Tohu Bohu

Thanks to the generosity of a couple of Gentle Readers, Your Humble Blogger has been watching Northern Exposure, which was my favorite television show for a few years. I don’t have a favorite television show any more, except perhaps Jeopardy!, which I don’t even watch very often. I wonder how many favorite television shows I’ve ever had? The Muppet Show, as a kid. I liked Barney Miller and Cheers a lot, but I don’t know whether either was ever really a favorite. I think, restricting it to shows that I was watching when they were being produced, and where I watched or tried to watch new episodes weekly, it would be Northern Exposure, The Muppet Show and Homicide: Life on the Streets.

Digression: Have y’all seen The Games? Listening to Mssrs. Clarke and Dawe is like attending a seminar on the use of rhythm in comedy, only without having to do any reading beforehand, and without anybody reading any analytical papers. OK, it’s nothing like a seminar. But why would you want it to be? And the good news is that they’re still at it. End digression.

Anyway, if you had asked me, back when they were still making episodes of Northern Exposure, why I liked it so much, I probably would have said that I liked the characters and the actors. The actors really are terrific: John Cullum is wonderful as Holling, his face and voice always worth close attention; John Corbett is lovely to look at and listen to as Chris-in-the-morning, with wonderful rhythms in both speech and gesture; Cynthia Geary’s Shelley is hilarious; Janine Turner’s Maggie is sexy; Elaine Miles is magnificent as Marilyn. And, more surprisingly, nobody is bad. In a big cast, nobody is bad. It’s amazing.

At the end, during that last terrible season and the decade or more following, if you asked me what was so good about the show, I would have talked about the incredibly sophisticated structure, where three (usually three) subplots would play around with a single theme, sometimes commenting on each other and sometimes looking at different aspects. Take, for instance, the eighth episode of season three: “A-Hunting We Will Go”. The main plot is that Fleischman, after being repulsed by the idea of hunting for sport, decides to try it. The secondary plot is that Ruth-Anne has a cast on her leg, leading Ed to cosset her, particularly when he finds out she is seventy-five years old. The third plot is about Holling discovering that after fifty-odd years of hunting (first with bullets and then with a camera), he would rather stay home with Shelley and tend the bar. Craig Volk, the writer, weaves the plots together very loosely, and doesn’t (imao) make a big heavy-handed deal of the mortality/age/death deal, but then he also doesn’t shy away from a big gesture: the episode ends with Ruth-Anne and Ed dancing on the grave plot he gives her as a birthday present. This structure-of-threes really is a strength of the show, although I think I exaggerated it a bit to myself; some episodes have unrelated subplots, and some related plots are heavy-handed or dopey.

As I’m watching them now, though, with the magic of little shiny discs (and, did I mention, friends who don’t mind lending things out for quite an unreasonably long time), I am struck that the real strength of the show is the dialogue. There’s a Northern Exposure style, a heightened rhetoric, long sentences with flights of exaggeration and cultural reference, a magnificent creation that is nothing like the way actual people speak and that I could listen to for ever so long. Yes, the characters are different and have different speech patterns which largely hold constant from show to show, but even the most taciturn characters are prone to come out with the most amazing turns of phrase. In one episode recently, Maurice was talking about Alan Shepard’s tiny feet. Adam spews bizarre and hyperbolic bile. Ed pops an obscure movie reference, or a blockbuster reference as if it were obscure. Fleischman, of course, never stops talking, and his stream of complaint and criticism is annoying, but I have to think that if there were the faintest hint of naturalism in it, if it sounded like any complaining that anybody had ever done in real life, it would be so annoying the show would be unwatchable.

My Best Reader and I are about halfway through the third season. I think we started watching at some point during that season, although it’s also plausible that we started watching in the fourth season and have seen a few of the earlier episodes on reruns or syndication. Mostly, though, we’re watching shows we haven’t seen before, in a series we’ve seen a lot of. It makes a good last-thing-in-the-evening-before-going-upstairs entertainment; enjoyable but not (usually) too distressing, or hilarious either for that matter. Comforting. Good television. There’s something in each episode to chat about as we’re closing up the house, but not enough to keep us up late dissecting it.

What seems strange to me is the sense that I don’t really remember it as it was, that we’ve romanticized it, inflated its qualities in our memories, and I think that we really have done that, but that I like it anyway. I’m much more used to coming back to some favorite after many years and being disappointed; the other common (and more enjoyable) experience is to find that the book or movie or whatever really is as good as I remember. This is different. It’s not what I remember, but it’s still good. Has that ever happened to you?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 7:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, darn. I happened to come across a lovely facsimile of the Morgan Picture Bible, and I wanted to talk about how wonderful it was, but I’ve just wasted half-an-hour trying to find a good picture of 15v, and not only did I fail to find one, but I lost the available time for posting.

There is a scan of the individual quadrants of the page at Medieval Tymes. The image of the upper right, Samson pulling down the pillars (Judges 23-30) gives an idea of how magnificent, crazy, funny, and moving these images are, but sadly gives no sense of the whole page, and the way that the four images interact. The Morgan Library itself has an on-line exhibition with eighteen full-page images: 23v gives a sense of both the violence and the artists’ freedom from formal restraint, and 27v shows the startling technique of allowing the figures to cross from one quadrant to another. Make sure to use the zoom feature, once you’ve got a sense of the page; the details on these are superb.

Sadly, 19v is only available from Medieval Tymes in bits and pieces; in that one Peninah actually leans from the upper right into the upper left in order to stick out her tongue at Hannah, which is even better because Peninah is already in the upper left quadrant, smiling and well-behaved.

Anyway, as I said, I’m out of time for now. But it’s wonderful stuff.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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So at one point, in my misspent youth, I was misspending some youth at a party, when I overheard a conversation about Tom Lehrer’s “Vatican Rag”. A fellow was saying something about how brilliant and subtle it was, and how in the line everybody say his own/kyrie eleison, you couldn’t get the joke unless you know about the petitioning portion of the Mass and where it was in relation to the Ave Maria, or something like that. I don’t remember. It’s perfectly plausible that the fellow was Your Humble Blogger; other than my utter lack of knowledge of the Catholic liturgy either before or after the second Vatican Council, it sounds like something I would say. Actually, particularly keeping in mind the utter lack of knowledge, it sounds like something I would say.

And, like so much Your Humble Blogger says, it is utter bullshit. Obviously, you can get the joke and enjoy the song without detailed knowledge of the Catholic liturgy, because as a matter of observable phenomena, people in fact do. There are perhaps different levels of enjoyment, sure. But there’s also a tendency to say that anybody who is enjoying a thing on a different level than I am is in fact enjoying it wrong, which is to say they aren’t really enjoying it at all.

Which brings me to the Music Hall. Every now and then, I think to myself Lad (I call meself lad ’cos I’ve known meself since I was that ’igh), Lad, I say, How can anyone possibly enjoy [Sgt. Pepper/My Fair Lady/Beyond the Fringe/Topper/Alfred Hitchcock/David Bowie/Prime Minister’s Question Time/Morecambe and Wise/Douglas Adams/Flanders and Swann/P.G. Wodehouse/Bare Naked Ladies/SCTV/life itself] without having an intense and pleasurable familiarity with the great tradition of the music hall? The answer of course is that people enjoy it the way they do enjoy it. My own familiarity with the Music Hall tradition is pretty weak, actually. I can sing part of “Burlington Bertie” and “A Couple of Swells”, all of “Has Anybody Seen My Ship” and the chorus to “My Old Man Said Follow the Van”. That’s about it.

Besides, a familiarity with the Music Hall is like a familiarity with jazz. There’s an awful lot of it. It isn’t all the same. It’s different every time, so you had to be there, and you weren’t. Even if you were there, you weren’t there all the time. And besides, what is it, anyway? How do you know whether something is, or it isn’t?

So. Music Hall, to me, is a certain style of music, a certain style of comedy, a certain style of dance, and a certain style of performance. Or rather a set of those styles. I can hear it or see it, when I hear it and see it. It’s about a particular set of rhythms, a penchant for particular kinds of puns and rhymes, and most of all a particular relationship with the audience. And, like jazz, its influence pops up in all kinds of things, and you really don’t need to be aware of that influence to enjoy the things, but if you are, like I am, well then you win, don’t you?

And in the absence of a point of any kind, a joke that I consider to be very Music Hall, courtesy of Noel Coward:

BERTIE: ’ello, ’ello, ’ello, where was you last night?
ALGIE: Where was I?
BERTIE: I say, where was you last night?
ALGIE: At the cemetery.
BERTIE: At the cemetery?
ALGIE: At the cemetery.
BERTIE: Anyone dead?
ALGIE: All of ’em.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Your Humble Blogger’s home town library has been renovating the main branch. It’s only been my home town for a couple of years, and in fact the main branch closed a month after we moved here, and remained closed for fourteen months. During that stretch, we all made do with two branch libraries that are both fine, fine, branches, but they are branches. Small. Not large.

The point, though, is that after all this time, our library has reopened. At last. There was a gala reopening celebration, with a band and clowns and drinks and ribbon-cutting and mayoral speeches and general fabulousness, and it was packed. I mean, hundreds and hundreds of people. Throngs. Parents and kids, little old ladies, professional types, hipsters, beautiful people, important people, riffraff, wanderers, madmen, saints. The whole town turned out. It was amazing.

That’s all. Just thought you’d like to know: YHB lives in a town which turns out in the hundreds for a library opening. I win.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger has been reading Tyler Green's Modern Art Notes over at ArtsJournal, because, well, I'm interested in Modern Art, and he’s an interesting writer. And if two-thirds of the notes aren’t actually all that interesting, then it doesn’t take that much time to scan them and move on. Mr. Green sometimes talks about artists I don’t much care about, but sometimes I do care about them after he’s talked about them, which is pretty good, if you ask me.

Anyway, the reason I mention it is that Mr. Green has been doing two weeks of DonorsChoose. I had been unfamiliar with DonorsChoose, but it's clearly a wonderful thing. It's a sort of microphilanthropy aimed at education. Teachers (or administrators, or parent-teacher organizations, I suppose) can list a project that they need some money for, say a couple of hundred dollars for some art supplies, or a thousand dollars for an LCD projector, or a few hundred for a set of reference books. And then you, Gentle Reader, can drop a twenty on one of them. Or a fifty. Or a five. You can pick a school in your hometown, or even better, a school in the nearby town that has real problems. Or you can pick a project you like, some sort of thing you happen to be keen on. Math? Reading? Music? Knock yourself out.

It’s not the Untied Way. But like the Untied Way, it addresses only short-term needs. It doesn't do a damn’ thing about the structural problems, or about the future of education, or about the future of the country. What it does, it helps a few teachers and a few kids, and a few parents, too, I suppose. Yes, I would prefer that we address the thing systematically. Yes, the idea of public schools includes the idea of public funding. So don’t think that being a Donor who Chooses relieves you of the obligation (in a democratic society) from talking and voting and working to create a culture and a community that doesn’t need DonorsChoose. Or the Untied Way. Or food banks. But neither does doing that good democratic stuff relieve you of the obligation to help teach children, to feed the hungry, to keep people from having to give birth in a barn.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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It occurred to me, the other day, that there’s an odd little cultural shift that’s taken place in undergraduate academic life. In my day (before 1990), as I expect for a generation or more previous, a lazy student would find it substantially easier to do the minimum amount of research for a particular topic in books, rather than in journals. Oh, if you wanted to be diligent, there was the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, which involved looking up a topic, and then getting a citation, and then probably looking up the journal in the card catalogue and going and finding it or maybe paging it or even working with microfiche or microfilm. But if you were at an institution with a reasonable library, and you had one title or author to get you to the right place, you could easily pick up three or four books from one shelf to make up your sources for a short paper. Easy as pie.

Now, though, from the comfort of your dormitory, you can not only search for citations but get the actual text of a zillion articles through ProQuest or Ingenta or JSTOR or ABI/INFORM or Educator’s Reference or PubMed or the publishers’ sites. Some of the databases have the citations hot-linked from one article to the next, so you can just brip-brip-brip! download a whole paper’s worth of resources. And suddenly, all the steps that had been previous invisible, because they were assumed to be a natural part of doing any research, are gone: you don’t have to physically go to the library (which might involve walking, or using your Human Transport Device), you don’t have to learn any catalogue system at all (because the search engine will work on keywords), you don’t have to research when the library is open, you don’t have to bend down to look at a bottom shelf or stretch to the top shelf, you don’t have to physically lift a stack of books, and you don’t have to risk being distracted by any books on any topics other than your own.

I don’t think I ever cited a single scholarly journal in my undergraduate career. I did get a high score at Addams Family Pinball, though. And I read a lot of books. I wonder if there has been (as I expect) an enormous increase in citations for scholarly journals at the undergraduate level, and at the same time a precipitous decrease in citations for books. On the whole, I suspect that would be a Good Thing, although of course there are drawbacks and disadvantages. I’m not, of course, saying that books are outdated, or that the bricks-and-books library has outlived its usefulness. Books are still books, and there’s a cachet there, even for undergraduates. But I suspect that journals and journal articles are where much of the serious scholarly advance occurs, and that even a limited exposure to that while still undergraduates would give students an idea of what their fields are like at the next level, while there’s still time to avoid graduate school.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger has been writing a lot more hatchet jobs than puff pieces lately, huh? Well, I was actually thinking about writing a hatchet job about my local NPR station, because I’m not satisfied with their weekday Yes, All Things Considered, and yes, Morning Edition, but the two local shows are very weak and I don’t like Talk of the Nation anymore. So I was thinking about grousing for a note, when the station caused me to Learn Something Interesting, which is kinda cool, ain’t it?

This comes from putting together two things, one of which was a news item by Nancy Cohen called New study links fall colors with soil nutrients, which makes the point that trees in crappy soil need to drain all that last drop of sweet, sweet chlorophyll from their leaves before shutting down for the winter, which makes (through chemical processes I fundamentally don’t understand) the leaves redder, yellower, oranger, brighter, vibranter than the crappy autumn leaves you get in places with good soil.

Now, I put that together with some stuff I heard in an episode of Where We Live, Connecticut's changing forests, with John Dankosky's guests Don Smith and Les Mehrhoff. One of the ways that Connecticut’s forests have changed is that, well, three hundred years ago, the whole state was forested, because hardly anybody lived here, and the people who lived here weren’t farmers. As more people moved here and farmed, more of the land was cleared. Eventually, most of the state was farmland, with (comparatively) hardly any trees.

The problem is that Connecticut’s soil is crappy. Oh, how crappy it is. Seriously. I know, I grew up in the desert, and couldn’t tell arable land from a hole in the ground, except for the hole, obviously, but even I can tell that the clay, sand and rock in the soil around here makes for crap farmland. And, in fact, the moment the dark satanic mills started employing people, the farms were abandoned and went to forest. Now, the state is mostly forest again, although with different trees.

As I understand it, the trees around the state now are mostly trees that are good at getting that last drop of sweet, sweet chlorophyll from their leaves before shutting down for the winder, trees that won the fight for scarce resources, trees that look really, really great in October.

Now, follow the economics. First, we cut down the pine trees, make houses and furniture out of the wood, and live off the (crap) farmland. Then we abandon the farmland, and live off the mills, while we let the maples take over what used to be farmland. Then, we close the mills and open B&Bs and antique shops and live off the tourists who want to see the maples turn colors. It’s all connected. Now, if it turns out that abandoned mills become the best places to make matter transport devices or that old maples are the secret to living with climate change, we’ll be getting somewhere.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger is saddened by the news that Alan Coren has died. I have a fondness for Alan Coren, mostly born of a handful of hilarious essays in Golfing for Cats. The interview with a bitter, alcoholic middle-aged Pooh Bear was stunning. There was a marvelous bit about disguising airports against terrorists that was probably funnier back then. There was a very nasty and hilarious 1984 joke. The Times obituary, as one would expect, is both perfect and bizarre. “He was the most reliable of contributors. He always filed early and wrote to the length required.” Wouldn’t you like to have that in your obituary?

Sadly, Mr. Coren also delighted in the use of comic dialect, and not always successfully. In fact, often painfully. Comic dialect is a touchy thing to begin with (nohmeen? nohm’sayn?) and always runs the risk of losing the reader entirely. I never made it more than a page or two into the Idi Amin book or the Miss Lillian Carter book. Still, I don’t demand that everything a writer puts out is wonderful. A decent percentage. And if you write as much as Mr. Coren did, a decent percentage of wonderful might well mean a lot of crap. Sadly, Mr. Coren not writing any more crap means no more good stuff, as well.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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It appears that Your Humble Blogger has not yet done a puff piece for the League of Women Voters, one of my favorite organizations. Not that I actually know very much about them, but their information has been tremendously helpful to me as a voter (not, as such, a woman) over the years. They distribute sample ballots, they provide comparisons between candidates and proposals, and they organize debates, speeches and other informational events. They register people, they help them find out where and how to vote, and they encourage involvement in democracy.

You remember me hocking about Walt Whitman? And how the point of democracy is not to create a good government, but to create a good population? We’ve been pretty cranky about that lately here in the Tohu Bohu, and it’s good to remember, sometimes, that the League of Women Voters is not yet a hundred years old, and is in itself a terrific argument for democracy.

One might think, though, that in these internetty days, the LWV would be less important. After all, the local election board can put a sample ballot on-line for your perusal and can make it easy for you to type in your address and get your polling place, complete with map, directions and satellite imagery. The candidates can do that on their own websites, too, as can the political parties and other interested organizations. Anyone can post a comparison between candidates or initiatives, and ask the candidates to respond to a set of questions, or post voting records, report cards on issues, and texts or even videos of speeches.

But somehow I could not get a simple answer to my questions. I’ve been a resident of my (rich, well-educated, white 06119) town for less than two years, and so have not voted in a municipal election yet. It’s clear from yard signs, newspaper reports and local events that we have a town council election, a board of education election and a town clerk election. But every town sets these things up differently, so I have no idea what my own ballot will look like, or who I might vote for. Do town councilmen represent districts, or the town at large? If it’s at large, is it 12-pick-6 or 5-pick-4? Are the candidates’ Parties identified on the ballot? I searched on-line (and some of you know that I have mighty search skills), but I could not find one place that had all the information I wanted. I even tried emailing my Party’s town committee, which has conspicuously failed to update their website for the municipal election. They have not yet responded.

Fortunately, the LWVGreaterHartford sent me an eight-page broadsheet with the sample ballot. Sadly, they don’t seem to have updated their own website in some years, but in print, they win. In addition to the ballot, a nice map of polling places, and some useful information on our new machines, they have responses from the Town Council candidates to six yes-or-no questions and four essay questions, as well as four questions for the candidates for the Board of Education, and some brief information on the Town Clerk candidates.

Now, West Hartford is a Democratic town. It appears that there are nine members on the City Council, six of whom are Democrats. And, strangely enough, in our Town Charter it states

At the elections as hereinbefore provided no political party shall nominate and no elector shall vote for more than six members of the council, and one registrar of voters. In the election of 1997, and quadrennially thereafter, no political party shall nominate and no elector shall vote for more than three members of the board of education, and in the election of 1999, and quadrennially thereafter no political party shall nominate and no elector shall vote for more than three members of the board of education.

So that there can be by law no more than six Democrats out of nine seats. Which seems very odd to me, but there it is. Anyway, the point of the Charter, and the point I was getting at, is that this is a solid Democratic town, just this side of utter one-party dominance. So the Democrats running for Town Council are either incumbents or the party of incumbency; they have to defend what the current Council is doing. But the Republicans are running as challengers, and in a town like this, they certainly don’t have to support the state or national Party policies to get onto the ballot. Which means that when the LWVGH asked “Is the Town sufficiently encouraging and enforcing recycling?” all but one of the Republican candidates said No, and all the Democratic candidates said Yes. When asked “Is the Town sufficiently encouraging citizens to participate in clean energy programs?” all the Republicans said No, and all the Democrats said Yes.

The League doesn’t interpret those responses, you know. It just prints ’em.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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In honor of National Dictionary Day, the Oxford University Press has decided to make the Oxford Language Dictionaries Online free for the week. That’s right, it’s National Dictionary Day, in honor of Noah “06119” Webster, one hundred and forty-nine years and in the public domain. Go Noah! Go Oxford! Go crazy!

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Gentle Readers who have enjoyed reading comments here on this Tohu Bohu by that Gentlest of Readers who signs himself Michael may be overjoyed to discover that he has, according to statute, custom and law, started his own damn blog. And a good blog, too.

In fact, even those Gentle Readers who don’t enjoy his comments, or who are indifferent to them may well enjoy the blog. It’s a lovely combination of personal observation, photography, and general rumination. Without so much nasty old politics.

But that’s not all!

No, if you act now (and even if you don’t), subscribers will receive not one but two bloggers! Michael is joined by the lovely, perceptive and ludicrously overeducated Lisa, another Gentle Reader and sometime commenter on this Tohu Bohu. Lisa has not been what we bloggers call Yglesiastic, or hyperprolific, as yet, but those of us with the feed look forward to her posts as we do to ... um ... good blog posts by people we like. Or like similes, rare but sparkling. Not similes. Other word. Starts with an S. You know.

And it’s possible, I hear, that there may yet be additions to the blurry roster. Hoorah! and Hurray! And so on. It’s called House Out of Focus—ask for it by name!

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Post Script: Whilst pimping, I should probably add my pleasure that Phillies Foul Balls is back in business, at least for nine more games, and who knows? Maybe more than that. That’s what I’m reduced to. Hoping the Phillies make the playoffs. Feh. Ah, well.

Post Post Script: At some point, I should list those Gentle Readers who have their own blogs and LJs; there’s My Gracious Host, of course, and Matt Hulan (with Chris), and hapa. In LJ, there are adfamiliares, asmanyaswill, carpenter, Gannet, irilyth, jaipur, psocoptera and Wayman, some of whom comment here under different names, but I believe they all are occasional readers. I’m sure I’m missing some, but I can’t think of who.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

My discovery today at Wadsworth Atheneum was an artist named Joseph Smolinski. He had three pieces showing. One was a version of the Charter Oak that would probably only be funny to Connecticutters. Such as Your Humble Blogger, who found it hilarious. The second is a set of four images of a tree in the seasons, ranging from Spring to Winter. I liked that one a lot, too. And the third was a digital video called Tree Turbine (the artist has only some early work for it on line), about, well, tree turbines.

As of the moment, Mr. Smolinski does not have a slash-co2 page. I think that artists will have awesome slash-co2 pages, don’t you?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger spent much of yesterday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Actually, Your Humble Blogger spent much of yesterday mocking the MFA,B, which richly deserves it, what with their pitiful collection of contemporary art, their baffling insistence on blockbuster shows of not-art, and their risible wall-text. And their delusions of grandeur. Great salad bar, though.

Actually, the thing about the MFA,B is that for all my animosity, I am forced to admit that they have a magnificent collection. Their ancient Greek stuff, for example, particularly the vases, is astonishingly good, and it is incredibly instructive to spend twenty minutes or so looking at a couple of dozen painted vases, each slightly different from the others, giving a picture of the range of subject matter and style, while also making clear the similarities, each to the other, particularly in subject matter and style. Admittedly, you have to really want to find this marvelous collection, because it’s in a darkened corner at the end of a corridor that’s been blocked off for construction. But it’s worth it. And there are more wonderful things: a set of breathtaking works of Arabic calligraphy in marbled paper; a gaggle of Roman heads, of various times and styles; enough Egyptian stuff to satisfy any ten-year-old boy, including, yes, mummies; some insanely lovely Asian scrolls; a tiny ivory Christ as Good Shepherd from Asia with the cutest little-widdle sheep, more like hedgehogs, really; a magnificent Titian-haired St. Catherine, with actual Titian hair; all that Impressionist crap people seem to like; an enormous Medieval Spanish portal, with all the stonework around it; a Sol LeWitt they are hiding somewhere. So, you know, I mock it because it deserves the mockery, but I still go, when I can.

But that’s not what I’m here to puff today. No, I mention the MFA,B because at the moment the cavernous West Lobby space is occupied by a piece called “Artificial Rock # 85”, by Zhan Wang. It’s a big, shiny scholar’s rock made of stainless steel. Now, I walked in to the lobby and went “ooh, shiny scholar’s rock!” and knocked over a bunch of old ladies to go over to it (this is a joke, for those of you unfamiliar with Bostonian Old Ladies in Bombazine; one would hesitate to attempt to knock over a BOLiB with an earthmover. Many of these are the same old ladies who were BOLiB when Francis Dahl wrote about how the Nazis couldn’t knock them over with a Panzer), and it was pretty cool, but when I had a chance to look at it over a long period, I found myself a trifle discontented with it. I liked the idea of it, but it somehow didn’t quite work for me.

So I’m not here to puff the Artificial Rock # 85, either. Now, it happens that a friend of my Gracious Host (and an acquaintance of mine, as well, who I would be happy to be friends with if the opportunity really arose) recently started a blog, on which she posted some lovely photos of scholar’s rocks. Real ones, you understand, not shiny ones. Which reminded me of the Artificial Rock (# 85); I don’t know if Kam would particularly like it, but I wanted to mention it to her. So I decided to do a little internet searching, and immediately found out the name of the artist, which I had of course forgotten, and several pictures of shiny scholar’s rocks, including one at the DeYoung in Golden Gate park, one that’s at the Kennedy Center and one that is evidently in Shanghai.

And then those links led me to a shiny floating island and a shiny rock in a stream, both of which are very cool and, um, shiny, and an installation that evidently just closed up at Williams of a shiny cityscape that looks very cool indeed. And the flickr tag for Zhan Wang has a bunch of pictures of what appears to be a very disturbing installation at the 2006 Shanghai Biennale. Some of those pieces look much cooler than Artificial Rock # 85 (“I thought it would be a series of three—four, at the most"). But that’s not what I’m puffing.

What I am puffed about, at the moment, is that the internet exists. And more than that, that it has accumulated this vast amount of trivia. Much of it searchable. Ten years ago, the internet existed, more or less, but if I had come across something that I was vaguely interested in, a search like that would have been almost totally useless. If I had happened to see a big shiny Scholar’s Rock at more or less the same time that a friend’s friend expressed interest in scholars rocks, I would have been unable to quickly find out the name of the artist I had seen, and probably wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it, because it wouldn’t have been worth it, just to say that there is a big shiny scholar’s rock in Boston at the MFA. And then, I wouldn’t have known that this friend of my friend had an interest in scholar’s rocks anyway.

For all the annoyances of the internet and the bizarre nearness of trivia, it’s terrific to me to have this odd coincidence of interest lead me to a quick, annoyance-free introduction to a handful of pieces of art that I would likely never have seen. Even though I don’t think all the stuff is fantastic, even though I’m not an instant fan. It’s just a nice thing, a new bit of interesting stuff for me, a tasty treat in the box.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

So. Over the last few months, I've been watching DVDs of a couple of television shows featuring the great Hugh Laurie. They are somewhat different. The first is an American drama/soap opera in which Mr. Laurie plays a brilliant and irascible diagnostician (oh, and crazy dope friend); the second is a sketch comedy series he co-wrote and co-starred in with Stephen Fry. Watching the two of them over a shortish period has put me rather in awe of Mr. Laurie as an actor.

House, the medical thing, is an annoyingly terrible show with annoyingly brilliant bits. Mr. Laurie's character is wonderful, mostly wonderfully written, and almost always wonderful to watch. The rest of the characters range from annoying to uninteresting, with occasional good bits for most of them. The show revolves, or ought to, around two kinds of scenes: Doctor House giving snap diagnoses of common conditions based on offhand observations of minute symptoms, and Doctor House coming up with possible diagnoses of extraordinarily rare conditions (or combinations of conditions) based on a whole slew of conflicting and usually disgusting symptoms. I prefer the former, particularly as Mr. Laurie and Doctor House deliver the diagnoses in very funny, terribly rude, and often unexpected ways. The writing and performance mesh perfectly, and his exasperation, misanthropy and arrogance are entertaining to watch, as long as you are not the poor sap in the walk-in clinic who has the doctor glance at your left wrist and tell you that you have glaucoma and besides, your boss is sleeping with your husband. Or whatever. It's a hoot. The other ones are less amusing but are actually engrossing (in addition to being out-grossing) and if they are implausible, they are entertaining enough that I don't mind.

Sadly, the rest of the show is a soap opera about a handful of unpleasant hospital administrators and doctors, who waste my time with their interactions as if I care about them and their fictional futures. La. In addition, the implausibility that works in the show's favor when it turns out that the patient has leprosy (the father, you see, was not actually on secret missions so much as he was tramping around the undeveloped world having indiscriminate sex with whoever he met) works against the show when I am supposed to care whether the ludicrous hospital CEO will be vanquished by the risible chief of surgery. There is an important difference between implausible and fun, and implausible and lame. I surmise that these bits are there to provide opportunities for Dr. House to be inventively and wittily abrasive, except that the setups take up time that could be spent showing Dr. House actually being inventively and wittily abrasive. Ah, well. I am nearly at the end of the first season, something like twenty-'leven episodes, and I don't plan to watch season two.

I was so impressed by Mr. Laurie's performance as Dr. House, though, that I decided to seek out A Bit of Fry and Laurie, which I had known about and never bothered to find and watch. I've seen six episodes of the first series, and they are amateurish, inconsistent, self-indulgent, and very very funny. I was surprised to see that Stephen Fry, for all that he is a very funny man and clearly a terrific writer, is not much of an actor. He plays a very narrow range of characters extraordinarily well, and when he goes outside that range, it's usually a disaster, or at least his performance is. Mr. Laurie, on the other hand, successfully embodies a much wider variety of characters, changing voices, physical habits, classes and rhythms as well as any sketch comedian I've seen (with the exception, I suppose, of Michael Palin, who somehow was always more persuasive in his lower-class characters and madmen than the other Pythons). That doesn't mean that Mr. Laurie is funnier than Mr. Fry, even in my perception. Most of the best bits of Fry and Laurie (so far) have hinged on Mr. Fry, when he is either playing Stephen Fry or one of the overeducated professionals he does so well. Or, particularly, when he is doing both, since the whole show is predicated on an enjoyment of meta-humor, of part of the joke being that Mr. Fry and Mr. Laurie are doing the whole absurd skit comedy thing. They particularly like beginning a skit with an elaborate set-up only to stop the whole thing three or five lines in. There's a classic bit where they apologize for having to leave out a particular skit that was one of their favorites, but it does have a lot of sex and violence in it, such as the bit where Mr. Fry hits Mr. Laurie with a golf club, which wouldn't be so bad, but he does it very sexily. And so on.

One thing that struck me, watching these old shows, was that Mr. Laurie does seem to give Mr. Fry the business quite a bit about being homosexual. Mr. Fry is, as I now know, homosexual, or perhaps (I don't recall, although I have read an essay by him about it) bisexual with a long-term boyfriend. I don't think Mr. Fry was Out when these were broadcast in the mid-eighties, nor do I know if he was out to Mr. Laurie. Still, when Mr. Laurie's character calls Mr. Fry's character a great nancy or a bumboy, it's hard not to read into it a sort of needling that I think they both might have found very funny. Or not. It's hard to read.

Anyway, of the two, I vastly prefer the earlier, funnier works. I have also seen Mr. Laurie in Blackadder (he is a regular in III and IV), Jeeves and Wooster (with Mr. Fry again), Ben Elton's excruciating snoozefest Maybe Baby, Peter's Friends, and small parts in half-a-dozen movies and television shows. He was certainly good in them, funny in many of them, but not startlingly good of the go-out-and-see-what-else-the-man-has-done sort. He is that sort of good in House, which is good, because it got me to the Bits.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus:,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

It appears that YHB hasn’t blogged anything nice for a while, and just in case somebody was looking for something other than a gripe, here goes. I’ve listened to the Klezmatics’ Wonder Wheel perhaps ten times in the last couple of weeks, and it is wonderful.

I know some of my Gentle Readers are already familiar with The Klezmatics, and maybe y’all already ran out and bought this album. Or maybe you like the Klezmatics but didn’t know they had a new album, or knew they had one but weren’t sure if it was worth running out and getting. It is.

Some of my Gentle Readers are not (yet) big fans of The Klezmatics or klezmer music, but are fans of Woodie Guthrie. And maybe y’all already ran out and bought this album. Or maybe you like Woodie Guthrie but didn’t know he had a new album, or knew he had one but weren’t sure if it was worth running out and getting. It is.

This is (as GRs may have guessed) another one of those albums where Nora Guthrie lets people into the archive of thousands of Woody Guthrie lyrics to write new music and record the resulting collaboration. I haven’t heard the Billy Bragg/Wilco albums, and I was a little skeptical of the whole process, frankly. But it works. The Klezmatics choose songs from the period Mr. Guthrie was living in Coney Island with his yiddishe in-laws, and some of the lyrics have little yiddishisms, but I think a different band would have heard something very different in the written word. As it turns out, though, the thing is seamless—the album sounds like a Klezmatics album (and, you know, it is a Klezmatics album, and it’s a Woody Guthrie album, too.

Well, mostly. One of the songs, Goin' Away To Sea, was in the archive, and after Matt Darriau had picked out of the thousands and written a rollicking melody for it, and after the band had recorded it and it was finished and through, babe of mine, they were looking through the archive for manuscripts to photograph for the liner notes and came across another copy with a handwritten note on it from Butch Hawes saying “I composed this song you sonofagun.” It’s the folk process.

That song, by the way, is one of a few on this album that on first listen seem to be upbeat, cheerful tunes, but on second listen are kinda scary. This one is pretty straightforward, actually, a song from a soldier to his family, promising to return after he sets this old world free, putting “them fascists in their place/In their long and narrow grave, babe of mine.” On the other hand, his admonitions seem a little scary in themselves:

Don’t you go and leave a light, babe of mine,
Don’t you go and leave a light, babe of mine,
Don’t you go and leave a light
In your window, babe, tonight,
For the enemy to sight, babe of mine.

Don’t go talkin’ out of turn, babe of mine,
Don’t go talkin’ out of turn, babe of mine,
Don’t go talkin’ out of turn,
Don’t let Mister Hitler learn,
‘Cause I never would return, babe of mine.

Even more startling is Come When I Call You, which starts with one for the pretty little baby, two for the love of me and you, and three for the warships at sea. And Pass Away declares that “Heaven and earth they'll pass away” but “ Not a word of mine/Will ever pass away”. That’s a little troubling, isn’t it?

Some of the songs are more straightforward. Headdy Down is a lullaby, and a heartbreakingly beautiful one. Not heartbreaking because of anything except the gorgeousness of the singing. Seriously, even if you don’t shell out for the whole thing, this song is worth a buck at your friendly local internet download establishment. Gonna Get Through This World is what I think of as Guthrie-esqe, anthemic and inspirational. Mermaid Avenue is a wonderful celebration of “the isle called Coney”. There’s also Holy Ground, a sort of answer to the way This Land is Your Land has been taken over the years, and Heaven, which is mostly startling in the way it reveals the lost optimism of America—it’s a song I can’t imagine even Mr. Guthrie writing these days.

As for the music, if you haven’t already decided to purchase the thing, you can hear some tracks and clips on-line various places, and you can hear an interview at World Café with a partial band doing lovely version of three of the best songs on the album. Yes, there are some duds on the album, but we may disagree about which ones they are. But albums have duds, that’s why the whole album thing died, right? My advice is to buy this one anyway.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger is back, having had an excellent Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is in some way all about wresting our attention from those things that get up our noses to those things we happen to actually like, yes? So here’s a Puff Piece, since we haven’t had one in a while, about guerilla artist and pedestrian activist Xing Ped. Honestly, I don’t know much about Mr. Xing, who is (or perhaps was) incredibly reclusive. A lot of what I do know is unverifiable anecdote; a lot of people claim to have known or even worked with Mr. Xing, but it seems unlikely to me that he would have confided in them. Anyway, it’s the work that counts. The most likely bio, based as much on conjecture as reliable evidence, is that he was a war orphan of a Chinese soldier and a Korean mother, adopted by a Canadian nurse and brought up somewhere in lower Canada or northern US. The influence of Pop Art and minimalism is obvious, but the stories about his relationship with Donald Judd are probably false. It’s tempting to imagine them on a cross-country car trip, the older man holding forth on materials, on sites, on consumerism, on galleries ... and then the crash outside Marfa and the youngster’s vow never to drive again. Still, there’s no evidence of that, nor of the similar stories about collaborations with Jasper Johns, Yoko Ono or Sol LeWitt. The story of the Marfa crash, particularly, seems to contradict the story about his adoptive family being killed when they were crossing a busy intersection and a car failed to stop. Of course, there’s no evidence for that, either. Or, really, for the youthful flirtation with First Nation religions that led to the early site-specific works.

It was those works—the two-dimensional yellow diamonds, all flat surface, the stenciled words and images, the roadside locations—that really started Mr. Xing’s career. It’s hard to imagine how startling the now-iconic deer or moose would have appeared at the time. Just the silhouette, and the name of the animal (and the stenciled signature) in easy-to-read large sans-serif letters. Later he eschewed the images for short, passionate slogans, making my own favorite pieces. The thing that makes the works powerful is the contrast between the style of the work—cold, industrial, manufactured—and the passion of the pleas to ‘End Road Work’ or ‘End Construction’. And, of course, the siting, by the side of the road, always near some of the ubiquitous construction, the attempt to make the roads wider, longer, faster.

In fact, these later works without Mr. Xing’s name affixed are even more powerful for me, because they play with the whole question of identity. After the seventies ‘happenings’ where he spray-painted the ‘graffiti’ (just his name, in all caps) on the road near some dangerous intersection, his legions of followers have taken to stenciling his name on roads in cities and towns across America (oddly, in Canada they put his family name last as if it were a Western surname). The strong association of his name with dangerous intersections and bus stops carries over to his later, unsigned work, to the point where the signs in proximity to the ever-increasing roadways evoke the danger to pedestrians as well, and even while driving, I find myself raising a fist and shouting his name, as if it had been printed right on the sign.

Of course, after so many years, it’s not clear whether Mr. Xing is still active, or whether he has retired from the active supervision of the team of assistants he had delegated to do the actual siting. He had always taken the minimalist rejection of craft to an extreme, using geometric figures, stencils and print to universalize the artworks. Like the conceptualists, he distanced himself from the actual production of the art. What was clearly his own hand was the placement of the signs and the graffiti, and he attempted to remove himself even from that by allowing assistants to choose the placement of the signs. Added to that, of course, was the work of ‘independent’ copycat artists, and of course many pedestrian-rights activists took his work as part of their cause. By removing his self from the works, he in effect multiplied himself; because it is impossible to tell whether a particular work is a “real” Xing Ped, all of them are and none. There is no artist, there is just art. And yet, when you see any of them—the most amateurish scrawl on a road near a school, or a flimsy canvas orange sign on the roadside—you take it for a Xing Ped, you say his name, you think about the other works (I haven’t even mentioned the marvelous Holzer-like installations where his stylized self-portrait alternates with a warning hand, or where the words WALK and DON’T WALK alternate in red and green like a contradiction incarnate) and, inevitably, you think of the place of walking and driving in our culture.

That’s the magnificent paradox. He removes himself from the work so that he doesn’t stand between the viewer and the (political) meaning, but the result is not that he disappears but that he grows larger, his name encompassing all the byways of the nation. Even if he has already died, and the studio now carries on making the works without any supervision at all, his influence is so strong that they are him, they work for him and he works through them, achieving a sort of immortality. There will always be Xing Ped; the endless construction demands Xing Ped; the children dodging traffic in front of approved Xing Schools grow up to be the drivers he excoriated but also to be the activists he still inspires.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Xing Ped, Self-Portrait, date unknown.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Arthur Hlavaty, who has an actual weblog, linked to The Gashlycrumb Torah, which is as funny as you might expect. However, the blog that contains it, Baraita, turns out to be astoundingly good when just writing, blog-like, about what the bloggist thinks. Talking about sitting with the Seven Shepherds of Israel in the messianic Sukkah made from the carcass of the Leviathan. Talking about the annoyances of Kol Nidre at Congregation Beth Boondoggle. Talking about kashering her kitchen with a blowtorch (“Muahahahahahahaha. I mean, shanah tovah.”). It’s all good.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I hope y’all Gentle Readers are aware that Your Humble Blogger yields to no one in admiration for the Constitution of the United States, a magnificent and profound advance in governmental philosophy and practice, and a blueprint that has proven, over two hundred and seventeen—almost two hundred and eighteen, now—years to be the backbone of an astonishingly long reign of peace, prosperity and stability. Well, and I do actually yield to those people who give it the status of Scripture, who feel that it was not just Divinely Inspired but Revealed. That bit of rhetorical hyberbole aside, I feel that an education in this country at any levels must, to be really good and helpful and proper and whatnot, include an explanation of the Constitution, in proper context for whatever level the student is at.

Let me say that again, before I get into the griping which Gentle Readers know, just know is waiting behind the puff-piece introduction: The Constitution is almost unimaginably marvelous, worthy of study, central to the extraordinary success the United States has had, and an important part of an American education. Furthermore, we should celebrate the Constitution as an American achievement—and it is in many ways a uniquely American achievement. Over the last ten years or so, my admiration for the Constitution has grown immensely, as we have seen the House and the Senate play out their appropriate roles, the Executive, the Legislative and the Judicial branches tug out their prerogatives, and the dead hand of James Madison keeping everything under control. Can anyone imagine what the rise of the Right in this country would have looked like if we had a system like Italy’s or Israel’s or even Britain’s? Can you imagine what Grover Norquist would have been able to do? Oh, Lord, thank you for James Madison, and thank you for the Constitution. OK? So you know where I’m coming from.

And yet, somehow, it doesn’t make me happy at all to discover this morning (thank you, Best Reader) that the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2005 (118 Stat. 2809, 3344-45 (Section 111)) as implemented by the Department of Education (see the Federal Register, 70(99), p. 29727) reads, in Division J: Other Matters, Title 1: Miscellaneous Provisions and Offsets, Section 111, part (b): Each educational institution that receives Federal funds for a fiscal year shall hold an educational program on the United States Constitution on September 17 of such year for the students served by the educational institution. The implementation allows that in years where September 17 falls on Saturday or Sunday, the institutions may hold such programs on the week before or after.

In other words, in order to celebrate the U.S. Constitition, our federal legislature demands that local schools alter their schedules.

Now, I am not arguing that such a law is unconstitutional. I happen to agree with decided doctrine which essentially agrees that once an institution that would not ordinarily fall under federal regulation accepts federal dollars it also accepts a certain amount of federal regulation. The question is not whether such a law should be overturned by the courts. My question is whether the law is a good idea.

Er, no.

I think it would be swell if schools celebrated our Constitution, and Constitution Day is as good a time as any to organize such a celebration. Heck, I would be pleased as proverbial if Left Blogovia decided to celebrate the Constitution tomorrow with a Favorite Five Constitutional Provisions meme. You hear? Atrios? Amanda? Matt? Josh? But there’s a difference between thinking something is a good idea and thinking that mandating that thing is a good idea. We can celebrate our Constitution, we can celebrate our Constitution in schools and libraries (is a public library included in “educational institutions” under the meaning of the act? What about a museum? What about a worker training program?), we can arrange a day to all celebrate it together, and that’s great. But what the hell is it doing in the law?

You know, I suspect if legislators spent more time thinking about the Constitution, studying it, you know, getting a sense of the thing and their place in it, we’d have less of this crap. Or maybe not. It’s hard to tell. A fellow might get frustrated by local schools failing at civic education, and try to mandate it. You can pass laws, but you can’t make civic education happen. And I don’t know who introduced this stupidity, and I don’t care if it was a Democrat or a Republican. Even if it was Senator Byrd (and it wouldn’t surprise me if it was, honestly), I hold that whoever it was should be mocked, publicly, for a thousand years. We could make the Public Mocking of the Stupid Legislator part of our Constitution Day festivities. Maybe we should.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Richard Whiteley has died. Now that might not mean much to you, Gentle Readers, but it gives me a chance for a bit of a Puff Piece, such as been sadly lacking round these parts. In addition to being the answer to a terrific trivia question (who was the first person shown on a Channel 4 broadcast), Mr. Whitely personified (to YHB at any rate) one of the facets of English television that I like so much.

Countdown was forty-five minutes (with one commercial interruption, if I remember correctly) of minor manipulation of letters and numbers. There were two games: a letters game and a numbers game. In the letters game, one contestant asks for either a consonant or a vowel, which is flipped off a stack and put onto a board, then ask for another, then another, and so on until nine letters have turned up. Then there’s thirty seconds of music and scribbling, after which the two contestants reveal the longest word they made from those letters, usually seven or eight letters, usually two or three letters longer than the longest word I found. Then we go to the panel, two people, one of whom is actually a lexicographer, who may have come up with a longer word, or may not have, depending. They do this three or four times in a row. Seriously. Just “May I have a consonant, please? A vowel? A consonant? Another consonant. A vowel, please. Another consonant, a vowel, a consonant and a final consonant please.” Then a comment or two, thirty seconds of music, then “What did your come up with, then, Jim?” “A six, Richard.” “Ah, and how about you, Sarah?” “A seven, actually.” “Excellent, well, let’s start with Richard.” And so on. Three or four times in a row.

Then, for a break, they do a numbers game. The contestant picks numbers, again off two stacks. This time, there’s a stack of small numbers and a stack of large ones (25, 50, 75 and 100), the contestant gets six of them. Then there’s a random three digit number revealed, which is the target number. The contestants have thirty seconds (with the theme playing, of course) to combine their six numbers using the four basic functions to get as close as they can to the target number. So, for instance, if the numbers are 3, 6, 4, 2, 25 and 50 and the target number is 742, you could do, um, [(6+4)(25+50)] - 4 - 3 for 743, right? I never ever ever ever get these. In thirty seconds, I usually can’t get within thirty, much less within five. The contestants always are within five, and often hit the button. Anyway, they see who gets closest, and then (I’d forgotten about this) the girl who flips over the letter part comes up with a better way, and then back to the letters game.

They do the letters game eleven times, and the numbers game three times, and there’s a tiebreaker nine-letter anagram that goes to the first one to get it. That’s it. It’s a simple, difficult game, and they get contestants that are very good at it. And they play it over and over again.

And this is the clever bit—they don’t fuck it up. They just bring on the contestants, play the game, bring on more contestants, play the game again, come back tomorrow and we’ll play it again. They didn’t make it easier, or harder, they didn’t add a third game, they didn’t make it more visual, or double the money. Actually, I can’t remember them talking about prize money at all. I suppose there must be prize money involved, but I have no idea if it’s in the thousands or if it’s twenty quid and coach fare. All they do is play the game.

And, you know, if you don’t like it, there are three other channels.

As for YHB, well, if it were on tv here, I suspect I would not only arrange my afternoon so I could watch it (or else invest in some of that new-fangled automated recording technology) but stop everything else and sit with a pad of paper scribbling and humming the music.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve had a soft spot for the late Anne Bancroft ever since I happened to see An Audience with Mel Brooks on cable in 1983. He was pushing his new film, To Be or Not To Be, which as it happens may have been the last of his movies to be really good, but anyway he did an hour of stand-up, taking questions from the audience full of famous actors. And plants. In fact, the whole audience may have been planted. The questions were obviously plants. At one point, a woman wearing dark glasses and a scarf asks “Is it true you are married to the most beautiful woman in the world?” “Certainly not,” says Mr. Brooks, “I’m married to Anne Bancroft.” The woman was, of course, Ms. Bancroft, who then came forward and did a bit of shtick of some kind with her husband, I forget what. Anyway, I thought it was great, particularly for a woman of a certain age, once glamorous, to participate in that sort of joke about herself. Of course, I was pretty young at the time. On the other hand, I still think it’s a good bit.

Anyway, despite my affection for her, I’ve never really been knocked out by her films, with the sole exception of 84 Charing Cross Road, a real three-hankie job. Yes, yes, the Graduate. I wasn’t knocked out. Yes, yes, the Miracle Worker. I wasn’t knocked out. I kinda liked her in Torch Song Trilogy, although by 1988 I considered myself hip enough to disdain the movie version. I was vaguely interested in seeing her play an updated Miss Haversham, although as I pointed out at the time, you knew she could do it, and you knew Robert DeNiro could do Magwitch, and it would be far more interesting to see them switch parts.

Well, there it is. I can’t help thinking that she was about to do one more brilliant role, that there was one more fantastic part left for her, and she never got around to it. Still, I suppose there’s hardly any good actor you can’t say that about, and those that you know didn’t have one more role left in them, well, that’s even more depressing, isn’t it?

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It seems as if Your Humble Blogger has yet to write a Puff Piece on A.Word.a.Day, Anu Garg’s tremendously entertaining service where he emails you, well, a word a day. Unlike some other seemingly similar services I’ve tried, Mr. Garg often chooses words that even my Gentle Readers will be unfamiliar with, and which are interesting in themselves. I have learned, on a few occasions, that I have been using a word incorrectly, and on many more, I have found that there is a word for something that I had always thought no single word described. For instance, where I have always used avuncular to refer to the particular affection an uncle shows his nieces and nephews, I had never heard materteral, which means much the same only referring to an aunt. I can now say that, for instance, a certain ex-boss looked out for the people in her employ with a materteral eye, not quite maternal, and certainly not grandmotherly. True, I’d have to explain what it means, but only once or twice, right?

As I say, it’s too bad I haven’t written a Puff Piece, because I’m all cranky about one of the daily notes, and as it’s so much easier to write hatchet jobs than puff pieces, here we are. Or perhaps it much easier to refrain from writing the puff pieces. Anyway.

This week’s began very nicely with three “words about wordplay”: antanaclasis, paralipsis, and antiphrasis. All of these are great and useful words, and describe quite specifically certain rhetorical figures that come up far more frequently than the words that describe them. So far, so good. Then came Thursday, and Thursday’s word was oxymoron.

Oxymoron has been a pet peeve of mine as far back as I can recall. Mr. Garg’s definition is typical: A figure of speech in which two contradictory terms appear together for emphasis, for example, “deafening silence”. For comparison, the American Heritage fourth edition’s is quite similar: A rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradictory terms are combined, as in a deafening silence and a mournful optimist. I’ll go ahead and quote from ooo is for oxymoron, from Jed’s late lamented column:

An oxymoron is what columnist Herb Caen used to call a "self-cancelling phrase"—a phrase which is internally contradictory. An oxymoron usually consists of two words which appear to be opposite in meaning. Often the apparent contradiction is simply due to the words in the phrase having other meanings than the intended ones. For instance, the phrase "even odds" makes perfect sense in its intended meaning, but it's often cited as an oxymoron because other meanings of "even" and "odd" are opposites of each other.

What Jed gets at here that the other two definitions miss is that the words in the phrase appear to contradict each other, but do not. The appearance of contradiction is the rhetorical trick. An oxymoron is not a phrase that actually does contradict itself, but one that appears to. So “deafening silence” is an oxymoron, because we ordinarily think of deafening as being more or less a synonym for loud, and in that sense it would contradict silence. In this case of course, either (more rarely) we are talking literally, as the total absence of sound (or silence) has the effect of somehow deafening someone (through atrophy?), or (more likely) we are using deafening to mean something like having the same social effect as a really loud noise, such as a person screaming abuse. As the common use of metaphor is to compare a thing to a thing that it is unlike, these phrases are very common. Jumbo shrimp is commonly called an oxymoron; Jumbo, was, of course, P.T. Barnum’s prize elephant and thus things that are elephantine, er, large are often called jumbo, whereas shrimp are quite small, and thus things that are small are often called shrimpy or shrimps. But shrimp is not used here to (metaphorically) mean small, just to mean (literally) shrimp. But jumbo prawn is not considered an oxymoron, nor does jumbo eggs, and eggs aren’t much larger than shrimp, because one metaphor is common and another isn’t.

Probably about two-thirds of the phrases that show up on lists such as Jed’s or the one from Oymorons.info are derived this way. In dry wine, dry is a less-commonly-used meaning, derived from metaphor. In Plastic glasses, glass is a commonly-used Schenectady, but the point is the same. In taped live or recorded live, live means neither live nor the metaphorical live nor yet the extended metaphor live, but the common descriptor derived from that metaphor, live, which makes it no contradiction at all. But those aren’t very interesting, other than to notice how words have a variety of different uses, and they aren’t responsible for them all at once. Anyway, it’s OK to call those oxymorons, technically, although most of them really they are sub-oxymorons, accidental juxtapositions due to the migration of words, having little rhetorical effect.

I would reserve the word, ideally, for the deliberate use of apparently contradictory words to either emphasize (deafening silence) or make a joke, or just draw attention to the words themselves. If I describe a particular celebrity as scandalously nice, or a novel as sublimely bad, I am using the rhetorical trick of an oxymoron, and I may be using it effectively, too. If a name a song Freezing Fire, I’m using an attention-getting rhetorical trick, and perhaps effectively, too. And if Milton (in Paradise Lost) says

Yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe

Now, there’s a third category of things often called oxymorons. These are joke oxymorons, phrases which contain no inherent contradiction, either actual or metaphoric, but which are called oxymorons as a joke. As Jed wrote, “to say that "California culture" is an oxymoron is to say that there is no culture in California, or that all Californians are uncultured.” In other words, the phrase California culture can only be called an oxymoron in jest or in insult. Similarly, it’s a fairly good, if tired, joke to claim that military intelligence is an oxymoron. It isn’t. If it was, the joke wouldn’t be funny. No, it isn’t funny anyway, but there it is. It could be funny. It’s theoretically funny. Similarly, if you call the phrase Christian Science an oxymoron, you are making a weak joke, or weakly insulting Christians, or scientists, or members of TCCS or something. What you are not doing is actually claiming that Christian Science is an oxymoron. And that’s fine. Until someone tries to tell you what an oxymoron is by using a joke oxymoron.

The AWAD definition was fine (if incomplete), but here’s the example, from an article called “The Family That Cheats Together”, by Karen D'Souza in the Mar 25, 2005 San Jose Mercury News: “A man for whom the term 'business ethics' is not just a polite oxymoron...” I understand that Ms. D’Souza was, herself, making a joke, and although I would have been gritting my teeth whilst reading it, I would have eventually let it go. I would not, not ever, have used it as an example. American Rhetoric, an otherwise terrific resource chooses as its example a line from a movie: “Safe sex -- now there's an oxymoron. That's like 'tactical Nuke' or 'adult male'.” Hahaha. Yes, I actually think it’s funny (funny-once) to call adult male an oxymoron. See, it’s a joke. It’s not an example. It’s not an example, people! It’s just not! It may be funny to say that if you look up choke in the dictionary you’ll see the 2004 Yankees team picture. It would not be funny for the dictionary to place that picture there. Well, it would be funny, but it wouldn’t be responsible.

Most of the time I see an example of oxymoron, it’s one of those joke ones. On occasion, it’s one of the accidental ones, such as jumbo shrimp or home office. Is it asking too much to use the Milton? Then how about Tennyson’s “His honor rooted in dishonor stood / And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true” (from Lancelot and Elaine)? John Donne’s “O miserable abundance / O beggarly riches”? Edmund Spenser’s “painful pleasure turns to pleasing pain”? Or Shakespeare’s “fearful bravery” (“thinking by this face / To fasten in our thoughts that they have courage”)? John F. Kennedy’s “peaceful revolution of hope”?

Well, and now that I’ve ranted for a ludicrous amount of time, I see that Wikipedia’s entry actually is rather good. So that’s all right. And even Richard Lederer after his usual blather eventually admits that it is a legitimate literary technique, although as usual he prefers mockery to explication. But I’m not just whistling in the wind, here.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, and when I started this blog thing I told myself that I mustn’t let it degenerate into a constant litany of complaints against the various annoyances of life. As a rule, I said, for every hatchet job I write, I need to write a puff piece. Over the months, this has meant that I don’t write very many hatchet jobs (or at least not as many as I start to). On the other hand, I don’t write very many puff pieces, either. So having given in to the weakness to complain about a New York Times piece, I’ll plant a big kiss on the web site of Operation Homecoming. Operation Homecoming is a NEA/DoD program that runs writing workshops for returning soldiers as part of the debriefing. The program was recently expanded to increase the number of workshops and locations; I’ve seen a variety of numbers but it looks like the total cost is less than a million dollars and most of that is picked up by corporate sponsors.

Now, I don’t want to get too romantic about returning soldiers, and if you are interested, you should probably read opposing articles such as Aleksandar Hemon’s Operation Homeland Therapy in Slate as well as admiring articles such as Dennis Ryan’s dcmilitary.com note. I happen to have a soft spot for the World War One “war poets”, and I think that it’s breathtaking to suggest that Americans want to invest even a trifle of money in the possibility of a few gems in uniform.

Digression: If you happened to read a new specfic novel set in some world that had as part of the background the fact that the military, for whatever reason, recruited its officers from the universities’ top-ranked historians, poets and mathematicians, and that a really first-class translator of dead languages was pretty much guaranteed a commission, would you dismiss it as implausible or what? And then for the poetry coming out of the war experience to be a separate and highly valued subgenre? End Digression.

I also happen to like the Library of Congress’s Veteran’s History Project. I understand those people who find this all to be a glorification of the military life, but mostly I find it to have a refreshing sense of respect for the individuals who wear the uniforms, as well as for writing itself. I don’t care if anybody ever reads the anthologies, nor do I expect ever to read them myself, or if I do to like anything in them. I just think it’s a great idea.

Thank you,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger should remember to do puff pieces with much greater frequency; I’m not really as cranky as I seem on-line. And, as it happens, my Perfect Non-Reader is learning to read Between the Lions.

Now, just the title works really well for me. The lions in question are not, however, Patience and Fortitude, but Cleo and Theo, and their cubs Lionel and Leona. They do inhabit the Barnaby B. Busterfield III Public Library, and they host a show about learning to read. Well, cute little announcer bunny is the emcee, but that isn’t important.

Anyway, if you have fond memories of Sesame Street, the show is far more like Sesame Street than Sesame Street is these days. It also has something of the old Electric Company about it, and it also has a touch of the Reading Rainbow. Lots of little segments wrapped around a goofy storyline involving reading a book. In addition, each episode focuses on a particular vowel sound, and words that contain it. Those words and sounds show up in the main segment, and also in the segments with Martha Reader and the Vowelles, the Adventures of Cliff Hanger, Chicken Jane, Gawain’s Word, the incredibly catchy song with all the names, and, of course, the trouser-defying magic of the Great Smartini.

The whole thing is extremely silly, and seems to have a words-can-be-fun attitude, which is my attitude as well, of course. They have a liberal helping of Stuff for Parents (frankly, I hope my Perfect Non-Reader never does come to understand why I laughed when the Baha Men took the dog books out of the library) and general silliness. The adventures of Sam Spud, Par-Boiled Detective always end with a distressed viewer. “Mom! The talking potato with no mouth is back, and his incessant wordplay is making me queasy.” “It’s educational television, dear,” says the mother, absently, from the next room. “I’m sure it’ll help you in school. Somehow.”