A little less of a fire hazard

Another pile of articles torn from 12-year-old newspapers found in a folder under my bed- archived here and then tossed on the fireplace:

An article on the industry created around viatical settlements for AIDS patients- suggesting that the business would collapse if the lives of AIDS patients could be prolonged.

An obit of Herbert Huncke: "It was through Mr. Burroughs that Mr. Huncke soon met Mr. Ginsberg, then a Columbia undergraduate, and Mr. Kerouac, a recent Columbia dropout who became so enchanted with Mr. Huncke's repeated use of the carny term ''beat,'' meaning tired and beaten down, that he later used it as his famous label for the Beat Generation. (Mr. Kerouac later clouded things by suggesting it was derived from ''beatific.'')

How Perrier water nearly killed everything on Earth:
AROUND 250 million years ago, something so devastating occurred that about 90 percent of Earth's animal species were wiped out. While the cause of this greatest of all mass extinctions remains uncertain, a new study by biologists and geochemists suggests that a huge upwelling of carbonated water from the depths of the oceans may have played a lethal role.
That mass extinction, at the end of the Permian period, reshuffled Earth's genetic deck, making way for the rise of dinosaurs in the subsequent Mesozoic era and widening the niches available for the mammal-like reptiles destined to become ancestors of the human race.

The bizarre practice of Feng-Shui:
The ancient Chinese craft of feng shui (pronounced fung shway) is the practice of arranging surroundings to promote prosperity and harmony. Here are basic guidelines from Tin Sun, a feng shui master, for assessing the feng shui of an urban apartment.
EXTERIOR:
A building should not have its front door facing oncoming traffic. Cars and lights create negative forces that disturb the peace. There should not be any sharp objects or corners facing a doorwya of a building or apartment. The corners are like arrowheads, shooting negative e4nergy toward the building and its tenants. One should avoid facing glass buildings. The buildings would absorb the negative energies of their surroundings and reflect them back. If a building is on a hill, the back of the building should not be on the lower part of the slope. It would be like a chair without back support - the energy would roll down the hill. It is not advisable to have bridges in close proximity. They create tension and negative forces.
INTERIOR:
An apartment should not be next to or facing an elevator, especially if one hears the mechanics of it. The humming of the elevator machinery disrupts the flow of qi, or life force. When one enters an apartment, the stove should not be visible. It can turn happiness into sorrow because of its concentration of fire, which disturbs the peace of the space. This is a common cause of family problems. An apartment should not be next to or facing a garbage disposal chute, which draws away energy from the apartment. Heavy traffic around the chute also disrupts peace.


The text of Justice Scalia's anti-gay dissenting opinion when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional Colorado's attempt to nullify civil rights protections for gays (Thomas and Rehnquist joined Scalia)


Obit for Arkansas Democratic Senator J. William Fulbright- full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/10/obituaries/j-william-fulbright-senate-giant-is-dead-at-89.html

They asked John Barrymore...

"Did Hamlet sleep with his mother?"
"Only in the Chicago company," he replied

Nepenthe

From South Wind by Norman Douglas
Worldly-wise, indolent, good-natured and, like most
Southerners, a thorough-going pagan, Don Francesco
was deservedly popular as ecclesiastic. Women adored
him ; he adored women. He passed for an unrivalled
preacher ; his golden eloquence made converts every-
where, greatly to the annoyance of the parroco, the
parish priest, who was doubtless sounder on the Trinity
but a shocking bad orator and altogether deficient in
humanity, and who nearly had a fit, they said, when the
other was created Monsignor. Don Francesco was a
fisher of men, and of women. He fished ad maiorem Dei
gloriam, and for the fun of the thing. It was his way of
taking exercise, he once confessed to his friend Keith ;
he was too fat to run about like other people — he could
only talk. He fished among natives, and among foreigners.

Foreigners were hard to catch, on Nepenthe. They
came and went in such breathless succession. Of the
permanent residents only the Duchess, always of High
Church leanings, had of late yielded to his blandish-
ments. She was fairly hooked. Madame Steynlin, a
lady of Dutch extraction whose hats were proverbial,
was uncompromisingly Lutheran. The men were past
redemption, all save the Commissioner who, however,
was under bad influences and an incurable wobbler, any-
how. Eames, the scholar, cared for nothing but his
books. Keith, a rich eccentric who owned one of the
finest villas and gardens on the place, only came to the
island for a few weeks every year. He knew too much,
and had travelled too far, to be anything but a hopeless
unbeliever ; besides, he was a particular friend of his,
with whom he agreed, in his heart of hearts, on every
subject. The frequenters of the Club were mostly
drunkards, derelicts, crooks, or faddists — not worth
catching.

and

"that little place all by itself fascinated her. Bitterly she regrets her choice. She has discovered the drawbacks of a promontory. My Dear Duchess, never live on a promontory! It has fearful inconveniences; you are overlooked by everybody. All the island knows what you do and who visits you and when and why..."

and


Concerning the life and martyrdom of Saint Dodekanus:
He had entered the land of the Crotalophoboi, cannibals and
necromancers who dwelt in a region so hot, and with light so dazzling,
that their eyes grew on the soles of their feet. Here he laboured for
eighty years, redeeming them to Christianity from their magical and
bloodthirsty practices. In recompense whereof they captured him at the
patriarchal age of 132, or thereabouts, and bound him with ropes
between two flat boards of palmwood. Thus they kept the prisoner,
feeding him abundantly, until that old equinoctial feast drew near. On
the evening of that day they sawed the whole, superstitiously, into
twelve separate pieces, one for each month of the year; and devoured of the saint what was to their liking.

Lytton Strachey

I'm loving his "Elizabeth and Essex":
No human creature can ever hope to be truly just; but there are degrees in mortal fallibility, and for countless ages the justice of mankind was the sport of fear, folly, and superstition. In the England of Elizabeth there was a particular influence at work which, in certain crucial cases, turned the administration of justice into a mockery. It was virtually impossible for anyone accused of High Treason—the gravest offence known to the law—to be acquitted. The reason for this was plain; but it was a reason not of justice but expediency. Upon the life of Elizabeth hung the whole structure of the State. . . . Her own personal fearlessness added to the peril. She refused, she said, to mistrust the love of her subjects; she was singularly free of access; and she appeared in public with a totally inadequate guard. In such a situation, only one course of action seemed to be possible: every other consideration must be subordinated to the supreme necessity of preserving the Queen's life. . . . It was futile to talk of justice; for justice involves, by its very nature, uncertainty; and the Government could take no risks. The old saw was reversed; it was better that ten innocent men should suffer than that one guilty man should escape. To arouse suspicion became in itself a crime.
It was in the collection of evidence that the mingled atrocity and absurdity of the system became most obvious. Not only was the fabric of a case often built up on the allegations of the hired creatures of the Government, but the existence of the rack gave a preposterous twist to the words of every witness. Torture was constantly used; but whether, in any particular instance, it was used or not, the consequences were identical. The threat of it, the hint of it, the mere knowledge in the mind of a witness that it might at any moment be applied to him—those were differences merely of degree; always, the fatal compulsion was there, inextricably confusing truth and falsehood. What shred of credibility could adhere to testimony obtained in such circumstances—from a man, in prison, alone, suddenly confronted by a group of hostile and skilful examiners, plied with leading questions, and terrified by the imminent possibility of extreme physical pain? Who could disentangle among his statements the parts of veracity and fear, the desire to placate his questioners, the instinct to incriminate others, the impulse to avoid, by some random affirmation, the dislocation of an arm or a leg? Only one thing was plain about such evidence: it would always be possible to give to it whatever interpretation the prosecutors might desire. The Government could prove anything.

Reprieved

I rid myself of another large carton of books. Mysteries by Ruth Rendell and Edmund Crispin. The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott. I received, much to my astonishment, sixteen dollars, with which I purchased "The Judgment of Paris" and "Alfred Kazin's America". I then began emptying another carton onto the living room floor to sort. After close consideration I have decided to keep a dozen books which I have had for many years but have never quite gotten around to reading:
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Joao Guimares Rosa- apparently Brazil's answer to "Ulysses"
Natural History by Joan Perucho- a sort of literary vampire tale
Dog Years By Gunter Grass- even understanding that I have still never finished anything by Grass
Essays by Leon Edel
A book on the English Civil Wars, "War Without an Enemy"

and several others I am anxious to read: J.G. Farrell's Singapore Grip, Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons.

A few have a probational period until I have the energy to open them: Nancy Lemann, Carson McCullers, Glenway Westcott.

And some have exhausted my patience and appear overweening and unforthcoming:
Daniel Martin by John Fowles, Emily Holmes Coleman's The Shutter of Snow, and B. Traven's The Night Visitor.

And in a postscript.... I found a hardcover set of "The Raj Quartet" and bought it... and have found the Farrell to be an unprofitable read.

From "The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook"

"When we first began reading Dashiell Hammett, Gertrude Stein said that it was his modern note to have disposed of the victims before the story commenced. And so it is in the kitchen."

Some marvelous Dorothy Parker

From a 1953 speech of Parker's discovered in a remarkable hardcover periodical called "7 Arts" which also includes contributions from Henry Miller and Washington Irving:
"I don't know what more to say about Hollywood. I just say it is a Stagnation. It is a horror. Brilliant flowers smell like old dollar bills. Those enormous vegetables taste as if they had been grown in old trunks."

elsewhere:
Gilbert Highet on kitsch:
"If you have ever spent an hour wandering through an antique shop, you must have noticed how your taste grows numb , and then- if you stay- becomes perverted. You begin to see unsuspected charm in those hideous pictures of plump girls fondling pigeons, you develop a psychopathic desire for spinning wheels and cobblers' benches.
There is a name for such stuff in the trade: kitsch. It means vulgar showoff, and is applied to anything that took a lot of trouble to make and is quite hideous.

elsewhere, Miller:
"The late John Dudley once chalked up over my door,"When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my revolver."

I now devote myself to the works of Anthony Powell

Powell's effortless mastery has won me over. From the first volume of the unfortunately titled "Dance to the Music of Time", "A Question of Upbringing":

"To Short, Sillery was a mysterious, politically-minded cardinal of the academical world, 'never taking his tea without an intrigue'(that was the phrase Short quoted) forever plotting behind the arras. Others, of course thought differently, some saying that the Sillery legend was based on a sort of kaleidoscope of muddled information collected in Sillery's almost crazed brain, that his boasted powers had no basis whatever in reality; others that Sillery certainly knew a great number of people had passed around a lot of gossip, which in itself gave him some claim to consideration as a comparitively influential person, though only a subordinate one. Sillery had his enemies, naturally, always anxious to denigrate his life's work, and assert that he wass nothing more than a figure of fun; and there was probably something to be said at least for the contention that Sillery himself somewhat exaggerated the effectiveness of his own activities."

The acerbic pianist

I took a bushel of admittedly undesirable coffee-table books of the American West purchased at auction to Half Price Books. They offered one dollar. I politely demurred and dragged the lot uphill to the shabby, smelly Twice Told Tales where I was offered fourteen dollars credit. It took an impossibly long time to find anything remotely readable in the shop. They have either the worst instincts or the worst luck possible. Eventually I unearthed a copy of Claude-Edmonde Magny's "The Age of The American Novel: The Film Aesthetic of Fiction Between the Two Wars" and a biography of Oscar Levant, the dog-faced cohort, from which the following anecdotes are culled:
It was William Goetz, an executive at 20th Century-Fox who finally fired Levant. Goetz, who had married one of Louis B. Mayer's daughters and so owed his job to his father-in-law had harbored a grudge against Levant ever since Levant had one-upped him in a battle of insults at a Hollywood party. Goetz had snidely asked Levant "Why don't you play us a medley of your hit?" referring to Levant's one hit song.
"Why don't you play us a medley of your father-in-law?" Levant responded.
and
The perennial bachelor Moss Hart entered a room with Edith Atwater on his arm. "Ah, here comes Moss Hart and the future Miss Atwater," Levant said.
and
After playing his moving, elegiac composition dedicated to his late friend George Gershwin, Levant's mother comments, "You call THAT a dirge?"

What progress I'm making!

The next batch:

An obituary of the painter Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) the maestro of the hiked skirt, the akimbo legs and the bared pudendum. Illustrations accompanying are by the decedent.

An article on 200 Afghani refugees wandering the mountainous wilderness: During the night the people on the outer edges of the sleeping pile rotated inward, and the people in the middle were spun outward. In this way no one froze to death.

An incisive description by Kevin Kelly of the way recording technology influenced the shape of music:
There is no music made today that has not been shaped by the fact of recording and duplication. In fact, the ability to copy music has been deeply disruptive ever since the invention of the gramophone. When John D. Smoot, an engineer for the European company Odeon, carted primitive recording equipment to the Indonesian archipelago in 1904 to record the gamelan orchestras, local musicians were perplexed. Why copy a performance? The popular local tunes that circulated in their villages had a half-life of a few weeks. Why would anyone want to listen to a stale rendition of an obsolete piece when it was so easy to get fresh music?
As phonographs spread throughout the world, they had a surprising effect: folk tunes, which had always been malleable, changing with each performer and in each performance, were transformed by the advent of recording into fixed songs that could be endlessly and exactly repeated. Music became shorter, more melodic and more precise.
Early equipment could make recordings that contained no more than four and a half minutes, so musicians truncated old works to fit and created new music abbreviated to adapt to the phonograph. Because the first sound recordings were of unamplified music, recording emphasized the loud sounds of singers and de-emphasized quiet instrumentals. The musicologist Timothy Day notes that once pianists began recording they tried, for the first time, to ''distinguish carefully between every quaver and semiquaver -- eighth note and sixteenth note -- throughout the piece.'' Musicians played the way technology listened. When the legendary recordist Frederick Gaisberg arrived in Calcutta in 1902, only two decades after the phonograph was invented, he found that Indian musicians were already learning to imitate recorded music and lamented that there was ''no traditional music left to record.''
As the technologies of reproduction bloomed in the last century, consumerism boomed. What consumers consumed -- whether in the form of a book, a CD or a can of Coke -- were exact copies. The ability to make copies in mind-boggling quantities, ceaselessly and perfectly, was the chief ingredient of mass culture. Music rapidly adapted to the culture of the copy. Reproductions were made exact, while copies were multiplied vigorously. Music lived in its constant reproduction

A marvelous and important article on the authenticity of 20th century "antiques":

The market for modernist furniture, once young, fun and inexpensive, is superheating. But it's also getting uncomfortably hot. As Richard Wright, a co-owner of Wright, a Chicago auction house that specializes in modernism, put it, now that big money is involved, ''people have the incentive to cheat.''
As is advisable with fine 18th-century furniture, an unspoken rule has become advisable with modern design: let the buyer beware.
Authenticity, the issue that defines mature antiques markets, is being called into question as objects by the most fashionable names in the business, like Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Chareau and Jean Prouvé, become the newest blue chips of decorative arts. As pieces are rebuilt, repainted, reproduced and newly assembled, or as hybrids of new and old come to market, assumptions about what is original or real are being redefined as rapidly as the prices.
Does refurbishment respect or disguise a designer's intentions? Shortly before the Christie's sale, Ms. Grajales explained that for each of her clients, authenticity was very personal. For some, only a piece without restoration, even if its condition was poor, would carry rarity and value, as is true for traditional antiques. For others, a reconditioned piece, with obvious work, recalled and revalidated the strength of the design.
That Prouvé cabinet, bright red and factory-fresh-looking, in its 50's and still sexy? Read the condition report. It's had more work than Catherine Deneuve. But hey, the loft needs a star for the dining room wall. Would Prouvé be proud?
James Zemaitis, the head of 20th-century design at Sotheby's, which sold the cabinet described above last Wednesday for $78,000 (above its estimate of $30,000 to $50,000), said he thought that modern furniture buyers were savvy and aware of distinctions in condition, which differ by designer.
''If you're seduced by the aura of Prouvé or Perriand, you have to accept the prevailing market realities of condition,'' Mr. Zemaitis said. ''The entire Prouvé market is built on things being refinished and rebuilt. I don't think collectors are being duped. They're completely understanding of this.''



The entire article is here:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D05E2DB163BF935A25755C0A9639C8B63

Sargent's tots

I love John Singer Sargent

Kings, Devils, Chimps, and Laureates

Pictured left: Vice-President of the United States William Rufus DeVane King




More articles from the NYT:

*******The Vatican issues a revised rite of Exorcism: It cautions exorcists "must not consider people to be vexed by demons" when they are merely annoying. A Vatican bureaucrat said that demonic possession can be recognized by several criteria including: speaking an unknown language, sudden enormous strength and the disclosure of unknown occurrences. The Devil, he stressed, is a real and active entity and his existence is a cornerstone of Catholicism.
*******On 3-19-99 as Germany prepares to mark the 250th annniversary of the birth of Goethe, an article on the secret exhumation in 1970 of his remains by East German scientists. What flesh still clung to him was macerated from his bones which were cleaned and strengthened before his laurel wreath was polished and reattached to his cranium and his body re-interred in the crypt in Weimar.
******An article on the discovery of the AIDS virus in African chimpanzees.
******An article on the discovery that Rigoberto Menchu, the Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner lied about much of her biography. She maintains, for instance, that her brother Felipe died from starvation. He denies this.
******A peculiar local matter about an African-American King County (Seattle) Council member, Larry Gossett, proposing that the county include an image of Dr. Martin Luther King with every designation. Obviously, no one has the temerity to object, but there is also little enthusiasm.
King County was named in 1852 for William Rufus DeVane King, an Alabama Senator who was the Vice-President Elect at the time. The county to the south of King was named after Pierce, the President-Elect. King was ill with tuberculosis and died six months after being sworn into office. (His swearing-in was held in Cuba.) He was never replaced by President Franklin Pierce. Aside from his sickliness he was widely disparaged for some perceived unmanliness and his close friendship with bachelor Senator James Buchanan was ridiculed. King was also unmarried.
As Steve Tally writes in "Bland Ambition" a history of the Vice-Presidency: "King did nothing to dispel the stereotype of the effeminate homosexual. He was a flowing dandy who favored silk scarves, brilliant stickpins, and glittery accoutrements. he continued to wear powdered wigs years after they passed from fashion. King's political peers did not view his esoteric air with quiet tolerance. Andrew Jackson, who had a manly reputation as the winner of numerous duels. referred to King as Miss Nancy. Aaron Brown, a senator from Tennessee gave King the nickname Miss Fancy."
Of course, no one could use King's own qualities to defend leaving the County name alone in 1985 when the Council, by a single vote passed some sort of resolution instructing residents that the county name, crafted in 1852, should be considered to signify a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.. Problematically, Vice-President King was a slave-holder as was George Washington.
Though the black population hovered around 5% in King County, no one seemed to begrudge honoring this truly significant role model with the name re-rooting, especially as the frightening and depressing traffic corridor which was renamed Martin Luther King Boulevard has come to look more like a slander than a tribute. As existing names are each a lesson in history whether they continue to have immediate recognition or not, I have a innate distrust of this kind of rebranding. Frankly it showed enormous ingenuity to find another foothold on the late civil rights leader.

By the way, when Buchanan was made President, succeeding Pierce, he selected the handsome John Cabell Breckinridge as his Veep. Breckinridge was an epic mess, but the street and mall in Little Rock are kind of nice.

New portrait

The fierce bidding at the auction did not allow many things to percolate down to my budget. This lovely portrait of a gentleman in a stiff collar was the only thing I was able to get at auction- fortunately it was my favorite piece and I would have stayed in the bidding beyond a reasonable price. Not signed, as far as I can see in the murk, but written on the stretcher bar is "Alan Beeton" who was a British artist, active in the 1920's, died in the war years, '42 or thereabouts. He has work in the Tate. Our art specialist believed this to be a portrait OF Beeton, possibly by Ambrose Patterson, possibly just once belonging to him. I thought I might rearrange my crowded mantle to put him there.
Here, also along with my mantle, are photos of the carousel bull, the Russian sailor boy and the delirium tremens.

Pseudo-randomness

In the second batch of sere, yellowed piles of flammable information ripped from the New York Times, I was surprised to find an article on the creation of deliberately random numbers. Random numbers naturally do not behave as if they believed they were random numbers. They are just as imprecatory as bank balances. I'd rather not know how one arrives at numbers, nor watch an autopsy. Numbers have far too much power and if you ask me, they can go screw themselves.

******"A sociologist or a statistician surveying a random sample of the public, a biologist analyzing the mercurial spread of a disease or the growth of a population, a psychologist studying whether an avowed clairvoyant can guess the identities of hidden cards with a success rate better than chance -- all need random numbers to calculate the uncertain outcomes of processes that can only be described using probability. ''The world consists of the tension between order and chaos,'' said Gregory Chaitin, a mathematician at the I.B.M. Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. ''When simulating physical phenomena, order is supplied by the laws of physics and chaos is supplied by random numbers.''
Before high-speed digital computers were invented, mathematicians compiled tables of random numbers by blindly flipping through phone books, casting dice, spinning spinners or drawing cards from a hat. As automation came of age, the RAND Corporation used a kind of electronic roulette wheel to generate a classic work, published in 1955, called ''A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates.'' The seemingly oxymoronic term ''normal deviates'' (random numbers whose occurrence can be plotted on a bell-shaped curve) inspired the New York Public Library to shelve the book in the psychology section.
But as science's demand for random numbers continued to grow, even the longest tables were quickly exhausted. A way was needed to produce torrents of random numbers on the fly, and nothing could spit out digits faster than a digital computer.
Therein lay the paradox: how to use order to generate disorder. The best that could be hoped for, it seemed, was pseudorandomness -- numbers that, though produced by a completely deterministic and repeatable process, appear to be patternless.

and some other apparently random interests:

*****An article on an Italian psychologist studying what she calls the "Stendhal syndrome" an over-reaction to art- occasionally even fainting as Stendhal did in Florence in 1817

*****on vagrants:
"The civil war gave vagrancy its first big boost- its immediate effect was to accustom a generation of men to riding in trains, camping out and foraging for food. The word 'tramp' originally described a military foraging expedition, a 'bum' was a soldier who foraged too enthusiastically."

*****Easily disposable articles on Webb Hubbell, the hunched, bloated, droopy-lipped law partner of Hillary Clinton who reached a plea agreement with Kenneth Starr. Also the transcript of Bill Clinton's affadavit.

*****An obituary on Richard Moon, the inventor of the first three digits of the zip code or Zoning Improvement Code (est. 1963)

The Pile: The first 1/16th of an inch

I heard a sinister buzzing the other night. I have been plagued most of the summer by the solitary mosquito- (why do they not collaborate?) passing my ear at night and waking me to saw the air. This buzzing was different. It had sparks. I looked down at the slivers of light being thrown from an extension cord. The buzzing was the incendiary crackling of an electrical short. The wiring in this house is troubling at best. The fuses are the antique screw-in type and the outlets are rare, ungrounded and easily overloaded.
I have several cartons of articles torn from the New York Times (mostly)- saved for many years, lugged from place to place and now stored near faulty wiring in a hundred year-old house. I think I should examine what I have saved, and why, summarize the pile and get it out of here.

The first article showed what period I had randomly reached back to. It was from:
*Jan 31, 1997 and concerned the further posthumous adventures of Gandhi. Additional ashes from his funeral pyre were discovered in a provincial bank vault. They were ceremonially dispersed in the Ganges by his chubby, bearded grandson.
*The largest Marian library in the world is in Dayton, Ohio. September 8 is her birthday. She is again appearing to adolescents in Medjugorje. Since the second Vatican council she has been pictured mingling with other biblical figures or at least in the vicinity of other people rather than aloof and alone.
*From 12-7-96, an article on an exhibition which celebrates the 18th century English "grand tour" mostly undertaken in and around Rome as Greece was then occupied by the uncongenial Ottoman empire. (The painting which best captured the scene is "Tribuna of the Uffizi" by Zoffany ...above) The grand tour disappeared when the Napoleonic wars began in 1796. When the wars were over the package tour replaced the grand tour. A man named Thomas Cook booked the rooms, set the itinerary and so it remains to this day.
*An article on the dangers of Fen-Phen- I suppose I had worries that my clients might suffer some adverse consequences. I never recommended it, luckily.
*A fragment which states that the monastery of St. Catherine, in Syria I believe, attracts pilgrims to view a sprig from the burning bush of the Old Testament.
*Another fragment regarding Scientology which teaches that humans are clusters of spirits trapped in ice and banished to earth 75 million years ago by Xenu, ruler of the 26-planet galactic federation.
*Part of an article on the increasing storage problems with leftover frozen embryos.
*A description by a writer of her first encounter with peanut butter which evoked feelings of suffocation and oddly, persecution.
*An article on PETA's protests against an artist named David Arnold at Columbia University who created frog-muscle sculptures that moved when electrically stimulated.
*Anthony Bourdain and the search for the perfect french fry. The debate over using the Russet Burbank "it does have a greater purpose when fried in oil. Its interior expands like a souffle and its exterior becomes crispy before absorbing too much oil. And coloring the outside which means caramelizing the potato's sugars gives it just the right bitterness- french fries need a touch of bitterness and loamy flavor smoothed out with fat."
*Renaming Fillmore St. in SF. A black leader states: "For African-Americans the name Millard Fillmore has extremely negative connotations."
*"Passover Cleanup Can Exhaust Orthodox Jewish Women" "Jewish law requires that a house be purged of all traces of hametz or leavening before Passover begins. Over the centuries the search for wayward crumbs has evolved into a frenzied assault.. 'If there is a crumb in the kitchen hiding in the corner, you should do everything to remove it', a Chief Rabbi instructed. 'If need be you should take a hammer and chisel and destroy the wall until the crumb comes out'".
*And finally a September 8, 2005 article from the NYTimes by the polymath Edward Rothstein whose effortless style is beautifully applied to so many very interesting things with equal curiosity, ardor and fun. A long excerpt:
"In the history of humankind, there has rarely been a disaster like the New Orleans flood without a theodicy to go along with it. The word "theodicy," coined in the 18th century by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, derives from Greek roots invoking the "justice of the gods." A theodicy is an attempt to show that such justice exists, to prove that we really do live in what Leibniz insisted was the "best of all possible worlds."
So theodicies have been plentiful after earthquakes, floods and droughts. Explanations are readily offered: disasters are the wages of sin, they herald an apocalyptic age, they cleanse the earth of evil. Theodicies aim to demonstrate that devastation does not really disrupt or overturn our understanding of the moral and social order. Instead, disorder provides evidence of order. The theodicy is that order. It explains forces that seem to lie beyond human powers, evils that lie beyond human cause.
Theodicies are not casual matters, and in the weeks after Katrina, they are bound to evolve, even in secular culture, even when they may not resemble the ones that Leibniz had in mind. So they need to be better understood.
The classic theodicies in the West are biblical. The flood of Noah's time, for example, is a reflection of the divine will, cleansing the earth of humanity's evil. A more powerful theodicy later evolved out of the trials of the ancient Israelites, in which destruction and exile were treated not as random accidents of history, but as forms of retribution for violating the Mosaic law and its ethical consequences. Suffering could become proof of divine attention and not its opposite.
Scholars like Norman Cohn have shown how in medieval Europe the worst human trauma could be interpreted as proof of imminent apocalypse and redemption, inspiring millennial expectations and movements. Meanwhile, the theodicy of divine retribution still thrives today and was invoked by some fundamentalist believers after Katrina.
But between medieval Europe and contemporary America something profound changed in the way natural disasters are interpreted and the kinds of theodicies they inspire. And one of the turning points, as many scholars have argued, was the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon. It destroyed perhaps a third of the city's population, with deaths in the tens of thousands. It overturned the confidence of European royalty and seemed to drive a wedge between the earthly and divine realms.
For the growing forces of the Enlightenment, it also seemed to overturn the very idea that a theodicy could account for the disaster. Voltaire, who had once seen nature as benevolent, was whipped into a rationalist fury by the experience. Leibniz, he believed, had been refuted by nature. Voltaire wrote a "Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon" in which the quake's victims are called "Tormented atoms on a heap of muck/ That death devours and that fate trips up." His character Candide watches the earthquake from a distance, seeing it as morally blind, killing the good and preserving the wicked.
In a sense, the earthquake actually ended up strengthening the hand of the Enlightenment, as if a replacement theodicy had fallen into place. Kant wrote about the quake. Scientific investigation took place. The response of Portugal's prime minister to the disaster was practical, not religious. "We will bury the dead," he said, "and take care of the living."
Recently, the philosopher Susan Neiman argued in "Evil in Modern Thought" that the Lisbon earthquake also destroyed an ancient idea that nature could itself be evil. After Lisbon, she argued, moral evil was distinguished from natural disaster. Earthquakes and floods could no longer be fitted into traditional religious theodicies.
But this did not mean, of course, that theodicies faded away. Ms. Neiman argued that for philosophers theology had been replaced by history. The fates of peoples and nations reflected other forces, and disruptions were given other forms of explanation. Hegel saw history as an evolutionary series of transformations in which destruction was as inevitable as birth. Marx believed other kinds of economic and human laws accounted for destruction and evolution. This mostly left natural disasters for the growing realm of science: if they couldn't be prevented, at least their origins could be understood.

Mole

It is my first reading of "The Wind in the Willows".

As he hurried along, eagerly anticipating the moment when he would be at home again among the things he knew and liked, the Mole saw clearly that he was an animal of tilled field and hedge-row, linked to the ploughed furrow, the frequented pasture, the lane of evening lingering, the cultivated garden-plot. For others the asperities, the stubborn endurance, or the clash of actual conflict, that went with Nature in the rough; he must be wise, must keep to the pleasant places in which his lines were laid and which held adventure enough, in their way, to last for a lifetime.

and:

slumber gathered him forthwith as a swath of barley is folded into the arms of the reaping machine.

and:

He saw clearly how plain and simple- how narrow, even- it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one's existence.

Lucia! Lucia! Lucia!

The opening of "Lucia in London" by E.F. Benson, the second novel in the incomparable series.

"Considering that Philip Lucas's aunt who died early in April was no less than eighty-three years old, and had spent the last seven of them bedridden in a private lunatic asylum, it had been generally and perhaps reasonably hoped among his friends and those of his wife that the bereavement would not be regarded by either of them as an intolerable tragedy. Mrs. Quantock, in fact, who, like everybody else at Riseholme, had sent a neat little note of condolence to Mrs. Lucas, had, without using the actual words "happy release," certainly implied it or its close equivalent.

She was hoping that there would be a reply to it, for though she had said in her note that her dear Lucia mustn't dream of answering it, that was a mere figure of speech, and she had instructed her parlour-maid who took it across to 'The Hurst' immediately after lunch to say that she didn't know if there was an answer, and would wait to see, for Mrs. Lucas might perhaps give a little hint ever so vaguely about what the expectations were concerning which everybody was dying to get information. . . .

While she waited for this, Daisy Quantock was busy, like everybody else in the village on this beautiful afternoon of spring, with her garden, hacking about with a small but destructive fork in her flower-beds. She was a gardener of the ruthless type, and went for any small green thing that incautiously showed a timid spike above the earth, suspecting it of being a weed. She had had a slight difference with the professional gardener who had hitherto worked for her on three afternoons during the week, and had told him that his services were no longer required. She meant to do her gardening herself this year, and was confident that a profusion of beautiful flowers and a plethora of delicious vegetables would be the result. At the end of her garden path was a barrow of rich manure, which she proposed, when she had finished the slaughter of the innocents, to dig into the depopulated beds. On the other side of her paling her neighbour Georgie Pillson was rolling his strip of lawn, on which during the summer he often played croquet on a small scale. Occasionally they shouted remarks to each other, but as they got more and more out of breath with their exertions the remarks got fewer. Mrs. Quantock's last question had been "What do you do with slugs, Georgie?" and Georgie had panted out, "Pretend you don't see them."

Mrs. Quantock had lately grown rather stout owing to a diet of sour milk, which with plenty of sugar was not palatable; but sour milk and pyramids of raw vegetables had quite stopped all the symptoms of consumption which the study of a small but lurid medical manual had induced. To-day she had eaten a large but normal lunch in order to test the merits of her new cook, who certainly was a success, for her husband had gobbled up his food with great avidity instead of turning it over and over with his fork as if it was hay. In consequence, stoutness, surfeit, and so much stooping had made her feel rather giddy, and she was standing up to recover, wondering if this giddiness was a symptom of something dire, when de Vere, for such was the incredible name of her parlour-maid, came down the steps from the dining-room with a note in her hand. So Mrs. Quantock hastily took off her gardening gloves of stout leather, and opened it.

There was a sentence of formal thanks for her sympathy which Mrs. Lucas immensely prized, and then followed these ridiculous words:

It has been a terrible blow to my poor Peppino and myself. We trusted that Auntie Amy might have been spared us for a few years yet.

Ever, dear Daisy, your sad
Lucia

And not a word about expectations! . . . Lucia's dear Daisy crumpled up the absurd note, and said "Rubbish," so loud that Georgie Pillson in the next garden thought he was being addressed.

"What's that?" he said.

"Georgie, come to the fence a minute," said Mrs. Quantock. "I want to speak to you."

Georgie, longing for a little gossip, let go of the handle of his roller, which, suddenly released, gave a loud squeak and rapped him smartly on the elbow.

"Tarsome thing!" said Georgie.

He went to the fence and, being tall, could look over it. There was Mrs. Quantock angrily poking Lucia's note into the flower-bed she had been weeding.

"What is it?" said Georgie. "Shall I like it?"

His face red and moist with exertion, appearing just over the top of the fence, looked like the sun about to set below the flat grey horizon of the sea.

"I don't know if you'll like it," said Daisy, "but it's your Lucia. I sent her a little note of condolence about the aunt, and she says it has been a terrible blow to Pepino and herself. They hoped that the old lady might have been spared them a few years yet."

"No!" said Georgie, wiping the moisture off his forehead with the back of one of his beautiful pearl-grey gloves.

"But she did," said the infuriated Daisy, "they were her very words. I could show you if I hadn't dug it in. Such a pack of nonsense! I hope that long before I've been bedridden for seven years, somebody will strangle me with a bootlace, or anything handy. Why does Lucia pretend to be sorry? What does it all mean?"

Georgie had long been devoted henchman to Lucia (Mrs. Lucas, wife of Philip Lucas, and so Lucia), and though he could criticise her in his mind, when he was alone in his bed or his bath, he always championed her in the face of the criticism of others. Whereas Daisy criticised everybody everywhere. . . .

"Perhaps it means what it says," he observed with the delicate sarcasm that never had any effect on his neighbour.

"It can't possibly do that," said Mrs. Quantock. "Neither Lucia nor Peppino have set eyes on his aunt for years, nor spoken of her. Last time Peppino went to see her she bit him. Sling for a week afterwards, don't you remember, and he was terrified of blood-poisoning. How can her death be a blow, and as for her being spared--"

Mrs. Quantock suddenly broke off, remembering that de Vere was still standing there and drinking it all in.

"That's all, de Vere," she said."

Mencken on murder

The technique of murder, like the technique of love has its fashions. There are periods when fire-arms are all the rage, and there are periods when the vogue is for hammers, bludgeons, golf-clubs and sash-weights. Towards the end of the year 1898, the smart thing was to send poison through the mails- in a box of candy, a bottle of headache powders, a plug of chewing tobacco, or what not. Thus a Mrs. Dunning was dispatched in San Francisco. A Mrs. Wilkinson in Newark, and a Mrs. Adams and a Mr. Barnet in New York. There ensued a pother with the World and the Journal running a race in alarms.

From my never-ending pile of copies of "The American Mercury", November, 1929

Godey's Lady's Book

"False ears of flesh color- India rubber- have been invented for the use of ladies with large ears. They are used in front of the real ears which are drawn back and concealed under the hair."
Ladies of the 1830's: "And demure she was, hiding her complexion from the harsh sun by a parasol, over-clothing herself from the elements and shrieking when 'a grasshopper steps across her path or a cow stops to gaze at her.'"
From "Mr. Godey's Ladies: Being a Mosaic of Fashions and Fancies"

No one puts Baby in the corner

Looking kind of foxy, Spencer Tracy.

Look Embarrassed, Angel

Ugh. That crazy bitch (left)

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Thomas Wolfe (center) has lunch with legendary Seattle restauranteur Ivar Haglund and is dead within a week or so.

The... um....unpredictable word stylings of Thomas Wolfe in "Look Homeward, Angel":

"He had come down to the empty house exultantly, tasting its delicious silence, the cool mustiness of indoors and a solitary afternoon with great calf volumes. In a moment the world turned hag."

and:
"He was somewhat above middle height, bumpy of face and sallow of skin with a light pleasing tenor voice"

and:
"They saw with decent wonder their awkward bulk of puberty. The proud gate of the years swung open for them. They felt a lonely glory. They said farewell."

and a smattering of anti-Semitism:
"The grocer was an old Jew who muttered jargon into a rabbi's beard as if saying a spell against Dybbuks. The boy looked closely to see if his hands touched the food. They were not clean."

Cooking with Fernet-Branca

by the redoubtable James Hamilton-Paterson:
"'Perfectly correct, papa' says this vision, flashing me a smile I want to lay away in lavender in a dark drawer for the rocky years ahead."

The Brontes Went to Woolworths

Rachel Ferguson's novel opens with these brilliant first lines:
"How I loathe that kind of novel which is about a lot of sisters. It is usually called They Were Seven, or Three – Not Out, and one spends one’s entire time trying to sort them all, and muttering, ‘Was it Isobel who drank, or Gertie? And which was it who ran away with the gigolo, Amy or Pauline? And which of their separated husbands was Lionel, Isobel’s or Amy’s?
Katrine and I often grin over that sort of book, and choose which sister we’d be, and Katrine always tries to bag the drink one."

No one puts Baby in the corner

THOMAS EAKINS, 1898

From: Roy Reed's oral history of the Arkansas Gazette

Jerry McConnell:
Carrick Patterson (the ancient owner of the paper's) grandson came home on vacation and he was standing in the newsroom, and Mr. Heiskell came out and was surprised by Carrick being there. He said, "Carrick, what are you doing home?
Carrick said, "Well... I came home for Easter vacation Grandfather."
Mr. Heiskell said, "You know I don't believe we had Easter vacation when I was in college. Of course, Christ wasn't dead yet."

The sublime Rose Macaulay

From Personal Pleasures: Reading
Here is one of the oddest of the odd inventions which man has sought out, this conveying to one another by marks scratched on paper thoughts privately conceived in the mind. It shows, as all the arts show, the infinite publicism of humankind, the sociability, the interdependence, which cannot endure to have a thought, to conceive a tale, a tune, a picture, an arrangement of words, or anything else, but all must forthwith be informed of it. And how avidly we run to be informed. We have already consumed many thousands of tales, poems, essays and what-not but we are never satiate, we are greedy always for more.

No one puts Baby in the corner

Mencken vs. Eddy

H.L. Mencken reviewing "Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind" by E.F. Dakin in The American Mercury, November, 1929

"Mr. Dakin's sub-title, it seems to me, is rather far-fetched. The peculiar mixture of vapors and sagacities which marked Mrs. Eddy's sayings and doings from end to end of her long life showed few of the characteristics of the virginal mind. Rather it would be more plausible (without throwing the slightest doubt upon her virtue) to compare he peculiar wisdom to that of a bordello keeper, for in it a sharp sense of reality and a weakness for the occult were curiously mingled. She was seldom if ever taken in by concrete human beings, but there was never a time when she did not believe quite incredible things about the powers and principalities of the air.
...Perhaps in grossly bad taste (I liken) this sense of the transcendental to a shaking fear of black cats, opals and cross-eyed men. In Mrs. Eddy it took the form of an incurable dread of malicious animal magnetism. This MAM pursued her during all the years of her prophesying and... brought down upon her the persecution of mesmerists, spiritualists, lawyers, newspaper reporters and other fiends from Hell; it haunted her days and made horrible her nights.
Despite her contention that disease was only an illusion, her ill health continued, and the temptation to blame it on malicious animal magnetism was hard to resist. Her terror was extreme- during her last years she maintained a staff of healers in her house to combat the waves of M.A.M. issuing from (her rival's students). They were on duty in sailor-like watches for the 24 hours of the day but it was all in vain."

When Gods were fun

Dionysus wandered about Greece looking for an entrance to Hades. He asked Prosymnus to show him the way. Prosymnus agreed on the condition Dionysus would allow himself to be "made love to as a woman is" by which he meant that he wished to sodomize the god. When Dionysus returned from Hades prepared to grant the favor, he discovered in the time that had passed, Prosymnus had died. He took a branch from a fig tree that grew over the man's grave, fashioned a member, and penetrated himself with it.

-paraphrased from "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso

No one puts Baby in the corner

Erik Satie

The use of the occult

Robsjohn-Gibbings on mixed media:
"One of the supposedly most mystifying things the Cubists did was to paste strips of newspapers, labels from bottles and so forth on their canvases. It was a favorite and old trick in occultism to arrange for the juxtaposition of quite unrelated objects. the mixing of such objects was a foolproof method used by magicians, witches and witch doctors to impress and bewilder the audience. This bringing together of such irrational unconnected objects suggests a secret formula that was beyond ordinary mortal's comprehension. The witches in Macbeth, for instance, throw into the steaming cauldron the eye of a newt, the toe of a frog, the finger of a birth-strangled babe and so on.

Robsjohn-Gibbings on Max Jacob

Max Jabobs admires one of his many puppets

From: Mona Lisa's Mustache:

"Among the major enthusiasms of Max Jacob and his group were the paintings of Henri Rousseau, the customs-house inspector.... It is not without significance that this fascination with Rousseau has a connection with the occult, for Rousseau was entirely persuaded that he painted according to the dictates of his dead wife whose astral hand guided his brush."
"Certain of Max Jacob's declarations contain a strange mixture of a profound Christian religiosity with a curious emotionalism and cunning. Typical of Jacob's mystical hallucination and sense of publicity was the claim that the Deity had appeared to him in his room on the Place Ravignan... and followed up this visit by sitting in the next seat to Jacob in a cinema"

Robsjohn-Gibbings on Picasso

From: Mona Lisa's Mustache- A Dissection of Modern Art

"As well as longing to be a clown, Picasso in these early days could be found copying the Old Masters in the Louvre and painting in his studio in the manner of Gaugin, Degas, and more often Toulouse-lautrec. So closely did he imitate the last that at first glance some of the paintings of the two artists seem indistinguishable. In 1901, with one eye on El Greco, Picasso painted a series of archly pathetic mothers, dyspeptic femme fatales, and peevish acrobats. This shivering gallery of neuroticism is now quite rightly known as the master's 'blue period'. Between 1905 and 1906, putting these doom-eager Madonnas and emaciated harlequins behind him, he painted a group of neo-Greco-Roman nudes, ususally seen through a haze of terra-cotta pink. These fin-de-siecle tanagras are now known as products of the 'rose period'."

Ishi, the wild man of California

From "Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect man" by John Kasson
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Photo of Ishi wearing the primitive clothing in which he was discovered.... by Kiefer Sutherland apparently.
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"With his gentle, friendly disposition, Ishi played the role of Rousseauian noble savage far better than had Wild Peter or Victor. His reactions to modern civilisation aroused keen interest. Traveling around San Francisco shortly after his arrival, he was unnerved by the crowds. The exclamation "HANSI SALTU!!!!" burst from his lips: "Many white people, many white people!"

Link to delightful song performed by Ishi ca. 1911:
http://www.umbc.edu/MA/index/number1/nettl1/nettl03.wav

Welles and Hemingway

David Thomson in Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles
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(Welles' radio roles) account "for the development of a kind of superior fraudulence in his voice.
There were those who detected this rising bogusness. Welles was the first choice to read the narration for the documentary movie 'This Spanish Earth'. The narration had been written by Ernest Hemingway, who claimed he had no desire to read it himself- until he heard Welles' voice. Then he objected and said he would do it himself. 'Every time Orson said the word infantry', he said, 'it was like a cocksucker swallowing.'"

Moderation

Nietzsche again:
This deification of the principle of individualization, if it is thought of in general as commanding and proscriptive, understands only one law, that of the individual, that is, observing the limits of individualization, moderation in the Greek sense. Apollo, as the ethical divinity, demands moderation from his followers and self-knowledge, so that they can observe moderation.. And so alongside the aesthetic necessity of beauty run the demands "Know thyself" and "Nothing in excess." Arrogance and excess are considered the essentially hostile daemons of the non-Apollonian sphere, therefore characteristic of the pre-Apollonian period, the age of the Titans, and of the world beyond the Apollonian, that is, the barbarian world.

Mencken on Catholicism

In The American Mercury: July 1929:
No one can be a good Christian and not believe in demons of all kinds, including those which animate vampires and witches. The Catholic church teaches categorically that they exist.. thus we are forced to assume that Al Smith believes in demons, and that it would not surprise him at all to see one of them enter a bellboy at the Biltmore and cause a dreadful ruction.

The Birth of Tragedy: Nietzsche

While in the theatre daytime might be only artistic and stage architecture only symbolic, and the nature of the metrical language might have an ideal quality, nevertheless, on the whole, a misconception still ruled: it was not enough, Schiller claimed, that people merely tolerated as poetic freedom what was the essence of all poetry. The introduction of the chorus, according to Schiller, was the decisive step with which war was declared openly and nobly against naturalism in art. Such a way of looking at things is the one, it strikes me, for which our age (which considers itself so superior) uses the dismissive catch phrase "pseudo-idealism." I suspect, by contrast, that with our present worship of naturalism and realism we are situated at the opposite pole from all idealism, namely, in the region of a wax works collection. In that, too, there is an art, as in certain romance novels of the present time. Only let no one pester us with the claim that with this we have overthrown the artistic "pseudo-idealism" of Schiller and Goethe.
Of course, it is an "ideal" stage on which, following Schiller's correct insight, the Greek satyr chorus, the chorus of the primitive tragedy, customarily strolled, a stage lifted high above over the real strolling stage of mortal men. For this chorus the Greeks constructed a suspended hovering framework of an imaginary natural condition and on it placed imaginary natural beings. Tragedy grew up out of this foundation and, for that very reason, has, from its inception, been spared the embarrassing business of counterfeiting reality.
That is not to say that it is a world arbitrarily fantasized somewhere between heaven and earth. It is much rather a world possessing the same reality and credibility for the devout Greek as the world of Olympus, together with its inhabitants. The satyr as the Dionysian chorus member lives in a reality permitted by religion, sanctioned by myth and culture. The fact that tragedy begins with him, that out of him the Dionysian wisdom of tragedy speaks, is a phenomenon as foreign to us here as the development of tragedy out of the chorus generally.
Perhaps we can reach a starting point for this discussion when I offer the claim that the satyr himself, the imaginary natural being, is related to the cultural person in the same way that Dionysian music is related to civilization. On this last point Richard Wagner states that civilization is neutralized by music in the same way lamplight is by daylight. In just such a manner, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself neutralized by the sight of the chorus of satyrs. This is the most direct effect of Dionysian tragedy: generally , the state and society, the gap between man and man give way to an invincible feeling of unity which leads back to the heart of nature.
The metaphysical consolation, which as I have already indicated, true tragedy leaves us, that at the bottom of everything, in spite of all the transformations in phenomena, life is indestructibly power and delightful, this consolation appears in lively clarity as the chorus of satyrs, the chorus of natural beings, who live, as it were, behind civilization, who cannot disappear, and who, in spite of all the changes in generations and a people's history, always remain the same. With this chorus, the profound Greek, capable of the most delicate and the most severe suffering, consoled himself, the man who looked around with a daring gaze in the middle of the terrifying destructive instincts of so-called world history and equally into the cruelty of nature and who is in danger of longing for the denial of the will of Buddhism. Art saves him, and through art life saves him.

The American Mercury: April, 1928 Vol. XIII

H.L Mencken reviews the biographies of Isadora Duncan and Aimee Semple McPherson:
"Superficially, to be sure, they differ enormously. La Duncan (posthumously, alas!) devotes a large part of her volume to shameless bragging about her drabbing; La McPherson (still alive, glory to God!) devotes at least a third of hers to proofs she was chaste. But that is all only on the surface: deep down the two gals are tremendously alike. Both are mystics and hear strange voices over the sky rim....
"What gives (Duncan's book) solid interest is not this pathetic and almost mannish interest in mulling over cold amours, but the author's laborious and vain effort to explain the principles of her so-called Art. This effort leaves it revealed as precisely what it was: a mass of puerilities without any more rational basis than golf or spiritualism. Isadora simply loved to prance around in a shift; all the rest was simply afterthought."
(McPherson) was attracted to Los Angeles, it appears, by the climate. The Bible Belt was sending a steady stream of its rheumatic... in that direction and she simply followed. The result, as everyone knows, was a swift and roaring success. The town has more morons in it than the entire state of Mississippi."

My idol on pigeons, Stein, & owls

There's an Owl in My Room
James Thurber, The New Yorker, 17-Nov-1934

I saw Gertrude Stein on the screen of a newsreel theater one afternoon and I heard her read that famous passage of hers about pigeons on the grass, alas (the sorrow is, as you know, Miss Stein's). After reading about the pigeons on the grass alas, Miss Stein said, "This is a simple description of a landscape I have seen many times." I don't really believe that that is true. Pigeons on the grass alas may be a simple description of Miss Stein's own consciousness, but it is not a simple description of a plot of grass on which pigeons have alighted, are alighting, or are going to alight. A truly simple description of the pigeons alighting on the grass of the Luxembourg Gardens (which, I believe, is where the pigeons alighted) would say of the pigeons alighting there only that they were pigeons alighting. Pigeons that alight anywhere are neither sad pigeons nor gay pigeons, they are simply pigeons.
It is neither just nor accurate to connect the word alas with pigeons. Pigeons are definitely not alas. They have nothing to do with alas and they have nothing to do with hooray (not even when you tie red, white, and blue ribbons on them and let them loose at band concerts); they have nothing to do with mercy me or isn't that fine, either. White rabbits, yes, and Scotch terriers, and blue-jays, and even hippopotamuses, but not pigeons. I happen to have studied pigeons very closely and carefully, and I have studied the effect, or rather the lack of effect, of pigeons very carefully. A number of pigeons alight from time to time on the sill of my hotel window when I am eating breakfast and staring out the window. They never alas me, they never make me feel alas; they never make me feel anything.

Nobody and no animal and no other bird can play a scene so far down as a pigeon can. For instance, when a pigeon on my window ledge becomes aware of me sitting there in a chair in my blue polka-dot dressing-gown, worrying, he pokes his head far out from his shoulders and peers sideways at me, for all the world (Miss Stein might surmise) like a timid man peering around the corner of a building trying to ascertain whether he is being followed by some hoofed fiend or only by the echo of his own footsteps. And yet it is not for all the world like a timid man peering around the corner of a building trying to ascertain whether he is being followed by a hoofed fiend or only by the echo of his own footsteps, at all. And that is because there is no emotion in the pigeon and no power to arouse emotion. A pigeon looking is just a pigeon looking. When it comes to emotion, a fish, compared to a pigeon, is practically beside himself.
A pigeon peering at me doesn't make me sad or glad or apprehensive or hopeful. With a horse or a cow or a dog it would be different. It would be especially different with a dog. Some dogs peer at me as if I had just gone completely crazy or as if they had just gone completely crazy. I can go so far as to say that most dogs peer at me that way. This creates in the consciousness of both me and the dog a feeling of alarm or downright terror and legitimately permits me to work into a description of the landscape, in which the dog and myself are figures, a note of emotion. Thus I should not have minded if Miss Stein had written: dogs on the grass, look out, dogs on the grass, look out, look out, dogs on the grass, look out Alice. That would be a simple description of dogs on the grass. But when any writer pretends that a pigeon makes him sad, or makes him anything else, I must instantly protest that this is a highly specialized fantastic impression created in an individual consciousness and that therefore it cannot fairly be presented as a simple description of what actually was to be seen.

People who do not understand pigeons-and pigeons can be understood only when you understand that there is nothing to understand about them-should not go around describing pigeons or the effect of pigeons. Pigeons come closer to a zero of impingement than any other birds. Hens embarrass me the way my old Aunt Hattie used to when I was twelve and she still insisted I wasn't big enough to bathe myself; owls disturb me; if I am with an eagle I always pretend that I am not with an eagle; and so on down to swallows at twilight who scare the hell out of me. But pigeons have absolutely no effect on me. They have absolutely no effect on anybody. They couldn't even startle a child. That is why they are selected from among all birds to be let loose, with colored ribbons attached to them, at band concerts, library dedications, and christenings of new dirigibles. If any body let loose a lot of owls on such an occasion there would be rioting and catcalls and whistling and fainting spells end throwing of chairs and the Lord only knows what else.
From where I am sitting now I can look out the window and see a pigeon being a pigeon on the roof of the Harvard Club. No other thing can be less what it is not than a pigeon can, and Miss Stein, of all people, should understand that simple fact. Behind the pigeon I am looking at, a blank wall of tired gray bricks is stolidly trying to sleep off oblivion; underneath the pigeon the cloistered windows of the Harvard Club are staring in horrified bewilderment at something they have seen across the street. The pigeon is just there on the roof being a pigeon, having been, and being, a pigeon and, what is more, always going to be, too. Nothing could be simpler than that. If you read that sentence aloud you will instantly see what I mean. It is a simple description of a pigeon on a roof. It is only with an effort that I am conscious of the pigeon, but I am acutely aware of a great sulky red iron pipe that is creeping up the side of the building intent on sneaking up on a slightly tipsy chimney which is shouting its head off.

There is nothing a pigeon can do or be that would make me feel sorry for it or for myself or for the people in the world, just as there is nothing I could do or be that would make a pigeon feel sorry for itself. Even if I plucked his feathers out it would not make him feel sorry for himself and it would not make me feel sorry for myself or for him. But try plucking the quills out of a porcupine or even plucking the fur out of a jackrabbit. There is nothing a pigeon could be, or can be, rather, which could get into my consciousness like a fumbling hand in a bureau drawer and disarrange my mind or pull anything out of it. I bar nothing at all. You could dress up a pigeon in a tiny suit of evening clothes and put a tiny silk hat on his head and a tiny gold-headed cane under his wing and send him walking into my room at night. It would make no impression on me. I would not shout, "Good god almighty, the birds are in charge!" But you could send an owl into my room, dressed only in the feathers it was born with, and no monkey business, and I would pull the covers over my head and scream.
No other thing in the world falls so far short of being able to do what it cannot do as a pigeon does. Of being unable to do what it can do, too, as far as that goes.