Tie and Jacket

Last week I watched a rerun of How I Met Your Mother. One of the running gags on the show is Barney’s obsession with suits. In a flashback we learn how it started: during his hippy days Barney lost his girlfriend to a successful man in a suit. The scene prompted me idly to wonder if I even own a suit.

This uncertainty might seem strange, but there are three explanations. The first, which the reader already likely has surmised, is that I haven’t had occasion to wear a suit in years. Second: my semi-formal wear (I have no fully formal wear) is stashed in a walk-in closet with a non-working light fixture. Replacing the fixture is one of those long-needed repairs that “I’ll get to someday.” Access to the recessed fixture’s wiring is in an extremely awkward far dark corner of the attic tight under the rafters, so it’s been easier (for the past 18 years) just to use a flashlight in that closet. I store in it my less commonly worn clothes along with other infrequently accessed sundries including my dad’s old military uniforms. I don’t see anything in the closet unless I shine a flashlight directly at it, so I’m not reminded of the full contents every time I open the door. Third: last year (see The Raiment under the Tree) I finally accepted that most of my clothes would never fit me properly again and so removed permanently from my closets anything that interfered with my breathing when buttoned – if it buttoned at all. Accordingly, while I knew I once owned a blue suit and a grey one, I truly didn’t remember if both were among the excised.

School days, 1969

A subsequent quest into the closet with a flashlight revealed that there still is one grey suit hanging there that I can use in a pinch. The word “pinch” is literal, but not so much as to render it unwearable. It will fit perfectly when I lose those 10 pounds, which will be about the time I fix the closet light. That is not to say it ever will be worn even then. I can’t recall ever having worn it in public outside of the store where I bought it 20 years ago: a real brick-and-mortar store back then. (I wore a blue one that I no longer own twice: once at a wedding and once at a funeral.) This might be surprising to white-collar types who wear suits as a matter of course, but my sartorial progression followed a path opposite of most of my generation: from tie-and-jacket in school to denim at work. (My work blended blue and white collar, so I tended to dress in the middle.) There are always occasions to spiff up just a little, though, so I’ve always kept the basic semi-formal ingredients for that on hand and still do, even though I apparently misjudged the need for a traditional business suit. There are sport jackets and blazers on my hangers that fit and they do get worn from time to time – sometimes even with a tie. The jackets don’t get worn so often as to be in one of the closets with a working light, but they do get worn; the tie rack is on the back wall of the dark closet, too.

Hard at work 1995

While checking for the suit I somewhat playfully (I was wearing a tee shirt) grabbed one of the ties off the rack just to see if my muscle memory was intact, though I had no reason to assume it wouldn’t be. It was, fortunately, for while I tie a half-Windsor (my preferred knot) in seconds without thinking about it, I’d find it difficult to describe to a newbie how to do it.

Tie rack in the dark closet

Ties are rather odd articles of clothing really, but they have a long history. Soldiers on Trajan’s column (finished 113 CE) are wearing them, or something very much like them. (BTW, the general doesn’t look too pleased by their gruesome gifts, does he?) Some of the Chinese terracotta soldiers, crafted some 300 years before Trajan, also are wearing something similar. It wasn’t a persistent fashion though: it came and went over the centuries. The modern necktie is usually traced to the 1600s when it was worn as a bit of flash by Croatian mercenaries in the service of Louis XIII of France. Louis liked the look, named it la cravate, and specified it as proper attire for royal events. It has been with us ever since in one variant or another including cravats, bowties, and bolos. (The bolo is official neckwear in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas; other US states, to my knowledge, do not have state neckties.)

Roman soldiers' neckwear: irony unintended

The standard necktie to which we are most accustomed became standard about 100 years ago. Fashionistas have played with tie widths, patterns, and colors over the years since then, but a conventional tie from the 1920s always has been wearable and still is. This also is the case with sport jackets and business suits. Men who enjoy being edgy in fashion will find that their choices inevitably age badly; 1970s garish colors, extra wide lapels, floral shirts, and bell bottoms come to mind. There always are conservative clothing options however that don’t go all-in for current trends; a conservative business suit or semi-formal tie-and-jacket from any of the past 10 decades remains wearable today. Some older styles might seem affectations today, but not outrageous ones.

All this persistence of standard style is fortunate since, like most men, I don’t get rid of clothes for any reason other than 1) they don’t fit anymore or 2) they truly are worn out. The grey suit in the dark closet isn’t at risk of wearing out anytime soon. Perhaps I’ll give it away before its style begins to look like an affectation.

Barney suits up in How I Met Your Mother

Leaving a Trace

The father/daughter dynamic is a tricky one in real life and almost as tricky to portray on film. Disclosure: I’m not a parent. Whether that makes it easier for me to observe such interactions dispassionately or impossible to grasp them emotionally, I cannot judge – maybe both are true.

There are, of course, many kinds of relationships; fathers are variously portrayed on the screen as over-protective, bewildered, tyrannical, aloof, doting, creepy, or absent. Daughters, among other possibilities, are rebellious, fawning, or manipulative. (Louis C.K.’s movie I Love You, Daddy [2017] about the last sort may never see general release, consigned as he is to the woodshed for reasons other than fatherhood.) Real relationships are combinations of all those characteristics and more. Few films are good at capturing them. Strangely, the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, of all productions, did a pretty good job portraying the complexities in the relationship of Buffy and Giles (a father figure rather than biological dad) and, stranger yet, of Faith and the villain Mayor Wilkins. A rather more credible setting than vampire-infested Sunnydale, however, can be found in Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, currently in theaters. The movie is based on the novel My Abandonment by Peter Rock, who was inspired by an actual news story from 2004 of a man found living in the woods with his daughter for years. Debra Granik and Anne Rossellini wrote the screenplay adaptation.

Some *spoilers*:

There are more than a few people who are unwilling or unable to live in “normal” society with its endless rules and requirements. To the extent possible they live on the fringe, actually preferring to fall through the cracks. One such man is Will (Ben Foster), a veteran with PTSD and a thousand-yard stare who feels at ease only in the forest away from all people except his 13-year-old daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie). They camp in Forest Park, a 5,200-acre tract in Portland, Oregon, and live almost entirely off the land. Their rare excursions into town are only so he can pick up his meds, sell them for cash to other (albeit less isolated) fringe-dwellers, and buy a few basic supplies. Will’s affection for Tom is deep and genuine as is hers for her father. A small mistake causes them to be spotted in the woods by authorities, which leads to their apprehension and separation; once authorities are convinced Tom isn’t abused, they are reunited in arranged housing, but the heavy bureaucratic hand of social services, however well meaning, is precisely the kind of control and human contact that he can’t stand. They pack up and head for the state of Washington where they again go into the deep woods, but Tom, who has had a taste of civilization, is not enthusiastic. She goes only out of love for her father. Will accidentally injures himself so Tom seeks help from residents of an RV park at the edge of the forest. By average standards, they, too, are fringe-dwellers, but by her standards their encampment is civilization. When Will is ready to head into the woods again, Tom no longer wants to join him; she chooses to remain with the RVs. “The same thing that is wrong with you isn’t wrong with me,” she correctly tells him. He doesn’t argue.

Will is portrayed sympathetically even when he makes plainly awful decisions. Will’s love for his daughter is real, and at no point does Tom even think to regard him as a villain, but of course he is. He may not be at fault for his problems, but he is at fault for making his 13-year-old daughter share them. We all make choices. We don’t always have good choices, but we always have some and they have consequences. He should have chosen something better for his daughter while choosing for her was still his responsibility. Love doesn’t make up for it. It counts, but it doesn’t override. Tom makes her own choice finally, which mirrors the choice all offspring make when they are ready to strike out on their own paths. 

Thumbs Up, but not for those who like only action movies.

Trailer – Leave No Trace

Shore Enough

It is beach weather, so I’m told, and I have no reason to disbelieve it. I probably won’t be testing it though. I am not much more than an hour’s drive (during off-peak traffic) from the Jersey Shore, but I don’t visit it much. The last time was last October, and, as the reader may have guessed from the month, my destination wasn’t the beach; it was a block away from the beach at the Wonder Bar in Asbury Park to see the Russian surf band (yes, really) Messer Chups. That was close enough.

Earliest photo I can find of myself
on a beach: Islamorada Florida
1954 with my father and sister

I don’t actually hate the beach. It’s not entirely out of the question that my feet will walk on beach sand in NJ or elsewhere before 2018 expires, but I’d give modest odds against it. This indifference comes not from a lack of past exposure. My family went to the beach with some regularity when I was a child, and back then I enjoyed the sand, sun, and waves in the way that kids usually do. Crowds didn’t bother me. Not even the painful sting of a Portuguese man o' war (Physalia physalis) at age 10 at Miami Beach deterred me from splashing in the ocean. I’ve swum in the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Gulf of Mexico. Yet, by the time I was arranging my own vacations, beaches were well down my list of preferred destinations – not off the list altogether, but well down it. Oh, I’d be happy to give beaches in Tahiti or Thailand a try if someone handed me a free plane ticket, but anyplace less exotic offers little attraction. I get that beach sports (surfing, salt water fishing, beach volleyball, etc.) can be fun. I also get that tacky boardwalks next to beaches can be enjoyable. However, simply sitting in the sun on a towel is something I’d rather do (if at all) in my own backyard rather than on a public beach. De gustibus.

My lack of enthusiasm is more in keeping with the bulk of human history than is the modern popularity of sand and surf. Ancient peoples exploited littoral resources far into prehistory, of course, but that was for a livelihood. With the exception of the Polynesians, who invented surfing (and one might note that beaches are rather hard to avoid in Polynesia), few ancients seem to have enjoyed beaches recreationally. There are no Sumerian or Greek accounts of pleasant daytrips to the beach. On the contrary, ancient writers tended to look at the sea with fear and disquiet. In Roman times, it is true, the upper 1%, built villas overlooking the seashore, but “overlooking” is not quite the same as “on”; the sites were chosen for vistas and docks rather than frolicking on sand. Seaside villas were beyond the economic reach of ordinary folk anyway, as are seaside houses in most places today.

Jersey Shore 1925: photo taken by my
grandfather of his friends and my
great aunt (center back)

The British were the first really to popularize visits to the beach as recreation for average people. In the 1700s the mineral waters at Scarborough turned the city into the first modern seaside resort; visitors took to bathing in the sea as well as enjoying the spa waters. In the 19^th century the number of seaside resorts multiplied as the idea took root that sea air and salt water bathing were healthful, as indeed they were compared to the cities choked with coal smoke and overflowing sewers. At the same time, rising wages and better transportation made resorts accessible to the middle classes. The fad spread from Britain to the Continent from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. The Americas weren’t far behind. By the 1860s Monet was painting scenes of people at the beach (scenes notably absent from earlier art). At the same time in the U.S. beaches had their first wave of popularity. Moralists complained about the (relatively) scanty attire and mixed company at beaches, but those complaints only made the beach more popular.

Whatever the health benefits of seaside spas, the shore has special hazards of its own. There are risks of rip currents, sun overexposure, and accidental drownings. The Jersey Shore did President Garfield no good in 1881 when he traveled there to recover from a gunshot wound. He died 12 days after his arrival. In fairness, the location probably didn’t do him in. His doctors deserve the credit for that. All the same, the seaside didn’t help. However, most daytrips and vacations at the shore are survivable. So, perhaps I’ll go at least once before the summer is out, if only to take a look around. Chances are that I’ll fare better than Garfield.

Messer Chups – Cemetery Beach

Short Stuff

I like a 400+ page novel as much as the next fellow, but I’ve always had a special affection for short story collections. Short stories have a long history. A True Story and Lucius the Ass by 2nd century author Lucian certainly qualify. But the 19^th and 20^th centuries were the real heyday of the form. Widespread literacy combined with limited competing sedentary leisure activities created a market filled by a wide proliferation of magazines and newspapers. Writers could make a good living writing short stories for them. Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Cather, and others made their names with short stories. F. Scott Fitzgerald earned as much from the stories he published in the Saturday Evening Post as he did from his novels. For readers, short stories were perfect for a ride home on a commuter train or an hour in a lawn chair on a warm afternoon. They could be consumed in full in one sitting without any cliffhanger and without losing one’s place.

Short stories often were an author’s best work. I like everything Mark Twain ever wrote, for example, but I’d recommend his collected short stories over any single one of his novels. I also like Hemingway’s collected short fiction better than any of his novels. 20^th century pulp fiction magazines – science fiction in particular – tapped the market further and made the careers of folks such as Heinlein, Asimov, and Bradbury. Some of the finest short fiction came from pulp scifi writers. If anyone has any doubts, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volumes I & II, containing 48 classic short fiction pieces written prior to 1964, should settle the issue.

In some ways today it is easier than ever to get short fiction published if you include Webzines and similar online sites. (A collection of my short stories, by the way can be found at Richard’s Mirror.) However, traditional venues that pay more than a pittance (e.g. The New Yorker, Atlantic, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and precious few others), if they pay anything at all, have dwindled, and those are reserved almost exclusively for established authors. No matter how catchy a writer’s turns of phrase may be, making a living today as a short fiction writer is, if not outright impossible, wildly improbable. Traditional publication venues have dried up because the market for them collapsed. Westerners in general and Americans in particular have been scaling back on recreational reading for decades, but the trend accelerated in the 21^st century. Time spent reading recreationally is down 30% since 2004. According to Pew Research, 25% of the adult population hasn’t read a single book in the past year; the survey didn’t distinguish between recreational reading and other kinds such as academic assignments. The median book count for adult (over 18) Americans is four books per year, but, again, assigned reading figures into that. Yet, book readership is holding up better than short fiction. On that commuter train back home in 2018, we are far less likely to read a short story in The New Yorker and far more likely to watch a YouTube video on a cell phone.

Nonetheless writers continue to write short fiction even if they keep their day jobs. Some of it ends up in novel-length collections or anthologies, which is one of the few ways the format still can be commercial if the stars align. I’ve enjoyed two this past week:

Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl

Dahl (1916-1990), a former RAF fighter pilot, is best known for his children’s literature (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, Witches, et al.), but the adult literature of this prolific author is wickedly humorous fare on a par with the tales of Robert Bloch (author of Psycho). First published in 1960, Kiss Kiss contains eleven tales of betrayal, murder, passive aggressive games, and comeuppances. The short stories still bite as well as kiss. Strongly recommended.

Mash Up edited by Gardner Dozois

This scifi anthology is gimmicky, but that is OK. The gimmick works. 13 of today’s leading scifi authors (Robert Charles Wilson, Mike Resnick, Elizabeth Bear, Allen M. Steele, Daryl Gregory, Lavie Tidhar, John Scalzi, Nancy Kress, Jack Campbell, Paul Di Filippo, Mary Robinette Kowal, Tad Williams, James Patrick Kelly) were asked to write stories, each starting with a famous first line from literature. So, there is a tale with someone called Ishmael, while in another a spectre haunts Europe, while in yet another a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, and so on. Some of the stories are heavily influenced by the works from which the opening lines are borrowed, and others go off in completely different directions. Anthologies by their nature are uneven, but there is some good work in here. Moderately recommended.

  

**** ****

It’s hard to comment on the decline of reading without sounding judgmental, and to some degree properly so – but not entirely. Many of our substitutes have merit, too, and most are, at bottom, literature after all. Screenwriting, for example, is, as the second part of the word says, writing. Short story anthologies have their screen analogs, such as the marvelous 1923 Buster Keaton vehicle Three Ages (love stories set in the Stone Age, ancient Rome, and modern 1920s), the edgy 1932 precode If I Had a Million (vignettes of eight people picked at random by an eccentric millionaire to inherit $1,000,000 each), the dubious Woman Times Seven (1967) that forces one to wonder if the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini knew seven women, and the superb Argentinian film Wild Tales in which acts of vengeance by legitimately aggrieved parties are shockingly disproportionate to the initial offenses. Given the books on my coffee table, it seemed appropriate on Saturday finally to see one such film that was recommended to me long ago.

Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)

This consists of eleven vignettes, all using coffee and cigarettes to keep people together at a table who otherwise would be unable to tolerate each other’s company. The first vignette was filmed by Jim Jarmusch in 1986 and the last shortly before the final release, by which time smoking no longer was legal in most of the movie’s locations. The encounters in the vignettes range from absurd to merely uncomfortable to openly hostile. There is a good cast and some good dialogue. Some of the actors play themselves. Cate Blanchett plays herself and her envious cousin. It’s a fun flick…once. I don’t anticipate watching it again. Thumbs Up, but not way up.

**** ****

Last week belonged to the shorts, but this week I think something longer is in order: perhaps Empire (1965), Andy Warhol’s 8-hour single shot slow motion picture of the Empire State Building – or perhaps not.

Trailer

Taking the Heat

The view of my backyard March 11 2018

To complain about the weather is human, so it is no surprise that almost every conversation I’ve had in past few days included complaints about summer heat, which locally ticked up to around 92 degrees (33 C), and about the characteristic NJ humidity. The complaints are not from me. I don’t argue though. I listen politely, but then move on to other topics. As a schoolboy I used to claim that winter was my favorite season. It was a lie. I was just being contrary. Yes, some snow sports are fun, but summer activities are better – and what kid doesn’t like summer vacation? Still, I liked winter well enough back then: it just wasn’t my favorite three months of the year. Nowadays when I have to shovel my own walks, drive myself on icy roads, and pay my own heating bills, I have little affection for winter. I remember what my backyard looked like just a few months ago. I remember what my house was like during a cold week without heat and power when a wind and snow storm took down power lines this past March. Given a choice I’ll opt for too warm over too cold – assuming non-lethal temperatures either way, that is. What of spring and autumn? They have their attractions but they aren’t the opposite of winter. As a favorite quarter-year, at least in this locale, it’s summertime for me.

The view out back this morning

According to a Gallup poll, only 11% of the U.S. population say winter is their favorite season. Summer is chosen by 25%, autumn by 27%, and spring by 36%. In a way it is surprising that summer gets no more than a one-quarter share. Humans are, after all, tropical creatures fine-tuned for the savanna. According to the very untropical Professor Hannu Rintamäki of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, unclothed people, when at rest on land, are most comfortable with an air temperature of 27 C (80 F); to be comfortable in water, people require a water temperature of 33 C (92 F). I can attest anecdotally to the air/water difference. I rarely heat my pool, and guests complain (a lot) about the cold when the water temperature is 80 F (27 C). (They also usually disbelieve the temperature reading and insist it can't be more than 60 [16].) In truth 80 degree water is cold enough for hypothermia to set in. (Scientific American: “Even water temperatures as high as 75 and 80 degrees F [24 and 27 degrees C] can be dangerous, but it would most likely take much longer than 15 minutes to become debilitated.”) For a person unclothed in open air with no wind chill, one hour at -1 C (30 F) is enough for lethal hypothermia.

The comfort zone of temperatures depends on activity, of course. The greater the exertion, the more heat we generate, and the cooler we like our environment to be so we can shed that excess heat. Professor Rintamäki mentions that people feel discomfort when their skin temperatures rise above 35 C or fall below 31 C. We feel best with core temperatures between 36.5 and 37.1. Hard though they may be on our clothes, our sweat glands are a great help in regulating body heat. Humans have far more sweat glands per unit of surface area than any other primate.

Speaking of clothes, they are the most likely explanation for why most people set their home thermostats well below 80 degrees (27 C) and favor seasons other than summer. Even the lightest fabric reduces heat loss substantially – in effect creating a tropical microclimate at the skin surface. We crank up the air conditioning to compensate. We have a pretty good estimate of when people started to wear clothes. DNA analysis shows that human body lice diverged from head lice some 107,000 years ago. Body lice don’t really attach to the body; unlike other lice, their claws are adapted to inhabit clothes. So, clothes have been around for at least 107,000 years. They were a key technology for permitting the spread of modern humans out of Africa and into cooler regions starting some 60,000 years ago.

Clothes aren’t going away anytime soon. On the whole, I’m happy with that on purely aesthetic grounds. It is the rare person who looks better out of clothes than in them. Those that do actually can make a living displaying themselves. (That’s never really been an option for me.) So, I suppose it is understandable that 75% of our garmented public prefer seasons at least somewhat cooler than summer; it is likely I will remain in a minority for the foreseeable future. That’s OK: the coming and going of the seasons are not subject to majority vote. Until the next equinox (September 22 this year) I’m in my preferred element. If the mercury climbs enough to tempt me to gripe, a peek at my photos from last winter will be enough to restore my equanimity.

Janis Joplin – Summertime