to Teddy Wharton was a miserable failure.  Some of Edith's friends suspected that it was what used to be called a "mariage blanc" -- a marriage without sex.  After twenty-eight years and, I'm glad to report, a couple of fervent affairs, Edith divorced Teddy, by that time alcoholic, manic-depressive, and institutionalized.  Among her manuscripts Edith left an unfinished pornographic fragment, Beatrice Palmato (which I have not yet read but which is supposed to involve, double-eek!!!, father-daughter incest).

Edith Wharton's passage from unnaturally prolonged innocence to sexual sophistication or perhaps even to sexual derangement summarizes, in little, a big hunk of American social history.  In the course of her lifetime, she had to cope with revolutionary changes, and those changes provide the background for some extraordinary and sometimes painful works of fiction.

So I will read on. 

[Biographical details are from Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Knopf, 2007). 

The Chosen Zebra

Ordinarily, I'm skeptical when supernatural images magically appear on everyday objects.  To me, such manifestations are perfectly explicable run-of-the-mill instances of pareidolia.  [Pareidolia:  the tendency, inherent in the human brain, to discover patterns (e.g. faces) in random markings.]  No matter how intently I peer and squint,  I simply cannot find the blessed virgin and her child in the Ritz cracker. Nor in the stump of that felled yew in Donegal nor in the water stain on the Samoan wall nor on the broken storm window in Jesup, Georgia and certainly not in the miraculous bird dropping on the rear view mirror of a pickup in Bryant, Texas. Not even in the revered and legendary 1978 Mexican tortilla. I am also willing to confess that although I haven't seen it with my own eyes, I remain unpersuaded by the internationally-celebrated image of Jesus in the partially-eaten toasted cheese sandwich that is reported to have sold on Ebay for $28,000 and is now framed and publicly exhibited in the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino of Hollywood, Florida, where it amuses the agnostics and wows the credulous.

In my conception, if the Ancient of Days had wanted to impress an image of his very own filius unigenitus or of JC's tender and mild mom on breadstick or bagel, cornbread or challah, he would have the made the representation clear and distinct -- certainly not subject to dispute or interpretation or doubt or skepticism.  That's the way the big Guy in the sky operates when he's at the top of his omnipotent game.

Which brings me to the illustration above, where, when you point and click, you will encounter in sharp detail a  complete and perfect menorah incontrovertibly etched, this Hanukkah season, on the port side of a zebra.  No ifs, ands, buts, or pareidolia.

Why a zebra, a creature not mentioned in the Holy Book?  Well, once again, the L-rd moves in mysterious ways.  If He chooses a zebra, who are We to question his mighty decision?

Moreover, there's absolutely no question but that His menorah on a zebra beats His Jesus on a toasted cheese sandwich all to heck.

Just sayin'.

Dinner Conversation

A:  Do you remember Walther Peters, used to teach history at the university?

B.  Yes, he had quite the reputation.

A.  Lazy as sin, among other things.  I was his grader in the late 60s.  He never looked at a paper or at an exam.  When a girl would complain about a grade, I'd tell them to go see Professor Peters. Some of them would, some of them wouldn't dare.  There was this one young nubile maiden, very beautiful.  She had a D on the mid-term and didn't show up for the final, so of course I gave her an F.  She was one of those who were willing to see Professor Peters in his office.  I never heard back from her but eventually I took a look at the grade sheet.  He had changed her grade from F to B.  I asked him, how come?

B.  Did you get any kind of explanation?

A.  He said, I talked to her, and I felt sure she would have gotten an A on the final, if she had taken it, so I changed her grade.  He said it with a straight face.

B.  I wonder if he thought you believed him.

A.  I don't think he even cared.       

B.  Let me tell you my favorite plagiarism story.  I was handed a paper which began, "Moreover...."  Student just took a couple of paragraphs out of the middle of a chapter.  Didn't even bother to change the first word.

A.  There's also the story of the student who handed in a paper with the bill from the ghost writer still in it.

B.  Here's one I heard from Don Baker.  He was teaching in  Mississippi, early in his career.  Freshman English.  He receives identical papers from two students in the same class.  He gives an A to one and an F to the other.  This would be in the 1950s sometime.  The F student comes into his office.  He says, "Uh, uh, Mr. Baker.  I have a friend in the class.  I sometimes study with him.  He, uh, uh, handed in a paper, kind of, uh, you know, similar to mine."  Baker says, "and."  The kid says, well, he got a much better grade than I did."  Baker says, or at least he swears he says, "Oh, but  I like him.  And I don't like you."

English Teachers Are Such Jerks

English teachers are such colossal jerks, at least whenever they appear in movies.  A case in point is Smart People (2008), which is the second-best academic movie ever made in Pittsburgh (Wonder Boys is superior). Smart People offers us a Carnegie-Mellon Professor of English, played by a shambling Dennis Quaid, who is a depressed, angry, uncommunicative, and miserable being, and who insults and patronizes both his students and his family.  He's the perfect embodiment of traditional and persistent American anti-intellectual stereotypes.  Book-learning has turned him into a mere grammarian, a pedant, who must learn about "real life" from his rolling-stone, improvident, frequently-stoned but streetsmart brother.  Smart People is constructed around stereotypes that were exhausted when Shakespeare created Holofernes and Sir Hugh Evans more than four hundred years ago. 

I've known a lot of English teachers -- some good, some bad -- but I've yet to encounter the shallow stereotype.

English teachers make their way into a disproportionately large number of movies.  There are two reasons for this phenomenon.  The first is that the writer of the film wants to illustrate some thematic point, so he brings his characters into a classroom where a pompous old fart or fartess can provide some cheap laughs while explicating a poem or novel that is tangentially related to a point the film is trying to make.  The second reason is purely revengeful.  In films in which English teachers figure, there's often --almost always, in fact -- a young man whose writing is unappreciated by the narrow-minded professor.  In Smart People, he's the son of our own nasty hero, and his sparkling poem is published in the New Yorker while his indifferent father is still waiting to hear whether his critical-theory manuscript has been rejected yet once again.  This character -- the brilliant but unappreciated young poet or playwright or novelist -- stands in for the writer or director of the film, who is saying, in filmspeak, "look at me now, you colossal jerk. I'm making movies and you're still back in high school or at State U., grading freshman term papers. So there!!! That'll teach you to give me a C+."

By the way -- Smart People is an intelligent, well-written film.  I heartily recommend it. 

A Further Note on Nineteenth-Century Horsedrawn Vehicles

Modern readers of the great classic novels of the previous era generally have no clue about the significance of horses and horse-drawn vehicles.  As I wrote, right here on this blague a couple of months ago, "no, I'm not obsessed, it's just that I have this little bee in my bonnet about the fact that we gasoline-era moderns understand the exact social significance of jeep, Jaguar, Jetta, and jalopy, but we are, except for specialists, utterly clueless as to the valence of barouche, basket carriage, berlin, britchka, brougham, buckboard, buggy, cabriolet, caleche, cariole, carryall, chaise, chariot, clarence, coupe, croydon, curricle, cutter, dearborn, diligence, dog-cart, fiacre, fly, four-wheeler, gig, go-cart, governess cart, hansom, jaunty car, jersey-wagon, kibitka, landau, phaeton, post-chaise, rockaway, shandrydan, shay, spider-phaeton, spring-van, stanhope, sulky, surrey, tandem, telyezhka, tilbury, tarantass, trap, troika, victoria, vis-a-vis, wagonette, and wurt."

What does it tell us when our hero arrives on the scene in a wurt?  Does it mean that he is rich and stylish, or vulgar and pretentious, or tasteless, or downtrodden.  We don't know, and so we read our own traditional literature with one hand tied behind our backs.

Well, I though that I had made my point, and I thought also that I had exhausted the list of nineteenth-century horse-drawn vehicles.  But then I came upon this passage in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (a truly splendid novel published in 1920, though the action is set in the 1870s). 

     They [Archer and Countess Olenska] walked back toward Beacon Street, and near the club Archer caught sight of the plush-lined "herdic" which had carried his note to the Parker House, and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing his brow at the corner hydrant.
    "I told you everything was predestined!  Here's a cab for us.  You see!"  They laughed, astonished at the miracle of picking up a public conveyance at that hour, and in that unlikely spot, in a city where cabstands were still a "foreign" novelty.

The novelty, the herdic, was "a kind of carriage invented by Peter Herdic of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in 1881" (so Wharton is guilty of a tiny anachronism).  "A predecessor of the taxicab, the herdic was a small two-wheeled carriage that had side seats and an entrance at the back.  Their low entry made it easy for passengers to enter and exit the cars.  The first herdics carried up to eight passengers.  The earliest herdics were painted bright yellow."

Cheers to Peter Herdic, forgotten father of the Yellow Cab. 

Oh No! What's Happening to Me?

So, a couple of days ago, we were watching some basketball on the HDTV, and despite the fact that Carmelo was going to the rim virtually at will, I was kind of down and depressed.  Trying to cheer me up, the companion of fifty-plus years says, "I'll tell you what.  I'll get you anything you want -- absolutely anything at all."  Meaning, of course, anything edible, anything from the kitchen.  We'll I'm not abstemious, I've always been a good eater, and I recognize that food has the power to confer good cheer, so I thought and thought, and finally I said, "I know what I'd like. How about a cup of decaf tea and two prunes."  And then after a few seconds, I screamed, "Holy moley, what in the living heck has happened to me?"  Is it now the case that outer limit of my imagination is a cup of decaf tea and two prunes?  So embarrassing, so downright geezerish.  What ever happened to ice cream sundaes, to rich and gooey lasagna, to late-night salami sandwiches on deli rye (not that we would have any of those ingredients stocked in our bland-healthful-but-tasteless-low-cholesterol-food refrigerator). It's all downhill, this septuagenarian eating.  Ou sont les pepperoni pizzas dantan?  Where are the bacon cheeseburgers of yesteryear?

Sons of Ham, Sons of Japheth

In Caroline Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride (1859), Eulalia, the daughter of an New England abolitionist, has married a slaveowner and traveled with him to his home in Georgia.  Here's what she sees.  Warning: be prepared to be shocked and revolted.

"All around, far as the eye could reach, the rich rolling fields of cotton, bearing the downy wealth of the South, stretched out a boundless ocean of green, spotted with white, like the foam of the wave.  Soon returning in grand march from the fields, came the negroes, poising on their heads immense baskets, brimming with the light and flaky cotton.  Little children looking very much like walking semicolons, toddled along, balancing their baskets also, with an air of self-importance and pride.  Eulalia recollected all the horrible stories she had heard of negro insurrections, and thought what an awful thing it was to be at the mercy of so many slaves, on that lonely plantation.  When she saw her husband going out among them, and they closed round, shutting him in as with a thick cloud, she asked herself if her were really safe.  They gathered around him, eager to get within reach of his hand, the sound of his voice, the glance of his kind, protecting, yet commanding eye.  More like a father welcomed by his chlIdren than a king greeted by his subjects, he stood, the centre of that sable ring.  She had never seen him look so handsome, so noble, so good.  As she looked at her husband, standing in their midst, the representative of the fair sons of Japheth, wearing on his brow the signet of a loftier, nobler destiny, every lineament and feature expressive of intellect and power, and then at each of that dark, lowly throng, she felt a conviction that freedom, in its proudest latitude, education with its most exalted privileges, could never make them equal to him. She never dreamed that slavery could present an aspect so tender and affectionate.  Do the hundreds and thousands buried in the black coal-pits and wretched dens of Great Britain, who have never heard, in their living graves, of the God who created, the Saviour who redeemed them, pass their sunless lives in greater comfort or fuller enjoyment."

Hey, it's good to be a slave. Apparently. "Tender and affectionate????

I was aware that there were anti-Uncle Tom's Cabin novels, designed to showcase the glories of slavery, but I had never read one. The Planter's Northern Bride is supposedly one of the best of the genre.  It has the power to make you despair for the intelligence of the entire human race. Some samples:

"Merry voices singing in the fields of labour or filling up the pauses of toil...."

"The joyful songs and exhilarating laughter of our slaves...."

"The negro has an intense appreciation of beauty and grace, and feels the influence of mental superiority."

"You will see the negro, not as he is at the North, an isolated, degraded being, without caste or respectability, a single black line running through a web of whiteness, but surrounded with the socialities of life, and though doomed to labour, yet free from the cares and anxieties that rest so heavily on us."

Here are the words that Caroline Hentz puts in the mouth of one of Eulalia's slaves. 

"I tell you what, Crissy, when de nigger have good massa and good miss, dey well off.  When dey have bad massa and missis, dey bad off. Talk 'bout us being on a 'quality with white folks, no such ting.  De Lord never made us look like dem.  We mustn't be angry wid de Lord, for all dat:  He knows best, I 'spise.  Look a'me, black as de chimney back, -- dey, white as snow;  what great, big, thick, ugly lips I got, -- dere's look jist like roses.  Den dis black sheep head, what de Lord make dat for?  Dey got putey, soft, long hair, just like de silk ribbons.  Now look at dat big long heel, will you?" added Judy, putting out her bare foot in the moonshine, giggling and shaking;  "who ever saw de white lady with sich a heel as dat?  I do wonder what the Lord made us nigger for?  I spect de white dust gin out, and he had to take de black."

Slavery deformed society.  Arguments in support of slavery deformed the intellect.  The attempt to find supernatural sanction for slavery perverted religion. Slavery incapacitated the slaveholding states.  One hundred and fifty years after slavery, they have still not caught up and they are still pulling the country down.

Does Caroline Hentz believe the words that she puts on paper?  I believe she does.  I believe that she makes these observations and arguments with total sincerity.  I also believe that the kind of utterances to which she gives vent, though no longer respectable, no longer made in public, are not dead.

Help, I Need Somebody Not Just Anybody

I did so write a check to register the car, it turns out, but since we have changed our residence, for some mysterious reason that I will never grasp,  the registration certificate and the little adhesive tab that you fix to the license plate never arrived here, and of course I forgot all about them.  Had no idea.   The upshot is that driving to the airport, I was stopped by a police guy who was lurking to pounce on such infractions and I was issued an expensive ticket.  Very annoying.  I'm generally a law-abiding citizen and I'm not used to being in trouble with the authorities.  

Not immediately able to figure out what went wrong, I hustled down to the Motor Vehicle Bureau out there on 33rd Street.  I took a number, sat down and rehearsed what I would say to the clerk on duty.  All I could think of was, "I need help."  

When my number was called, I walked up to the designated clerk, a woman of uncertain age.  The sign on her desk said, in rather large letters, "Rhonda."  And so I did it.  I couldn't help myself.  I said, "Help, help me Rhonda."  And then, of course, I was immediately chagrined. I'm sure you hear that all the time," I apologized, admitting to my appalling banality.  "Not all the time," she said, "but often enough."  

It could have been even worse.  I could have declaimed the entire poetic chorus to the Beach Boys' 1965 hit:

Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda, yeah.

ADH2*2 in My Life

I can't drink wine, beer, or spirits.  Alcohol of any kind makes me ill.  In this respect, I'm similar to my father and to one of my sons.  It's logical that the condition that people who don't know me very well take for  unsociability or asceticism is simply an hereditary trait.  

Now at long last the culprit gene has been fingered.  It's ADH2*2, "a rare variation of ADH2, which produces a more active form of alcohol dehydrogenase, the enzyme that catalyzes the first step in alcohol metabolism."

Would you like to know more about alcohol dehydrogenase?  First of all, it's a plural:  "alcohol dehydrogenases are a group of seven dehydrogenase enzymes that facilitate the interconversion between alcohols and aldehydes or ketones with the reduction of NAD+ to NADH...." More succinctly, "they break down alcohols."  I don't know whether ADH2*2 digests alcohol too fast, or too slow, or just idiosyncratically, but the effect on me is stomach-ache, headache, and general queasiness,  Wine, "the merry cheerer of the heart," turns me sour. 

The eccentric allele occurs in 20 to 30 percent of Jewish populations, "suggesting that ADH2*2 is one of the factors explaining the low rates of alcoholism in this group."  Recent investigations have demonstrated "significant relationships between ADH2*2 and alcohol use ... in all Jewish groups studied."  "Those with the variant gene have been seen to drink less frequently, consume less alcohol overall or have more unpleasant reactions to alcohol." This analysis makes perfect sense to me, but Science is apparently unsatisfied: "the exact reason why ADH2*2 tends to discourage heavier drinking isn't known."  Well, Science, let me see if I lend a hand here. If you get sick rather than high from a few sips, you stop drinking, unless you're a Complete and Total Schmuck.  

Perhaps because I'm a teetotaler (though a reluctant one), I have little tolerance for drunken excess.  I'm not amused by loss of inhibition, by sloppy speech, or by too-loud staggering enthusiasm.  I've honored my father's proverb -- "never get into an argument with a drunk" to the letter.  In actual fact, I try very hard not to engage the alcoholically-addled  in any discussion, whether serious or flippant. 

I regret that I can't participate in wine-tastings -- the stuff and looks smells so good.  But even there, I'm skeptical of the poetic language that oenophiles employ -- hints of rubber and raspberries and old leather and that sort of hyperbole.  I tend to sniff deeply, and then proclaim "tumescent but not rigid."

It's not hard to be witty when you're sober and your Falernian audience has been quaffing the pinot grigio.

Damn Yankees

The Yankees 2009 payroll was $201,449,189, exceeding the next largest (the Mets) by more than $50,000,000.  The median major league payroll was about $80,000,000 and the lowest $36,834,000.  With 103 wins in regular season, each victory cost the Yankees $1,955,810.  The other teams that made it to the playoffs incurred considerably smaller but greatly varying costs per win:  Boston Red Sox, $1,285,300;  Philadelphia Phillies, $1,215,097; Los Angeles Angels $1,172,325; Los Angeles Dodgers, $1,056,995; St. Louis Cardinals, $852,803; Colorado Rockies $817,402;  Minnesota Twins, $816,165.  Should we be surprised that the Yankees could beat the Phils?  Given the numbers, it would have been shocking if they couldn't.

Cheers to the Cardinals, Rockies, and Twins. 

Cost per victory is a measure of management efficiency.  By far the most effective 2009 team, dollar for dollar, was the frugal Florida Marlins, who won 87 games at a cost of just $423,379 per win.  On the other end of the scale, the woeful New York Mets, with just 70 successes, were the only team to pay more per win than the Yankees.  It cost the Mets $2,133,910 each time that they walked off the field in triumph.  

As long as the Yankees are allowed to pay salaries one-third larger than their nearest competitors and two and a half times more than the median, it must be expected that they will win regularly  -- which is why I'm for rigorous, enforced parity.  Let's level that playing field.

And with all that money, how to account for the fact that the Yankees sported such an entirely run-of-the-mill outfield.  Melky Cabrera?  Nick Swisher?  Gosh, there must be better players than those to entice to the brand new ballpark.

Which brings us to the next spending spree.   

STAAS

The woman with whom I've shared the last fifty-plus years has developed an alarming new symptom.  She disappears in markets.

We'll be together, pushing the basket in the vegetable section, for example, and I'll wander off to fetch some cream cheese and a half-gallon of milk.  When I return, she's gone.  Nowhere to be found.  I walk up and down the neighboring aisles.  Nothing.  She's completely dematerialized.  I walk up and down, back and forth, vainly searching. 

After a twenty minutes, or half-an-hour, she's back, but teleported to an an entirely different part of the store.  She doesn't even know that she has vanished.  Sometimes she pretends that it's I who has disappeared.  

I can understand that she could lose herself in the acre-and-a-half King Soopers, or in the McGuckin prairie, or on the vast Costconian steppe.  But in Bradford's minuscule P & C?  Or in Bradford's Main Street, comprised as it is of far fewer square feet than any mid-size contemporary Walgreen's?  No, there's more here than meets the eye.  This is no natural process.  Something supernatural is going on.

It took some serious reflection before I came to the realization that it's a clear case of abduction by aliens.  There is no other credible explanation.

I've given a name to the disorder.  I call it Spousal Transient Alien Abduction Syndrome, or STAAS.

I've made some inquiries, and it seems that STAAS is not a condition found only in my family.  In fact, it's quite common.  More than four-fifths of the people that I questioned had experienced recent instances of STAAS.  Curiously, it's much more frequently discovered in long-marrieds than among the recently-hitched.  And less common among women than men.  In fact, men tend to disappear for longer periods of time than women.

Moreover, just as might be expected, not a single one of the disappeared remembers that he (or she) had ever fallen into the ungentle hands of aliens -- which is certain proof that the abduction took place, inasmuch as it is well known that these extraterrestrial beings possess the ability to scrub human brains and obliterate memory.

I don't know what can be done to arrest the spread of this alarming syndrome.

Updike's Gamble

John Updike's novels are loaded to the ever-loving gills with invocations of the most evanescent and ephemeral manifestations of "popular culture."  I can't think of another writer who is so relentlessly fascinated by the most trivial of things.  If his novels are to be read in a hundred years, they will not be fully understood unless encrusted with extensive and elaborate footnotes.

"Roy has been carefully shaping can his Total mush into a kind of a pyramid with the back of a spoon."  Who will understand the meaning of this sentence.  "Total mush?"  I imagine a footnote:  "'Total' was the brand name of a fibrous dry packaged breakfast food which, when liquids such as milk were added, could be formed into a paste."  

Here's another example.  Rabbit is musing.  "Biblical names.  Rachel, Esther.  Not always.  Barbra, Bette."  And here's the putative footnote. "In this passage, Harry muses about the names of Jewish women.  "Barbra" (sic) refers to Barbra Streisand, a popular Jewish-American singer and actress of the period.  Professor Harvey Wrongbody's assertion that "Bette" refers to Bette Davis is clearly uninformed, as Miss Davis was not Jewish. "Bette" as Professor Wrongbody should have known, references Bette Midler, a performer famous in her day for impersonating Janis Joplin (see Index) in The Rose." 

In the first few pages of Rabbit at Rest --  which is perhaps the most consistently fine of Updike's novels, there are dozens or scores of allusions that will test a future annotator's learning.  It's highly unlikely that with the passing of generations anyone but specialists in late twentieth-century Americana will be able either to identify or grasp the significance of  "this guy Bundy who murdered dozens of women in dozens of states."  (Bundy?  Is that King Kong Bundy?  McGeorge Bundy?  Al Bundy?)  Or have the least idea what is meant by a "Cabbage Patch doll with its bunchy beige face" or the possible thematic significance of "Cara Lott Gets Hot" or "Winn Dixie" or "Ekerd Drugs" or the National Enquirer or "Planter's Peanut Bar" or "Melanie Griffith" or "Deion Sander's recent arrest."  It's only twenty years since Rabbit at Rest was published, and I was there, paying reasonable attention, but frankly, I'm already becoming a bit vague about some of  the details.

If I were a novelist of Updike's talent, I would think twice about loading up on trivia that cannot help but  barricade the novels from future readers.  But perhaps Updike doesn't care.  Perhaps he's only interested in the moment and in readers of his own generation.  To me, it seems as though he doesn't give a royal fig for the future. 

Shakespeare, a writer not for his age alone but for all time, occasionally included references to fleeting phenomena.  I rather like it that he did so.  I'd be intrigued to learn, once and for all, who was that "red-nosed innkeeper at Daventry" to whom Falstaff refers.   But neither Shakespeare nor any other writer with whom I'm familiar so saturated his work with multitudinous and forgettable popcultch trivia.

But perhaps Updike has made the right choice.  Perhaps the density of reference makes the novels so credible, so real, that scholars will be happy to annotate and readers will revel and glory in the footnotes.

It's a gamble.  My guess is that it's a losing one, but time will tell.  

A Visit to a New Health-care Provider

Today I went to see a new doctor, a specialist.  His receptionist sits behind a sign that reads "Co-payment must be made at the time of service.  Failure to pay the co-payment will result in an additional charge of $10."  I took a seat to wait and to fill out various forms -- and to be apprised of a "policy change":  "A patient who misses an appointment without canceling 24 hours in advance will be charged $45."  I read a little further:  "Extended telephone conversations will be subject to a charge of $15." 

I know that doctors have to make a living and I don't begrudge them a decent wage.  But goodness gracious, must they transform themselves into shameless nickel-and-dimers? 

I want to have confidence in my doctor.  I want to think that he's the heir to Aesculapius, Hippocrates, and Jean Hersholt. I don't want to think that he's a money-hungry "provider" whose primary aim, transcending all others (especially healing), is to squeeze me for a buck here and a buck there. 

Which is in fact what I did think.  Not a good first impression, Dr. Provider!

Another Baseball Dream

I have recurrent baseball dreams, most of them nightmarish. The most frequent is that I hit a sharp line drive to right, start for first but run as if I were stuck in a sea of mucilage.  My legs won't move. The right fielder throws me out before I'm halfway down the line.  I leave the field in disgrace, thirty-thousand fans vigorously booing.  What does it mean?  "I can't get to first base" sounds like an adolescent sexual worry, but I suspect that such an interpretation might be too specific. Let's just say that the theme of the nightmare is ineffectiveness and frustration.  

What a relief, then, that this World Series time I can report on a very pleasant dream.  My team (Dodgers or Phillies or just a bunch of nameless guys) was pounding the Yankees.  (Cultural context for you non-Brooklynites out there in Bloglandia: the New York Yankees represent all that is evil in American society, and have done so since the days of Joe Page and Snuffy Stirnweiss and Charley Keller, or for some sixty-plus years.  There is no question but that the rich, whiny, crybaby Yankees are the special favorites of Bernie Madoff, Ann Coulter, and Dick Cheney.)  In the dream, my side hit one opposite-field line drive after another and the score went from 5-0 to 13-0 to 17-0.  Finally, we brought to the plate a cute, tow-headed four-year-old boy.  He blasted the first pitch over the head of their center fielder and knocked in three more runs. I woke up elated, and in an aroused condition that gave me confidence that, yes, I could get to first base. Possibly to third base.  Perhaps even score.  .  

As Time Goes By ( in Baseball Years)

Two nights ago, I watched the Phillies trounce the Dodgers, 11-0. What a colossal drubbing!  HDTV let me appreciate Cliff Lee's southpaw masterpiece in exquisite detail. But for me the most memorable moment of the evening wasn't Lee's artistry or 270-pound Ryan Howard's mad-dash triple to right.  Instead, it was the discovery that the Phillies' lanky, awkward-but-effective scraggly-bearded right fielder Jayson Werth sports a noteworthy baseball pedigree  His grandfather was Dicky Schofield, a good-field no-hit infielder from the 1950s -- from the days of my golden youth. Holy jumping jiminy!  I saw this young feller's grampa play! 

Youch!  More evidence, as if more were needed, of my long-in-the-toothedness.

Why should I be surprised?  I went to my first baseball game in 1946;  (At Ebbets Field -- Cardinals 3, Dodgers 1.)  Before there was TV.  I've been attending to the game for 63 years.  Close to three generations. 

I've grown accustomed to father-son combos.  Bobby and Barry; the Griffeys (who once played together in the same outfield; Felipe and Moises; huge Cecil Fielder and his even more enormous son, Prince; the Hundleys, the Stottlemyres, and many, many others.  Sometimes I can be watching a game and suddenly lose track of time.  Eric Young, Jr. looks and runs so exactly like his father that it's easy to fall into flashback mode.  I remember watching a game in which Pedro Borbon came in to relieve.  Holy moly, I said to myself -- he's a right-handed pitcher.  Why the heck is he throwing with his left hand?  Then after a few seconds of complete bafflement it came to me: Pedro Borbon, Jr.  I had simply lost twenty-five years -- a phenomenon to which your "mature" brain is occasionally and increasingly prone.

Jayson Werth isn't even the sole grandson.  Aaron Boone's father was the catcher (and manager) Bob Boone and his grandfather was the Cleveland infielder Ray Boone, whom I also saw play, but only on the TV.  And then there's the Bell family: grandsons David and Mike, father Buddy, and grandfather Gus, a big hitter with Cincinnati during the Dicky Schofield years.  

So here's the question.  Will I hang around long enough to watch the great-grandsons play?.  Is Jayson Werth married?  Does he have any kids?   Are there any budding Boones or baby Bells waiting at the horizon? 

Why I Love Health Insurance Companies, Reason # 453

I hate to fetch the mail nowadays because there are so damn many importunate communications from doctors, hospitals, from medicare, and from insurance companies.  Even though I'm in relatively good health and need only routine servicing, each time I visit a doctor the system manages to generate one piece of paper after another -- most of them written in codes that are almost entirely inexplicable.  Could anyone have devised a more lunatic, more inefficient health-care system? 

The other day I received a letter from Great-West Healthcare, my "supplemental carrier,"  to this effect:

"We recently reviewed one of your claims and discovered that we mistakenly sent you a benefit check for $31.80.  We now realize that payment should have been sent directly to your provider.  We have reprocessed the claim to pay the provider.  Therefore, this letter is a request for the $31.80 paid to you in error.  Please send a check for $31.80 to the address on the back of this letter.  If you have any questions, please contact our service center at the number on the front of your health plan ID card.  Thank you.

Of course, there was no address on the back of the letter, so I could not respond. 

But if there had been an address, this is what I would have said:

Dear Great-West Healthcare:

Thank you for you letter of August 10.  I will be happy to refund the $31.80.  However, I have no record of this transaction, so before I pay you, I need the following data.

A copy of a cancelled check for the amount that you claim to have sent me. 

Evidence that you have actually paid the funds to the unnamed "provider."  This evidence should be in the form of a cancelled check but if the $31.80 was sent as an electronic deposit, a notarized affidavit from an officer of the "provider" will be ample.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call me at my home phone number, which can be conveniently found in the local telephone book or obtained online, so that I can play you some nice elevator music while you languish on indefinite hold.

Thank you.

Yellow Face

"Yellowface" is the Asian equivalent of theatrical "blackface," as in the case of Warner Oland (a Swede) or Sidney Toler (an Scottish-American) impersonating Charlie Chan. "Yellow Face" is also the name of an uncharacteristic Sherlock Holmes short story -- one that is unusual among Conan Doyle's compositions in that no crime is solved nor none committed, and also because Sherlock Holmes' overconfident deductions prove to be entirely erroneous.

Grant Munro has married a young widow, Effie Hebron, who returned to her native England after her Atlanta husband died of yellow fever.  After some years of blissful marriage, Effie begins to act most strangely;  she sneaks out to a neighboring house in the middle of the night -- a house at the upper window of which her puzzled husband catches sight of a strange and unnaturally immobile yellow face.  

After listening to Munro's narration, Sherlock Holmes confidently theorizes that Effie's first husband did not die, but has secretly returned to England to blackmail his erstwhile wife.  But when Munro, Watson, and Holmes break into the house, they discover at the window not a husband come back to life but a young girl, Effie's daughter, wearing a mask to conceal the fact that she is a "little coal-black negress."  The mystery is solved:  Effie has been behaving peculiarly not because she is seeing another man (as Munro seems to fear) or because she is being blackmailed, but because she was afraid to confess to her second husband that her former mate was black --  even though, she proclaims,  "a nobler man never walked the earth."

And so the story proceeds to its climax.  How will Munro respond to the revelation? Will he reject his wife, or embrace her?  "It was a long two minutes [ten minutes in the first American edition!!] before Grant Munro broke the silence....  He lifted the little child, kissed her, and then, still carrying her, he held out his other hand to his wife, and turned towards the door. 'We can talk it over more comfortably at home,' said he.  'I am not a good man, Effie, but I think I am a better one that you have given me credit for being.'" 

"Yellow Face" is designed to be an uplifting story of tolerance and trust and in truth it is extraordinarily progressive, even radical, by the standards of 1894.  But it's also a naive story.  It elides and dodges the complications that it raises, especially about matters of race.  Is it credible, or is it not more fear than fact, that a mixed-race husband and an English woman would produce a "coal-black" offspring. Doyle's belief that such an engendering is possible is a mark of the simplicity of his thinking about race.  Moreover, there were strict "anti-miscegenation" laws in Georgia in the last part of the nineteenth century. How did Effie and John Hebron manage to evade them?  In what way did they live?  Hebron managed to leave a considerable estate to his wife?  How did he achieve his wealth?

Doyle is interested in making a case for tolerance and he is interested in Holmes.  But he does not much concern himself with the other characters that he creates.  He does not explore the psychological costs for Effie when, as she says, "she cut herself off from her race."  What prompted her to violate so strong a taboo?  And why would a strong and independent woman suddenly become so fearful when she re-married?  What did it cost her, emotionally, to leave her child behind in Georgia where a dark mixed-race girl would be so awkwardly situated?  How could she conceal so much of her history from Grant Munro without overwhelming guilt?  How did she manage to achieve so blissful a union with him while carrying many important secrets?  And what about the poor child?  Born to an illegal union that is soon fractured by death, then abandoned, then reclaimed and brought to a strange land -- and asked to wear a yellow mask for fear the someone would be shocked by her pigmentation. Doyle does not even broach the question of the damage to the child?   And what kind of future can be in store for her in England?

Doyle seems to consider that "Yellow Face" concludes happily -- but does it? While it is certainly to the author's credit that he is unfazed by the taboo against "intermarriage," it is also true that he rests satisfied with easy, superficial, and naive answers to hard questions. Or rather, he does not even seem to realize that he has started a whole pack of hares in motion.   

It's curiously negligent that Doyle does not even give a name to the "coal-black negress."  She remains a plot-device, not a person. 

It is equally odd that Doyle does not find fault with Sherlock Holmes's' inability to think past the convention of the genre, where blackmail is a commonplace.  Intermarriage, Doyle seems to suggest, is so exotic, so unusual, that it would not occur even to so brilliant a detective as Sherlock Holmes that a yellow mask might hide a black face.

On Noise

Even as my hearing deteriorates, I become more and more disturbed by excessive noise.  For example: coffee shops, which in any sensible world, would be oases of tranquility, have become positively uninhabitable. When I visit such a place, I do so either to talk with a friend or to read silently.  I do not go to be assaulted by what the tattooed, benose-ringed young staff fancies to be "music" -- grating sounds amplified to 11 on the Nigel Tufnel scale.  And then last week I went to a baseball game at one of the new stadiums where they have embraced to the ultimate the philosophy of  the "total entertainment package," which means bright blinking lights, almost constant "music," and exhortations on the giant scoreboard to "Get Loud."  But baseball, more than any other sport, requires thought and concentration.  It's a subtle game, not enhanced by distractions. And yet it seemed that very few of the spectators around me were actually paying attention to the events on the field.  The noise forbade it.  When our side's left fielder played a routine fly ball into a single -- an act which would have provoked indignation and jeers at the low-tech Ebbets Field of my youth -- the crowd remained preternaturally silent, reserving its roars for the inter-inning "kiss-cam" and similar travesties.

Do we truly enjoy or are we simply inured to the noise that has become so constant at the old ball game, in the restaurant, or even on the leafy suburban street, where the egregious leaf-blower has become an oppressive commonplace. (Why do we not ban a mega-decibel machine that is less efficient than the time-honored and virtually silent broom)?

The noise of machines and the noise of amplified sound is a relatively new phenomenon.  Until 1650 or so, no such sounds oppressed our ears. There was the occasional thunderstorm, and there were church bells, and there was the clatter of horse and coach on cobblestone streets  -- but there was nothing comparable to the sea of noise in which we daily swim. Our ancestors lived for a million years in a world that we would judge to be virtually silent.  There were no factories, no trucks, no airplanes overhead, no electric guitars and, inasmuch as 95% of the people were village-dwelling agricultural workers, not even large crowds.  The noise that we routinely endure is unprecedented and unnatural.  And unhealthy as well. 

     

Some Mid-Career Baseball Deaths

Ray Chapman, the most notorious of  the dead-in-mid-career, was batting .300 when he was hit on the head by a spitball thrown by Carl Mays in August of 1920. "Big Ed" Delahanty, a Hall-of-Famer, fell drunk off the International Bridge at Niagara Falls in 1903.  Cory Lidle, Thurman Munson, Nestor Chavez, Ken Hubbs and the great Roberto Clemente died in plane crashes.  Many players, including Nick Adenhart, a pitcher of great promise until April 9, 2009, have died in car crashes.  Danny Frisella died in a dune buggy accident.  Steve Olin and Tim Crews ran their motorboat into a pier in 1993.  Steve Bechler was a 2003 victim of Ephedra. Tiny Bonham and Jake Daubert died of appendicitis, Harry Agganis of a blood clot, Darryl Kile was found dead in his hotel room, having succumbed to an unsuspected heart defect. Urban Shocker died of pneumonia, Danny Thompson of leukemia.  Dernell Stinson, Gus Polidor, Dave Shotkowski and Lyman Bostock were murdered.  Just last year, Geremi Gonzalez was struck by lightning. Jim Umbricht died of cancer at age 34. His ashes were spread over the field he loved.  Unfortunately, he played at domed stadium with artificial grass, so after a few days, he was vacuumed up and spends eternity in a Texas landfill.    

Plastic Flowers

Our property adjoins the old West Bradford cemetery.  The two- or three-acre plot of ground is the most visible remnant of the village of dairy, sheep and apple community of  West Bradford, which was hacked out of the steep slopes above the Connecticut river in the first part of the nineteenth century, peaked before the Civil War, and then went into decline more that a century and a half ago. West Bradford lost its post office address in the 1920s and its schoolhouse (if word-of-mouth can be trusted) before WWII.  We still have a few sheep and horses and some beef cattle but also an ever-increasing number of commuters who head down I-91 to jobs in Lebanon or Hanover. 

The history of West Bradford can be read in the cemetery's gravestones,  There must two hundred of them.  The oldest are of local slate and are only a foot or eighteen inches in height; these date from the 1820s. One or two of them feature lugubrious, stunted iconic weeping willows which rain and wind have rendered barely decipherable. The markers that date from the end of the nineteenth century are larger, made of marble that was quarried thirty miles to the west of us, and reflect the area's growing prosperity.  They're laconic  -- just name and dates -- and entirely bereft of adornment or decoration.  They celebrate the Baldwins and Cunninghams and Lows and Tebbetses who cleared these hilly fields with horse and pung and who left behind all those massive and beautiful stone walls that snake and twist their way through lands that are once again deeply forested.  There are women buried here who have been denied even the brief immortality that a grave marker affords: a man's name and dates and the notation "his wife" or sometimes even "his wives."

Quarter-size headstones, numerous and unincised, attest to unnamed infants.

There's a new part of the cemetery, still in use, but which to my eyes is less sturdy and more frivolous -- an emblem of a culture in decline.  Just because it's possible to laser a prancing reindeer onto a granite headstone doesn't mean that it's a good idea to do so.  How would all those long-bearded and puritanical Emersons and Pipers have railed against such trifling?

A few years ago, one of our local Thurstons erected a pink granite stone with a plastic cross epoxyed to its surface.  The cross, it was said, was to be a perpetual light -- lit until the end of time by some sort of device that gathered energy during the day and discharged it at night.  "Oh no," I thought the first few times that I came home late at night and was greeted by a ruby and unwinking polysterene crucifix, "how ugly, how tacky, how out-of-keeping." Fortunately, the perpetual light only lasted a year or so before extinguishing itself for good. 

I rather like it that the cemetery is nearby.  "Quiet neighbors," as they say here.  Our house lies halfway between the cemetery and the pond.  It's important to have the crucial symbols of life and death in place.  My only quarrel is that occasionally a visitor to the cemetery, a descendant of one of the pioneers, perhaps, will pitch an old vase or some sun-faded plastic flowers onto our land. I don't so much mind picking up a few pieces of trash as I object to my property being used as someone's rubbish heap.  It's disrespectful.  But any person who would think to commemorate his mother with polycarbonate or acrylic geraniums will generally not be the most mannerly or ecologically sensitive of souls.  

To honor both the visitors and the inhabitants of the West Bradford cemetery, I've composed a country-and-western quatrain. 

Remember me in marble and in granite;

     Remember me with rose and lily brave;

Remember me in sunshine and in shadow

    But don't put plastic flowers on my grave.

One day, many years ago, I was sitting on the cemetery's split-rail fence with D., a local farmer.  We were chatting about the weather and such.  He suddenly swung around and pointed to one of the headstones.  "That's the boy that died of eating the crayons."

 A truly Dickensian moment. 

Updike -- Part IV

The Updike-athon continues  Since my last report, I've read Museums and Women, Bech is Back, In the Beauty of the Lilies, Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. 

The good news:  Updike is fluent, a masterful stylist, a remarkable story-teller, a distinguished craftsman.  He's original, entertaining, bold, inventive.  The section of Beauty of the Lilies that describe Alma DeMott's childhood in Basingstoke, Delaware is as good as anything I've read in years -- a truly classic piece of writing  

The bad news:  Updike's characters have no heart  They're almost uniformly small-minded, bigoted, hateful, unloving and, in fact, incapable of love.  The novels are distressing and depressing.  And inconsistent.  The Rabbit quartet is reputed to be Updike's masterpiece, but the long section about Skeeter in Redux is a ludicrous mess, a total bomb, a failure that disfigures the entire series  

A reader who knew America only through the Rabbit series would be convinced that Americans in the second half of the twentieth century were selfish, money-grubbing, racist, entirely without culture, sex-obsessed, alcoholic, uneducated, insecure, obnoxious, undisciplined and knowledgeable only of TV trivia.  I suppose that there are such people -- but there are also substantial citizens, artists and artisans, and good, functioning families.  I must say that four large novels in the company of Updike's folk can wear a reader down.  I think it's time to re-read Trollope's Palliser novels, wher4e there is villainy but also redemption.  I need an antidote.

Another P.S. 217 Picture

Is it my imagination, or did we mature later in those days than kids do now?  These handsome juveniles are thirteen and fourteen years old.  To my eyes, the girls look barely half-grown, the boys variable but distinctly unfledged.

Claire R., who sent me the picture (thanks so much, Claire!!), looks womanly, but the others --not far out of childhood.  The boys in the second row look as though adolescence has not yet begun to rear its unhandsome head. 

Want to know the names of these unpromising lads and lasses?  Search here.  

I

Notes on the "Tarpaulin"

We're packing up, getting ready to go -- even though there hasn't been the slightest hint of frost.  When I loaded the metal sculptures into the bed of the truck, I realized that it would be a good idea to cover them with a tarpaulin.  So down I drove to Main Street and to the recently enlarged Aubuchon.  "Where do you keep your tarpaulins?" I asked the young clerk.  "What is a tarpaulin?  I've never heard of it?"  "Never heard of a tarpaulin," I replied, taken aback, "you use them to cover boats or cargo or the backs of trucks." "Oh," he said, brightening, "a tarp," and he took me right there where the shelves were loaded with blue "polytarps" -- canvas being virtually extinct, at least in our part of the landlocked world. 

The young feller didn't know the world "tarpaulin" and looked at me as if I were some sort of pretentious snob.  But "tarpaulin" goes right back to my childhood -- it might be the first three-syllable word I ever learned.  Not that I was nautical, not in any sense a "tar." But when it rained at Ebbets Field, the ground crew would roll out the infield tarpaulin and then we'd all sit and listen while Red Barber and Connie Desmond chatted for an hour or so until either play resumed or the game was postponed. "Tarpaulin" is not a hard or obscure word -- certainly not to baseball fans who can remember when fields didn't have roofs.  But the big linguistic question is -- will the word tarpaulin survive in all its glory or will it be truncated into a pathetic apocopic monosyllablic shadow of itself?   Or will it be confused with the TARP, which is a horse of another acronymic color --. Troubled (or more accurately, Toxic) Asset Relief Program. 

Well, I bought the "tarp"  -- not at the Aubuchon, which didn't have the right size --but down at the Farm-Way.   So now we're one step closer to shoving off for DC and then back home.  I'm overwhelmed with pre-nostalgia.

My First Racist

There was this kid in our class at P. S. 217, back there in the 'Flatbush '50s.  I'm not going to name names, but if anyone is cares to look, you can know him by his smirk in the picture of our eighth grade graduating class.  For convenience, I'll call this guy K.   K was not particularly smart, or athletic, or talented, or attractive, or congenial, so he was quite a way down in the nebbish area.  But to give him his due, he was intense, dogged, hard-working, and perpetually argumentative.  He was not afraid to offend.  He took positions that no one else in the schoolyard supported.  I remember him haranguing me on the subject of social security.  It was a bad thing, he asserted, because his father could make more money by investing on his own rather than contributing to the pot. "But, but, but...," I remember stuttering, "it's insurance, and not everyone is a good investor."  This exchange must have taken place during the Truman years. In the P. S. 217 schoolyard, where everyone was the child or grandchild of immigrants, FDR was our guy and social security was a fact of life, a revolutionary improvement in quality of life.  Besides, wasn't it the case that my widowed grandmother received $32 a month -- not enough to live on, but a great help, enough to pay her rent?  To argue against social security -- where in the world could K get such weird, off-the-track ideas?  Plus K was a Yankees fan --an unholy, contrarian jerk!

Then K disappeared for a month or a year -- some period of time, I can't remember exactly how long.  He had relatives in a southern city -- Baltimore, I believe, and he lived with them for an extended while. When he returned, he starting spouting the most appalling racist remarks, one of which is engraved on my memory:  "they have a lot of uppity blacks down there, they won't even get off the sidewalk for you."  Whoa, daddy.  First of all, no one said "blacks" in those days -- they were "Negroes."  And second -- "uppity?"  I had never heard the term before and was shocked beyond measure.  "Get off the sidewalk" --WTF???  Beyond my conception, beyond anyone's conception in our part of the universe.  Remember, dear reader, that the only person more sacred to the schoolyarders than FDR was Jackie Robinson.

I tell you, I gave K a lot of room after that conversation.  Truth to tell, there was no need for our paths to cross -- we weren't in the same classroom and K didn't play softball or basketball -- as I said, he was pretty much of a klutz.  

I looked up K on the internet.  He's a retired professor of economics and is now a fellow at a right-wing  think tank.  He's made a career out of opposing third-world development and supporting "free market solutions" to all our ills.  That dogged dullness has produced a number of books.  I've even found a picture of him -- where he was once greasy and pimpled, he's now bald and sleek, with a malevolent cast to his eye. 

There's always been a connection in my mind between conservatism and racism.  The link is narcissism.  "I've got mine, let "them" take care of themselves."  For the Ks of the world, it's not "how do we take care of less fortunate and of our old people?"  It's, "how do 'we' deal with 'them.'"  And "they" are usually, almost always, darker-skinned than "we."  I'm sure that K would deny that his "free-market" views have anything to do with racism.  But I know better -- I was there at the beginning, before K became quite so sleek.  

New Bird in Town

A creature previously unknown to me has appeared in the pond.  After a few moments with the binoculars and a glance at Peterson's classic Field Guide to the Birds along with some intense internet research, I could make a positive identification.  It's a double-crested cormorant, usually found at the seacoast but sometimes in rivers and lakes, which has been "recently extending its range" and which has just now arrived on Hackett Hill Road.  Although it's exciting to encounter a new bird, especially a large graceful swimmer and diver, the cormorant arrives tarnished by a bad reputation.  Cormorants form very large colonies and over-indulge their voracious appetites -- they gobble fish, frogs, salamanders, clean out the lakes.  Is it after our trout?  They've become a pest on Lake Champlain, where they're now "taking measures" to reduce the population.  I don't mind one cormorant, but I certainly don't want to host a horde of them

When the first wild turkey arrived, about fifteen years ago, everyone would stop and stare.  Now turkeys are as common as pigeons, but as far as I can tell, do no damage (unless they get into the garden, which they haven't, so far).  They eat insects, not frogs. Plus they're good eating.  I've never heard of anyone salivating over roast cormorant.

I'd trade the cormorant, and the turkeys for that matter, for some of the birds that have disappared over the last forty years.  We used to have a symphony at dawn and dusk -- now there's hardly a peep, except for the robins and the bluejays.  I'd give a lot to hear a white-throated sparrow at daybreak.  It's been years since I've seen a bluebird, a wren, an indigo bunting, an oriole, a purple martin, a red-wing blackbird, a sandpiper, a tanager, a vireo.  Or seen the swifts overhead. Even our once-abundant swallows have become rare. Where are they? 

Late Blight

It sems so allegorically named, late blight, especially appropriate to your septuagenarian gardener. But it's more than symbolic -- late blight here and it's real.   It's official name is phytophthora infestans.  It's a noxious fungus and it appears just when you're about to start harvesting your abundant tomatoes.  Late blight blackens and putrifies leaves, stems, and the fruits themselves. It leaves nothing edible, and there's no recourse o do except to pull out your plants, and then either burn them or put them in black plastic and take them to the dump.  We're trying to rescue a few of the tomatoes by pulling off the bad leaves, but it's a losing cause.  All that work -- starting the seeds, watching and watering, fertilizing and staking and tying up -- all wasted.  What a pity.

 Late blight also affects potatoes.  In fact, this nasty fungus is responsible for the great Irish famine of the 1840s.  So while we're mournful, we're glad that we don't depend on our tomatoes for sustenance or income. 

Why this year?  Some say that the disease comes to us from the great factory farms in the south, where tomatoes are started early and then shipped north in late spring. My neighbors put the blame on Wal-Mart.  But in all honesty, I must admit that all my tomatoes were started locally, by friends and relations.  The fungus can't be transmitted through the seed, so the tomato factories are off the hook.  The real culprit is the weather -- the soggy cold of June and July was hideous if you're a tomato but just perfect if you're a blight.  

I think I'll take a year off from tomatoes -- let the garden go fallow, or just plant flowers.  I couldn't bear to lose another crop. I'll follow the official advice --root out every single volunteer tomato and pull every weed in the nightshade family.  No tomatoes until 2011.       

Richard Poirier (1925-2009)

Richard Poirier died last week at age 83.  The New York Times paid tribute with a long obituary and an appreciative essay.  Poirier was a "distinguished man of letters" and also a Professor of English.

In 1960, as the juniorest and least-sophisticated graduate student in the history of the universe, I enrolled in an AmLit course taught by Poirier.  Fifty years later, I can affirm that it was the single course in my graduate career in which I performed the absolute worst -- both in the instructor's judgment and in my own.  I'm still embarrassed at the woeful mess of a paper I offered him.  I remember little of it, except its incompetence and the recollection that I used the phrase "a writer of his ilk" -- I can't remember to which I writer I referred -- and that Poirier wrote a longish exasperated note explaining to me that I did not have the standing to treat any American author with disrespect.  However, the honest-to-goodness reason why I did so badly in the course was that Poirier expected his students to think -- and thinking was not an area in which I was gifted.  I had discovered early in my educational career that my memory was far superior to most of my contemporaries, that I had an ear for language, and that I had a moderately fluent prose style.  But I never, ever, possessed a logical, orderly, or penetrating intelligence.  (I could remember sentences and phrases and whole poems, but not arguments or chains of reasoning).  My skills were sufficient for literary study -- indeed I doubt that I could have managed an academic career in any other discipline.

In fact, I did rather well in studies with most of my graduate-school professors -- distinguished and learned gentlemen all of them -- who were so happy to encounter facility that they didn't notice the want of brain.

It is curious that some of the most profoundly learned of my professors were the least adventurous of  thinkers.  I remember, for example, Douglas Bush, now a mere trivia question, but a most renowned scholar in his day, whose superficial, fey, conservative, neoChristianist-pixie observations on Spenser and Milton I duly recorded. for two endless semesters, learning absolutely nothing of worth or value.

Poirier was more serious.  Only 35 (I was 21), he was thinking deeply about the qualities that made American literature distinctive (I believe that he was in the process of formulating the ideas that came together in A World Elsewhere).  He was an intellectual rather than an academic. It would have been wise for me to have listened carefully to him. I might have learned something. 

It's shocking to me that the young, dashing lecturer whom I remember so clearly could be so old, so dead -- but ther's no denying that half a century has slipped away since I last listened to his rumbling voice.   

The Slightness of the Lambs

As far as I can tell, the deer generally keep clear of the back field where the Morgans and the Scottish Blackfaces are pastured.  Perhaps it's because the domestic animals eat down the grass, or perhaps the deer just don't like company.  But a few days ago, I watched four white-tailed deer -- a doe with three fawns, I believe, though such a group makes an unlikely family -- chase twenty-two sheep out of the field and back to their fold.  Sheep are notoriously skittish, but then, so are the white tails.  It was a battle of cowards.  It was especially painful to watch because one of the sheep was the ram, McCavish, and it's his job (aside from the annual servicing, at which he performed brilliantly) is to guard the ewes.  McCavish is the "herd sire," new to the flock,  He was recently imported from Wisconsin; his grandfather came from Scotland in the form of a vial of sperm packed in dry ice.  What was Mr. McCavish thinking when he ran from the field?  I was embarrassed for him and for the entire flock.  Query:  will the sheep stand their ground or will they allow themselves to be intimidated by the wild turkeys?

Zucchini News

In our part of Vermont, the common wisdom is, "never keep your car unlocked in August, because someone will open your door and throw in a couple of zucchinis." Like most local gardeners, I'm drowning  in the  squash.  We can't eat our zucchinis fast enough.  And no matter how vigilant I am in picking them, I wake up in the morning to lift one of those huge hairy leaves and there it is --- another baseball-bat long, sumptuously fat zucchini, staring its one-eyed stare at me.  To make matters worse, this year I'm growing two kinds of zucchinis -- the standard green supermarket variety and a fancy striped "Romanesco."  Also another exotic squash, a buttery globe called "Ronde de Nice," most plentifully produced.  

Last week I was weeding in the garden when I had an unexpected visitor -- unusual for our dirt-road, off the beaten track neighborhood.  I can't remember having to deal with a solicitor since two barely fledged Mormons popped by, fruitlessly, in 1978.  This young man, who arrived noiselessly on bicycle was from VPIRG, and he came to tell me about the hazards of the Vermont Yankee atomic power station.  I told him right up front that I wasn't going to donate any money and I told him why --it all went to Obama.  But he was cordial nevertheless, and we chatted.  He's a Latin major, just graduated from UVM, off in the fall to join Americacorps.  Nice kid, I thought, but an easy mark.  After twenty minutes, he rode off with no donation but with  two substantial zucchinis and a Ronde de Nice in his backpack.  Also a large head of broccoli and a handful of beets.  .