the guest bed at a small farm in Parana, Brazil

“[I]n the paiol, a kind of porch intended to protect the maize harvest from rain [we slept]. Surprising as it may seem, a heap of dry corn cobs with the leaves still on them makes a comfortable bed; the oblong shapes slide one against another and the mass adapts itself to the sleeper’s body. The delicate, sweet, grassy scent of dried maize is wonderfully soporific.”

source: Tristes Tropiques, by Claude Levi-Strauss

“Any law that degrades human personality is unjust”

“[T]here are two types of laws: There are just laws and there are unjust laws. … One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that ‘An unjust law is no law at all.’

“… Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

No wonder so many conservatives loathed and feared Martin Luther King, Jr.

source: “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” (1963), The American Reader, edited by Diane Ravitch

“the question flies entirely outside the domain of reason”

“In the United States … we need no longer argue woman’s intellectual, moral and physical qualification for the ballot with the intelligent. The Reason of the best of our citizens has been convinced. The justice of the argument has been admitted … When a great church official exclaims petulantly, that if women are no more modest in their demands men may be obliged to take to drowning female infants again; when a renowned United States Senator declares no human being can find an answer to the argument for woman suffrage, but with all the force of his position and influence he will oppose it; when a popular woman novelist speaks of the advocates of the movement as the ‘shrieking sisterhood’; when a prominent politician says ‘to argue against woman suffrage is to repudiate the Declaration of Independence,’ yet he hopes it may never come, the question flies entirely outside the domain of reason, and retreats within the realm of sex-prejudice, where neither logic nor common sense can dislodge it …”

Another installment of Things Never Change? Yeah, okay, women got the vote – eighteen years after this speech by Carrie Chapman Catt was given in 1902. Eighteen years? Eighteen years after the argument was no longer “with the intelligent” and “Reason [had] been convinced”?

The rhetoric is about the same; ‘same sex marriage’, for example, could be switched out for ‘woman suffrage’ and readers would assume the writing was contemporary. Not that there aren’t plenty even now who wish women didn’t have the vote.

source: The American Reader, edited by Diane Ravitch

“the emblem of sacrilege”

Back in May 1902 George Frisbie Hoar, the Republican Senator from Massachusetts, delivered a speech in the Senate denouncing the U.S. invasion of the Philippines. Some of it sounds awfully contemporary. Hoar addresses himself to “my imperialistic friends”:

“You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established concentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest, bringing their sheaves with them, in the shape of thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out their miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of numerous people the emblem of sacrilege … and of the horror of water torture … Your practical statesmanship has succeeded in converting a people who three years ago were ready to kiss the hem of the garment of the American and to welcome him as a liberator, who thronged after your men when they landed … with benediction and gratitude, into sullen and irreconcilable enemies, possessed of a hatred which centuries cannot eradicate …”

source: The American Reader, edited by Diane Ravitch

“of no earthly account in this world”

I remember crying when my mother tried to coach me in reciting the times tables. You know, 8 times 8 is 64, 6 times 7 is … uh … 42? 42, the answer to the question, Life, the Universe and Everything. That number keeps popping up. It is the right one, isn’t it? I barely know. The times tables just seemed a torture device to me, utterly without meaning. I wasn’t any good at them. Maybe if someone had invented a song, like the Schoolhouse Rock “Three is a Magic Number.” I loved the chanting of the 3-6-9, 12-15-18, etc. But I still couldn’t get down the times table part of the song, “Three times eight is …” That would be 24? See, I gotta think about it. I’ve never memorized it.

Last week I got the latest issue of the International Wizard of Oz Club’s magazine, The Baum Bugle. In it there’s an article comparing two books that appeared around the turn of the twentieth century, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the long-assumed total knock-off, Zauberlinda, the Wise Witch. In both books a little American prairie girl, an only child, goes on an adventure in fairy land. The illustrations and the book design for Zauberlinda are clearly pastiche of The Wizard of Oz, as Annie sometimes looks like a virtual clone of W. W. Denslow’s version of Dorothy.

I had never heard of Zauberlinda when I first joined the Oz club but (to my confusion) it kept showing up at the Oz convention auction and selling for more than I cared to pay for some actual Oz books. I’ve flipped through it but never felt much urge to own it. Or read it, frankly. But I was intrigued by Phyllis Ann Karr’s compare/contrast essay and the notes to the article indicate the availability of Zauberlinda via Google Books. So I bopped on over to Google Books and called her up. And started reading.

As Phyllis Ann Karr puts it: “[P]erhaps the first difference we notice [between the texts of Zauberlinda, the Wise Witch and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz] is that, whereas Baum plunges his heroine into her adventures within the first few pages and finishes off with a three-paragraph homecoming, [Zauberlinda’s author, Eva Katharine] Gibson devotes the first eighty of her two hundred fifty-five pages to Annie’s home life …”

Indeed. I wouldn’t have liked it as a kid. In fact, I came upon a scene that would have given me the shivers. Annie’s aunt writes from the big city. “The grandmother would read these letters to Annie. … Aunt Molly used to write of what Lizzie May, Annie’s six-year-old cousin, was learning at kindergarten … Nearly always after reading one of these letters, Annie’s grandmother would push her spectacles back upon her forehead, smooth down her apron, and, looking very solemn, call the little girl to her. … The grandmother would say, ‘Annie, it is high time you were learning something. Now tell me, child, how much six times four is.’” When Annie didn’t give the right number, “if her father was sitting by, he would laugh at her and grandmother would say, ‘Oh, Annie, can’t you answer such a simple question as that?’ And Annie, in her mind, would repeat over nearly all the numbers in that old multiplication table, but somehow always seem to hit upon just the wrong answer … Then grandmother would sigh, shake her head sadly and say, ‘It’s no use, John, that child’ll never know anything until she is sent to school …’ Annie would step softly out of the room, feeling very crushed and foolish, and just of no earthly account in this world.”

formula

Dread = Uncontrollability + Unfamiliarity + Imaginability + Suffering + Scale of Destruction + Unfairness

source: The Unthinkable: who survives when disaster strikes and why by Amanda Ripley

“the height of the shelves”

Alberto Manguel remembers his “father’s largely unused library in Buenos Aires.” The boy Alberto was “always alone in the library, since [his] father used it only on the rare occasions when he had to meet someone at home rather than at his office.” The father “had instructed his secretary to furnish the library, and she had bought books by the yard and sent them to be bound to the height of the shelves, so that the titles at the page-tops were in many cases trimmed, and sometimes even the first lines were missing.”

In his History of Reading Manguel later quotes Seneca on this sort of thing. Seneca scorned the man “’who gets his pleasure from the bindings and labels’ and in whose illiterate household ‘you can see the complete works of orators and historians on shelves up to the ceiling, because, like bathrooms, a library has become an essential ornament of a rich house.’”

I confess I try to read the titles of the books on the shelves in a stage play. I look over the books propped in bookcases in uninhabited houses (the house being up for sale, handsome furnishing having briefly been imported to suggest a lifestyle).

source: A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel

Sexton and Madonna, part II

Last spring I was reading a biography of Madonna and blogged about Madonna's affinity for Anne Sexton.

Today I read that Madonna cribbed from Sexton when composing a love poem for her bodyguard.

A fax dated December 24, 1993 reads: "I was the girl of the love letter/the girl full of talk of dreams and destination... the one with her eyes half under the covers/with her large gun-metal blue eyes/with the thick vein in the crook of her neck."

In comparison, Sexton wrote: "I was the girl of the chain letter/the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes... the one with her eyes half under her coat/with her large gun-metal blue eyes/with the thin vein at the bend of her neck."

hat tip to CDY

Plutarch's God

“To [Plutarch] a superstition was not a mistaken belief, a kind of religious stupidity; it was an unmitigated evil, far worse than absolute disbelief. Atheism, he says, denies God, but superstition wrongs Him. It makes God evil or silly. It uses the very worst of all weapons, terror. It fills the world after death with ‘flaming fires and awful shapes and inexorable judges and horrible torments’; in this world it teaches people to practice absurd penances and self-torturing. Better far not to see God at all than see Him like that. ‘I had rather have it said that there was not and never had been such a fellow as Plutarch, than that he was fickle and vindictive and would pay you out for not calling upon him.’”

source: The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

Rambo v. Hulk

Reading a book about a family in the Bronx I came across this curious paragraph, probably evidence of a change of mind by the writer (or an editor?) about whether to use the undercover officer’s alias:

Rambo, a Bronx homicide detective, changed out of his sweat suit and into a Con Ed employee uniform. Hulk’s choice of a disguise was appropriate: gas leaks, like fires, were common in the neighborhood. That morning, a tip had come in … Hulk and the other undercovers drove to Anthony Avenue. …

Rambo, nicknamed for his pumped-up body, was known for solving cases.

So which is it? Hulk? Or Rambo? It’s pretty clear from context that we are only talking about one person. I suspect the real nickname was “Hulk” as the Hulk is known mainly for being big & beefy, whereas Rambo is known mostly for being a loner and revenge-o-phile. But who knows. Maybe we have the author to thank for both.

source: Random Family: love, drugs, trouble, and coming of age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

The People’s Almanac

Over the years I’ve clung to certain ambitions. One of them was to read The People’s Almanac from cover to cover (and, presumably, The People’s Almanac #2 and The People’s Almanac #3, which have also been part of my library).

I don’t know how my family acquired The People’s Almanac, which was published in 1975; I was ten at the time. Was it a gift?

I knew kids who’d claimed to have read the dictionary and the encyclopedia (Britannica or World Book?); neither project appealed to me. OK. Yes. I did try reading a dictionary a few times. Boring! As suspected.

Something about that title fascinated me: The People’s Almanac. I didn’t know what an almanac was. The People’s Almanac was not like The Farmer’s Almanac, which included “a calendar for the year as well as astronomical information” (that’s from the Microsoft Word dictionary definition of “almanac”). Rather, The People’s Almanac was a seemingly random collection of information – a year by year history of the U.S. (1797: “In retirement, General Washington dined well. One of his favorite menus: cream of peanut soup, Smithfield ham with oyster sauce, string beans with mushrooms, Southern spoon bread, Virginia whiskey cake.”), thumbnail descriptions of all the nations (“Nauru is composed largely of phosphate-rich guano or, as it is better known, bird droppings. This unusual resource has provided Nauruans with one of the highest per capita incomes in the world …”), supposed buried treasure troves, words commonly misspelled, offbeat artists, stories of great boxing matches, and so on.

The idea of imbibing all these facts was far more fascinating the actual process – there was just so much information, I discovered, about which I did not care!

Still, wasn’t there something special about the possessive? The “People’s” … I recognize it now as particularly 70s. At the time it had an aura of rebellion, offering a fresh new take without the tired old rigidity and irrelevance of the established authorities, whoever & whatever they were. Oughtn’t something belonging to “people” also be more fun? Such seemed logical to me at the time.

When I was clearing out my mother’s house I brought The People’s Almanac and its sequels home to Berkeley (aka “The People’s Republic of Berkeley”). They sat on the floor of the library upstairs – the shelves having already been taken by other books. Now that renovations are going on the books have all been boxed up and sit once again in inaccessible stacks. I didn’t box The People’s Almanac.

Because I decided I wasn’t going to keep it anymore. That old ambition, that I was going to sit down and read the thing through? I’m letting it go.

word of the day: pyrrhuloxias

“[R]ed birds such as cardinals and pyrrhuloxias … apparently need sufficient carotene from reddish fruits to maintain their plumage colors, so they feed on red berries. Such berry specialists will pick up chile [chili?] fruits now and then, which are about the same size, hue, shape, and brightness [as] the birds’ mainstay berries. … [W]ild chiles fequently become established under wolfberries and hackberries, for they are probably dispersed beneath the canopies of these shrubs when the birds pick their berries. Once they have germinated there, they find a buffered microclimate more suitable for growth than open, barren ground.”

source: Enduring Seeds: Native American agriculture and wild plan conservation by Gary Paul Nabhan

photo from Birds as Art

Mossberg stands up to Swisher’s mother

From a New Yorker profile of Wall Street Journal consumer technology columnist Walter Mossberg:

“Mossberg is not shy about expressing his opinions. He helped recruit Kara Swisher from the Washington Post [to the WSJ] in late 1996 … When she and Megan Smith, a Google executive, decided to marry, Swisher told [Ken Auletta], her mother ‘was troubled by the idea of a gay wedding.’ She and Smith have two children, and she recalls that when she came home with the first baby Mossberg was there, and so was her mother, who ‘really likes Walt a lot.’ Swisher went on, ‘We were having dinner and she was being difficult – she was arguing with me. I was getting really uncomfortable. Walt took her down like I’ve never seen anybody take anybody down: “How dare you talk to her like this? This is an important issue and you have to be supportive no matter what as a parent.”’”

Gay marriage as a political issue is really about straights. It seems to me straights ought to be talking to straights about it. Would Mossberg be up for a 30-second ad?

source: The New Yorker, May 14, 2007

“dared commit”

“Although the [18th Century Romantic] era’s effusive declarations of passionate friendship were long discounted as overheated formulas for merely platonic affection, the reverse is more likely: in a time of harsh public scrutiny, more went on physically than all but a few writers dared commit to paper.”

One might note that even though the kiddies danced to the hits of the Village People and the Navy considered using one of their songs in a recruiting campaign and straights still gesture to “YMCA” at ball games, the band members exemplify gay sexual fetishes. It may have been the case that lots of non-gay folks innocently adopted the language of passionate friendship but that hardly erases the passion or means it was always chaste.

source: Pictures and Passions: a history of homosexuality in the visual arts by James M. Saslow

Christianity as “barbarous interruption”

“Renaissance thinkers recast the Christian era as the barbarous interruption of a Golden Age whose lost wisdom and erotic innocence they yearned to restore in a third, modern age.”

Them Christians, still a bunch of butt-in-skis.

source: Pictures and Passions: a history of homosexuality in the visual arts by James M. Saslow

Life and death laundry

In a New Yorker profile of Milton Bradley and his Game of Life Jill Lepore says Life is in “a class of board games [called] ‘spiral race games.’”

“The oldest spiral race game,” she says in a parenthetical, “may be the Hyena Game, played by Arabs in Sudan, in a groove traced in the sand with a stick and involving a race between pebbles representing the players’ mothers, who leave their village and head to a well at the spiral’s center, where they must wash their clothes and return home before a hyena catches them.”

source: New Yorker, May 21, 2007

what Dads like

Steve Martin had a difficult father. Rare was the praise, frequent were the cold rages and seeming contempt. After more than ten years plugging away at his comedy, Martin was finally seeing success that did more than get him out of debt. His father acted unimpressed, even talking his son down around friends and colleagues. “I suppressed everything I felt about his comments because I couldn’t let him have power of my work,” Martin says.

Martin became a household name, was selling out arenas. Father “remained uncomplimentary … [W]hat I did about it still makes sense to me: I never discussed my work with him again.”

My own parents divorced when I was a toddler; I don’t remember them living together. My dad lived thousands of miles away – me, my brother & my mother in Northern California, Dad in Alaska with his new family. But Mom kept us in contact with letters and phone calls and, when we were kids, Dad usually managed two visits a year. So I had a dad – distant but existent, someone I felt a connection to, better, I suppose, than some I hear about who lived in house. Mom would have my brother & me send our creative work to Dad and he acknowledged it and tried not to say belittling things about it even when it wasn’t to his taste – mostly, it seems, it wasn’t.

When my poetry got more & more “avant-garde,” Dad responded by enthusing about cowboy poetry. “That’s what I really like,” I remember him saying.

I have nothing against cowboy poetry. It’s not something I do. It’s not something that interests me, other than in a vague academic sort of way. Oh, Dad likes that, huh? What he doesn’t like is what I do. So I stopped sending him examples. I stopped talking about it.

source: Born Standing Up: a comic’s life by Steve Martin

“I’m not sure what I meant”

Back in 1967 change in the air. Though he claims in his memoir that his studies, philosophy & ee cummings, both fascinated, excited, and baffled him, Steve Martin tried to alchemize from them a fresh new comedy. In a letter to his girlfriend he wrote, “I have decided my act is going to go avant-garde. It is the only way to do what I want.”

Commenting on that 40 year old assertion, Martin notes, “I’m not sure what I meant, but I wanted to use the lingo, and it was seductive to make these pronouncements.”

I suspect we pretend we know what we’re talking about at least as often as we really do. Sometimes that’s a problem. But mostly?

“I have learned,” Martin continues, “there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.”

source: Born Standing Up: a comic’s life by Steve Martin

monkey butts

“By the way, paying for porn is no longer unique to humans. Researchers at Duke University offered male rhesus monkeys the chance to see pictures of female monkey bottoms, but only if they paid for it by giving up their fruit juice. The monkeys paid up.”

source: How Sex Works: why we look, smell, taste, feel, and act the way we do (2009) Dr. Sharon Moalem

sex stinks

So I’m reading How Sex Works and I come across discussion of a study on how people respond to body odor, specifically how “four categories [of persons] – heterosexual men, heterosexual women, homosexual men, and homosexual women - ... indicate their preference among odors collected from ‘odor donors’ in the same four categories.”

Let’s skip over the methodology and get right to the rather queer results:

“Homosexual males, heterosexual females, and lesbians preferred odors from heterosexual males over odors from gay males,” the study stated. “Gay males preferred odors from other gay males … Heterosexual males, heterosexual females, and lesbians over the age of 15 (but not those 18-25) preferred odors from lesbians over odors from gay males … Finally, gay males preferred odors from heterosexual females over those from heterosexual males.”

Last I remember reading about odor studies like this the results were of the men-prefer-the-smell-of-women-women-prefer-the-smell-of-men variety, with zero consideration of sexual orientation. I’m glad some scientists are being more open to subtlety and variety. The study’s results, though, what can one say of them? Hm. This deserves more study?

source: How Sex Works: why we look, smell, taste, feel, and act the way we do (2009) Dr. Sharon Moalem