Swinging on Janus’ Gate

2019, which arrives tomorrow, looks like an unreal date to me, as has every year since 2000. I grew up when “the 21^st century” meant the future of The Jetsons. Actually, the Jetsons were a very 1950s-ish family that in basic ways already was an atavism when the show first aired in 1962, but they had flying cars and AI robot domestic servants. The show’s prognostication was wrong on both the social structure and the technology. 2001: A Space Odyssey also was wildly optimistic on the tech side but stuck in the 60s socially…but that is another conversation. My current point is simply that when I saw the movie (in a Boston theater with a marquee that read “for stoned audiences” – hey, it was 1968) 2001 seemed a suitably distant future date for all the spacefaring tech on the screen. The fact of somehow now finding myself 19 years into the 21^st century feels…strange. Nonetheless, I won’t be writing “2018” by accident on my checks. I’m pretty good about making the change each January, probably precisely because the previous year didn’t look real either, so writing it never became an ingrained habit. The only day of the year I really have to be careful is my birthday when I have an unsettling tendency to finish a date “1952.” That tends to raise eyebrows at the bank.

While saving some documents to a flash drive the other day, I noticed that January 3, 2009 was my first post here on Richard’s Pretension. So, along with the New Year to be celebrated by pretty much everyone, there is a ten-year anniversary to be celebrated (if at all) just by me. Maybe I’ll have cake. In the first few years on this site I tended not to append (sometimes barely relevant) videos and pictures as I do now, but otherwise the posts haven’t changed in tone that much since 2009. They were and remain a hodge-podge of this and that. Of course, I was pretentious long before 2009. My blogging predates the word “blogging” by decades. It was a habit acquired by age 16, partly from writing for the school newspaper (yes, I was one of those kids), which was by choice, and partly from schoolwork, which wasn’t. My high school English teacher Mr. Drew required his students to write a 500 word essay every single day on any subject: “On my desk by 5 o’clock. That does not mean 5:01!” Only in later years did I appreciate just how much work he had generated for himself; wading through all that adolescent prose must have been rough. I won’t say I always enjoyed writing the essays, but I often did. So, even after graduation the habit persisted (not every day, but more or less weekly) in multi-page letters to friends, occasional essays and short stories published in obscure literary magazines (webzines by the ‘90s), and eventually in blogs with modest readerships including on Myspace. Remember Myspace? Five decades after those schooldays and one decade after first posting on this site I’m still at it – on New Year’s Eve no less. We all have our quirks. Where’s that cake?

New Year's Eve in
"After the Thin Man" (1936)

There are worse ways to spend New Year’s Eve as I know from experience. Most of my worst New Year’s Eve experiences have been the most outwardly festive ones – and I don’t mean because of the next morning’s aftereffects, which are a bonus feature. I’m just not keen on public merriment, though I don’t scoff at those who are. Loud is fine, for those who prefer that. I understand the impulse to celebrate dispensing with the old and welcoming the new, however loudly or quietly one prefers to do it. Unlike in videogames, in life we don’t ever get a do-over at our last save point. (That feature accounts for much of the popularity of gaming IMO.) The closest we can come is simply to declare a “fresh start,” and there are few better times to do that than at the New Year, whether one celebrates it on January 1, the second new moon after the winter solstice (Chinese New Year), or the vernal equinox (most ancient cultures).

We owe the January 1 starting date for the standard Western calendar to Julius Caesar. (The Gregorian calendar currently in use is simply his Julian calendar tweaked a tiny bit by eliminating leap days from century years not evenly divisible by 400, so that 2000 was a leap year but 2100 won’t be.) Prior to Julius the Roman calendar started in March. Like all calendars that try to incorporate lunar cycles, however, it was a mess and was constantly going out of phase with the solar year. So, Julius’ better calendar that set New Year’s Day on January 1 was adopted; it went into effect in 45 BCE. Inexplicably, he didn’t change the names of the last several months, so “December,” meaning “10^th month,” became in actuality the 12^th. No matter. He did pick a good name for the new first month. January is named for the two-faced god Janus. Janus was the Gatekeeper whose image on gates had one face turned inward and one outward – or metaphorically one toward the old year and one toward the new. The new New Year’s Day was soon enough after the Saturnalia for it to become an extension of the holiday season as it still is today. I suspect boozing to excess on New Year’s Eve (regardless of the calendar in use) predated the Romans, but they certainly continued the tradition. They also did the kissing thing, though nowadays that’s a midnight tradition that isn’t likely to end well and had better be skipped.

To all the readers out there (perhaps not numerous but…ahem…discerning), whether your evening tonight is loud or quiet, may your 2019 be pleasant.

Zooey Deschanel & Joseph Gordon-Levitt reprising Frank Loesser's 1947 What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?

Ghosts of Christmas Past

In my younger days articles in newspapers and magazines regularly appeared in December remarking about the high rate of murders and suicides between Christmas and New Year’s Day. In the past 20 years they have been replaced by articles debunking any such increase. Two decades of debunking might seem adequate, but the articles still appear. The debunkers are correct. April and May, not December and January, have the highest rates of deadly violence to oneself and others. December is relatively slow. Yet, this, too is misleading. The older writers were not simply making stuff up. They were reporting anecdotal evidence from EMTs, police, and hospital workers who insisted they were exceptionally busy during Christmas season. They really were and they are. Their mistake was assuming that the extra busyness must be due to violence. It was and is not. Natural deaths spike substantially this time of year. This is not a myth, and they are what keep emergency responders busy. Study after study confirms that the holiday season is deadly. Philips, Barker, and Brewer in their study “Christmas and New Year as Risk Factors for Death” published by the NCBI state, “In the two weeks starting with Christmas, there is an excess of 42,325 deaths [in the U.S.] from natural causes above and beyond the normal winter increase. Christmas and New Year appear to be risk factors for deaths from many diseases.”

As yet, no exogenous cause for the increase has been found, so the answer may lie in the individuals themselves. It is well known that people with serious health conditions have a way of surviving to landmark dates. They are more likely to die on or shortly after a birthday, for example, than in the several days prior to it. So, too, with other notable (to them) dates. They want to survive until then and they do. Afterwards they don’t care so much, so they don’t. To be sure, we cannot “think” ourselves well, but we do seem able to hold out a while longer if we choose – not a lot longer, but often long enough. The end of the year, whether we mark it in our minds by Christmas or by the actual New Year, is such a landmark.

A little pleasant nostalgia: 1962, I think

The question remains why we don't retain enough enthusiasm to last until the next landmark. The holiday blues are an obvious suspect. For all the “‘tis the season to be jolly” exhortations, many adults have bouts of nostalgia-inspired sadness this time of year. Nostalgia can be sweet, but beyond a certain age it can’t be separated from loss. For that reason, for example, after my sister passed my mom hated the Elvis Presley song Blue Christmas and changed the station when it played on the radio. Among the losses is our own youth. Inevitably this reminds us of our own mortality. (I never thought the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in  A Christmas Carol made a very convincing point, by the way; the same fate awaits penny-pinchers and generous souls alike; the “unmourned” aspect isn’t likely to bother one much under the circumstances, though I suppose in the context of the story there is the risk of carrying chains like Marley.) To top it all, some of us never recover from the news about Santa.

I don't normally experience holiday blues, though this is something for which I take no credit: there are other times and events that put me in a funk but leave other folks unfazed. We all have our buttons. For those who do suffer the blues this time of year, I’ll just offer the reminder that the season ends soon enough. In the meantime nostalgia needn't be depressing. I even rather like Blue Christmas. 

Elvis – Blue Christmas

Pluvial Perusals

A rainy weekend left time to munch on bookshelf fodder, both morsels of which had curious origin stories. My reasons for picking them are less curious. Anthony Burgess had satisfied my reading urges before. As for the other, my recent review of academic publications about superhero mythology prompted me once again toward the comic book shelves to explore one character (strangely absent from Marvel live-action movies), none of whose comics I had previously read.

Napoleon Symphony: a Novel in Four Movements by Anthony Burgess

After the success of the modestly budgeted film A Clockwork Orange based on Anthony Burgess’ novel of the same name, Stanley Kubrick approached Burgess once again. This time Kubrick had in mind a grand epic about Napoleon. Kubrick asked him if he could come up with something. Burgess obliged, providing Kubrick with an idiosyncratic manuscript structured like (to the extent two very different art forms can be alike) Beethoven’s Eroica. Kubrick decided he couldn’t do anything with it and dropped the notion of a definitive Napoleon movie. (This was probably wise: the last serious attempt, Napoleon [1927] written and directed by Abel Gance, is 333 minutes and gets us only as far as 1797.) Kubrick instead chose to make the less epic but still interesting 18^th century period film Barry Lyndon (1975). Anthony Burgess, meantime, polished up his manuscript and published it as a novel in 1974.

This novel is no challenge to Tolstoy and was not intended to be. It is (in Burgess’ words) “a comic novel” though it is not a parody either. The comedy arises, when it does, in the contrast of the heroic image with the human beneath – as it arises whenever we examine our idols closely. We don’t get the great battles and grand events but rather the stage coach rides before them, repasts after them, evenings in taverns, arguments with colleagues, table talk with lovers, and private moments. Burgess assumes the reader already has at least a basic knowledge of his historical career and does little more than indicate (often indirectly) when and where a scene occurs. We see Napoleon as humanly inconsistent: alternately inspirational, mawkish, noble, petty, idealistic, unprincipled, self-effacing, and pompous. The four “movements” into which the book is divided are his rise to fame and power, his defeat in Russia, the Hundred Days, and his exile at St. Helena. Burgess, by the way, planned to be a composer before unexpectedly finding success as a writer. His flair with words is always reason enough to read him.

This is not a book for someone looking to learn history via a more-or-less accurate historical novel. Most basic information about the era’s events simply isn’t in it. But if you wonder what the man could have been like when just being himself, this gives a plausible picture.

Thumbs Up. Not my top pick of Burgess (A Clockwork Orange and Nothing Like the Sun are more fun), but Thumbs Up nevertheless.

**** ****

She-Hulk by Dan Slott

In 1978 CBS had a hit with its TV show The Incredible Hulk starring Bill Bixby as Dr. Banner and Lou Ferrigno as his green alter-ego. It was so popular that executives at Marvel worried that CBS might develop a gender-reversed spin-off series, much in the way The Bionic Woman was spun off The Six Million Dollar Man. If CBS did this before Marvel copyrighted and trademarked a female Hulk, CBS rather than Marvel would own the rights to the character. Marvel tasked Stan Lee with creating the character, and in February 1980 The Savage She-Hulk appeared on comic book racks.

Jennifer Walters is a petite and physically frail young attorney. She is also a cousin to Bruce Banner (Hulk). Bruce has no choice but to infuse her with his own mutated blood after a run-in with criminals leaves her bleeding to death: there is no time to wait for a safer source. Jennifer catches her cousin’s condition and acquires the alter-ego She-Hulk. Unlike her cousin, however, she retains her full mental faculties when green and has considerable control over her transitions. She actually prefers her green persona to her vulnerable original one, sometimes even arguing her court cases as She-Hulk. She isn’t very secret with her identity. She becomes one of the Avengers. A feature of her 20^th century comics is her awareness of being a comic book character and her tendency to “break the fourth wall” and talk to the reader.

Comic book characters get rebooted and made over regularly in order to keep them current, and She-Hulk is no exception. Accordingly, I opted for the 21^st century tales by Dan Slott in the collection She-Hulk: The Complete Collection. In Slott’s updated version of She-Hulk the fourth wall is more often bent than broken: Jennifer is one of the star lawyers at a prestigious firm specializing in (what else?) superhero law, and the firm’s prime research tool is its comic book collection. Not all the courtroom drama is in earthly courtrooms. She is whisked away on a matter of Universal Law in outer space and is herself put on trial by temporal authorities for interfering with the timeline. Meantime there are more conventional (by comic book standards) confrontations and interactions with other superheroes and villains including her archenemy Titania who at one point comes into possession of an infinity gem. (Marvel fans will know what that means.) There are good supporting characters in the stories, for example a teen would-be villain who is the granddaughter of Jen’s boss, and Mallory Book, Jen’s rival at the firm. There is also Jen’s reliable colleague (non-superhero) admirer at the firm who, though never making any overtures, awaits the right moment to escape the “friend zone.” The moment never arrives since Jennifer always has suitors with whom he can’t hope to compete.

When I was a child my mom had none of the snobbish prejudice so common at the time against comic books for kids. She opined that “reading is reading” and anything that encourages it is a good thing. So, she craftily brought home reading material likely to appeal to my sister and me including comic books. She supplemented these with magazines, children’s literature, and more ambitious material such as Mark Twain and Sir Walter Scott. The strategy worked. Both Sharon and I became early and lifelong recreational readers. Comics faded from the mix of my recreational reads by the time I was in high school with the exception of some counterculture novelties by Robert Crumb and his ilk. They didn’t really return to my coffee table until the current century, and then only because adult-oriented comics were a social phenomenon that couldn’t be ignored by anyone interested in the state of popular culture.

Adult mainstream comics were already well established in the US by the 1980s, but I’m often late to pop-culture parties. I’m not quite sure what to make of them. There is something unsettling about the power fantasies of superhero comics appealing to adults; they seem to be something one should grow past. Yet, I readily admit I often enjoy the comics even if my reason for buying them (at least so I tell myself) is to keep abreast of pop-culture. Their popularity coincides with an ongoing long-term decline in sales of traditional literature, both fiction and non-fiction, but I doubt that is cause-and-effect. Other modern diversions probably account for the decline – along with current approaches to formal education that too often make reading seem painful to students. The decline in the consumption of literature is regrettable, but perhaps my mom’s perspective is still the right one: reading is reading and something (even something with pictures and words like “zonk!” and “plink!”) is better than nothing. If it contains clever artwork and storytelling, better yet.

Thumbs Up

Smash Mouth - Everyday Superhero

Four Diversions for Sleepless Nights

December is a rather busy month for most of us, but there still might be days or evenings when we have time to unwind and the notion of picking up an old-fashioned book or movie is more appealing than whatever is on the screen of our cell phone. The following recently have occupied some of my time (mostly in the middle of the night) with mixed results:

Earth Descended by Fred Saberhagen

20^th century science fiction by the better authors has a special quality to it. Even when the themes are adult (as they often were by the 1960s) the tales to modern eyes commonly have a refreshing innocence. Even when they are un-PC (as they often were throughout the era) they are absent the meanness that permeates so much of present day writing and culture. Saberhagen is one of the better authors, best known for his “berserker” stories about self-replicating doomsday weapons. Earth Descended is a collection of a dozen of his short stories written between 1968 and 1981. Saberhagen’s style evolves interestingly in this period from straightforward to experimental and from optimistic to cynical.

The stories bear little similarity to each other in any way other than in prose style and by broadly fitting a definition of scifi. They include a berserker tale that intersects (really) with Sherlock Holmes. There is a magic-filled fantasy story (“Earthshade”) originally written for Larry Niven’s Warlock series. There is an interstellar generation ship (“Birthdays”) of a peculiar type. Observer created reality becomes all too literal in “Recessional.” Mortality is optional in “Calendars.” There is even his own scifi version of Theseus in Crete. The collection is science fiction as we all too seldom encounter it anymore. Recommended.

**** ****

Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011)

This dramedy was recommended to me by the Amazon algorithm as a movie I might like. It is reassuring to know that Amazon and Google don’t know everything about me yet, perhaps because Alexa isn’t listening in my house. (It amazes me that so many people are complaisant about installing web-connected listening devices in their own homes: devices that listen carefully enough to judge the quality of the relationships in those homes. The Independent reported research by Imperial College Business School concluding that “digital assistants could predict with 75 per cent accuracy the likelihood of a relationship or marriage being a success.” I’m sure the unsuccessful will get unsolicited ads for marriage counselors and divorce attorneys on their smart phones.) Anyway, this movie by the Duplass brothers just didn’t work for me.

Jeff (Jason Segel) is a 30-year-old man-child living in his mother’s basement in Baton Rouge. He doesn’t believe money is one of the important things in life but does believe in fate and the interconnectedness of the universe. Signs is his favorite movie. When he gets a wrongly dialed call from someone seeking “Kevin,” he takes it as a sign to seek out Kevin. Along the way he interacts with his ultra-materialistic brother Pat (Ed Helms) who is letting his marriage and other important things in life fall apart. Pat suspects his wife might be cheating on him, though it would be hard to blame her under the circumstances. The frustrated hardworking mother (Susan Sarandon) of Pat and Jeff, meantime, has a secret admirer at work. All of them end up en route to New Orleans. Events occur on the trip that are supposed to be heartwarming (I think), but to me they seem so contrived as to take the viewer (this viewer, anyway) out of the moment. The supposed denouement of the film (the revelation that Jeff is not such a loser after all) is frankly still up for debate at the end. One good deed during a crisis on a road trip is not a validation of a general lifestyle; it just means that Jeff is a nice person, which no one ever doubted.

This film has generally positive reviews, with the adjective “amiable” turning up a lot, but to me its mere 83 minutes seemed very long. Thumbs Down.

**** ****

Killing Dylan by Alastair Puddick

This mystery novel published in 2016 is enjoyable from start to finish.

Freddie Winters is a mystery writer who was college friends with fellow writer Dylan St. James. Freddie is published and modestly well-known but he has to scratch for every pound and frequently has to dodge his landlord for lack of funds. Dylan, by contrast, is enormously successful with his more literary fiction that, according to Freddie, “has me choking on my own bile. Fortunately for Dylan, however, it is the same type of stuff that has middle-aged, middle-class women recommending it to their book clubs.” If you detect resentment at Dylan’s success in that, you’re right, and Freddie avoids Dylan for that reason.

Dylan doesn’t return the ill feelings, however, and one day he shows up at the coffee shop where Freddie commonly uses the free Wi-Fi. Dylan says that someone is trying to kill him but the police aren’t taking his claims seriously. He asks for Freddie’s help as someone good with mysteries. Attacks by auto, letter bomb, and even a speargun lend credibility to Dylan’s claims. Freddie looks for a motive from Dylan’s ex-wives, doctor, publisher, and others. The writing is good, the characters engaging, and the plot twists are clever, suspenseful, and funny. Thumbs Up.

**** ****

The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018)

The plot device of an ordinary person caught up against his or her will in a spy adventure (e.g. the esteemed North by Northwest and the disposable The Man Who Knew Too Little) is an old one, but it still can work if done right. This one is done sufficiently right: it is no modern classic, but it is amusing and is full of more well-choreographed mayhem than any Bond film.

Audrey (Mila Kunis) discovers the hard way that her boyfriend Drew is an agent. When he is shot in front of her, she and her friend Morgan (Kate McKinnon), believing they are in danger whatever they do, try to complete Drew’s mission by delivering a flash drive to Vienna. It doesn’t go well. In chases from Vienna to Prague to Paris to Amsterdam to Berlin they try to stay alive as the body count mounts and they try to figure out who is on whose side. And yes, it is a comedy, sort of. Thumbs Up – not way up, but up.

Trailer: The Spy Who Dumped Me

Headshrunk Supers

In an October 31 post below regarding the first season of The Adventures of Superman, I repeated the oft-mentioned observation that superhero stories are very much of a type with ancient tales of heroes and demigods. In fact, the ancient heroes and gods turn up in modern tales with some frequency, such as Ares in Wonder Woman and most of the important characters in Percy Jackson & the Olympians.

That observation prompted a revisit to the multi-volume The Golden Bough by James George Frazer. Originally published 1890, it remains the single most important work on the origins and evolution of mythology, not just in the West but around the world. That assessment is likely to annoy a modern anthropologist, most of whom make a point of dismissing Frazer as unscientific. Yet, though his sources are literary rather than archeological and his analyses necessarily speculative, he more often than not is convincing on the fundamental points. This is why he was such an outsized influence on foremost members of the literary and intellectual scene of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, including Robert Graves (whose The White Goddess is another essential tome on mythology), W.B. Yeats, Aleister Crowley, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Campbell, T.S. Eliot, Carl Jung, and many others. He still appeals today. Camille Paglia commented that even though he might have been superseded on details, he “will remain inspirational for enterprising students seeking escape from today's sterile academic climate.”

Frazer is definitely worth a visit on his own merits. His discussions of fertility cults, resurrection myths, scapegoating, sacrifices, and more are endlessly fascinating. (Single volume abridgements of The Golden Bough are available, but if you have the time tackle the full set.) However, revisiting his work proved a misstep with regard to considering modern superheroes, who belong to a later stage of mythology. They are adventurers in the mold of Theseus, Hercules, Perseus, and Bellerophon. Frazer doesn’t ignore these completely, but the older and deeper entities such as Isis and Osiris interested him more. While I don’t regret the diversion into Frazer, more recent books on the modern superheroes themselves were, perhaps unsurprisingly, more directly useful. There is a plethora of such books from which to choose, but I went with The Avengers and Philosophy, which contains contributions from 18 philosophers, and The Psychology of Superheroes with contributions by a couple dozen psychologists. Are these authors overthinking the subject? Well, yes and no. There really are ethical questions raised in the context of comic book superhero tales, and the characters work only to the extent they reflect something about the human condition. It’s important to note that both books rely primarily on comic books as sources, not movies. The storylines there differ from the screen versions substantially. Nonetheless essential character traits are usually unchanged by the transition to screen.

Mark White, who edited the collection of essays that make up The Avengers and Philosophy gets us started by contrasting the ethical systems of Captain America (a deontologist), Iron Man (utilitarian), and Thor (virtue ethicist). The classic example to contrast the first two is the trolley car conundrum. A runaway trolley with 5 people aboard is headed for a certain lethal crash; you can prevent it by throwing a switch that diverts it onto a track where one person is standing and will definitely be killed. Do you throw the switch? A deontologist says no; it is never right to choose to kill an innocent person and that is that. A utilitarian says one death is better than 5; throw the switch. This is why Iron Man and Captain America were on opposite sides of the Civil War. Iron Man (Tony Stark) says look at the outcome, which will be better if we cooperate with the Registration Act. Captain America says forget the outcome: the Registration Act is wrong. Thor has another approach altogether. He strives to be a virtuous person: loyal, honest, brave, true, honorable and supportive of comrades even if that comrade is Loki. He doesn’t much interest himself in other ethical minutia – and that is the potential problem. One can have all those virtuous traits in a bad cause.

Other authors in the collection discuss responsibility for unintended consequences, ask if might is right, ask when ends justify means in war, and ponder the possibility of redemption. Several superheroes (e.g. Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch) had stints as villains, after all, while others (notably Black Widow) are ambiguous. Forgiveness is not much in fashion in the 21^st century, but in the comics, at least, it’s discussed. There is even a discussion of the nature of reality with regard to She-Hulk who is aware she is a character in a comic book. There also are discussions of love, which in the real modern world all too often resembles something out of a comic book. You’ll never look at the Avengers quite the same way again after this book, and that is all to the good.

The Psychology of Superheroes poses questions (and offers tentative answers) that are much more personal. For example, Robin S. Rosenberg, who edited the collection, asks in her essay, “So how different would Superman be if he had grown up in a different part of the country?” Suppose Clark had grown up in Brooklyn with unsupportive parents? What of Clark is nature and what is nurture? Robert Biswas-Diener in his essay discusses Peter Parker. Yes, we all know the guilt trip over his uncle’s death that led to his crime-fighting, but is that the reason he continues? Biswas-Diener thinks not. After all, he has done more than his share taking down supervillains, but he doesn’t retire. Biswas-Diener thinks he simply enjoys the opportunity to use “the full range of his strengths.” Other authors discuss such various topics as the effects of prejudice (Magneto), the deliberate simplification of one’s public persona to reassure others (Superman), and the employment of the dark side of one’s character (Batman) to positive ends. Chuck Tate suggests, “Maybe this apparent contradiction explains why Superman and Batman can’t get along. Superman knows that the Batman is closer in motivations and behavior to the villains.” There is much more on the expression and suppression of aggression and anger, on psychopathy, on the psychology of readers of superhero comics, and on the inmates of Arkham Asylum.

The reader can’t go wrong with either book. For those who feel a twinge of guilt at “wasting” time on superficial superhero comics and movies, the books offer a way to turn them into meaningful entertainment. By sharing our insights from them with those in our company who just seek pure escapism, we thereby can be supervillains. That prospect has an allure, which is something upon which Dr. Rosenberg might have an opinion.

Suzi Quatro – Official Suburban Superman

Rolling Doubles

For reasons I can’t explain there is a small pleasantness to numbers in which the digits are the same, as when the odometer of a car turns to 44,444.4 miles or when the time is 11:11. Again, I don’t know why. It’s not as though I pop champagne corks to celebrate such events, but if I notice one I might smile. Perhaps that is odd. Perhaps not. As that may be, a birthday in a couple days will be a double. I would smile more about it if it were a lower number, but one takes what one can get. It brings to mind earlier doubles.

11: Age 12 is normally the peak of boyhood – presumably of girlhood, too, though I have no direct experience of that. 12-year-old boys (generalizing, of course) are confident, bold, and surprisingly competent. (The majority of adult Americans, including college graduates, get by on a typical 12-year-old’s math and reading skills, either because they never exceed that level or because they backslide to it after a brief bump-up in high school and college.) At 13 all that boyhood confidence drowns hopelessly under a wave of hormones and teen angst. The highest stage of childhood is traded for a new status as the lowliest of teenagers – a status underlined by a transition to high school. I effectively skipped 12. For me 11 was as close to that exalted position as I got. The reason is a peculiarity of private schools.  Private secondary schools traditionally are Grades 7-12 (Forms I-VI) and mine was no exception. So, “high school” for me started in Grade 7 at age 11, thereby vaulting me (socially, if not numerically) completely over 12 all the way to the self-conscious and awkward teens – made extra awkward by being the youngest in my class and therefore, in that first year, the youngest in the whole school.

Digging Anthracite 

All the same, 11 was a good year. I put 6^th Grade behind me. In the summer that followed in those pre-videogame days there was much summer biking, playing in woods and streams, and (on rainy days) model-building. Random memory: in early November a black mare named Anthracite ran off on me despite my constant tug on the reins. She ran until she reached a stream at which point she planted her feet at the edge. I didn’t stop. Splash.

22: After a very mixed 21 in which a happy college graduation was followed by post-graduation blues and anomie, I regained some footing at 22. Travel helped. Random memory: While driving across the Utah salt flats from Nevada to Salt Lake City the white salt reflected the blue sky perfectly. So, it looked for all the world as if the mountains beyond the flats were floating in the air. 22 was a good year, too.

33: By this time I owned my own little cabin in the woods and had met a few other of the usual “adult independence” benchmarks, much to my own surprise. This was a transitional year in significant ways. My youthful hard-partying days phased out during the year; I became virtually a teetotaler by the end of it. My first really serious romantic relationship had gone south at age 27, and I spent the next several years deliberately avoiding anything serious in favor of casual tête-à-têtes only. Yet, by the end of the year I was in an exclusive relationship again and remained in one for 3.5 years, a personal record.

Random memory: My significant other was arrested. She didn’t do it. She had a similar name, a similar description, and the same model car as a woman wanted for robbery. After being stopped on the highway, she was released when it was clear she wasn’t the suspect, but not before a fingerprint check.

44: The calm before the storm. Let’s just leave it at that.

Random memory: My tuxedo cat named Succotash sat on the couch next to me. She suddenly popped up her head and looked around with a wild look in her eyes. She leapt off the couch, ran the length of the house to my bedroom, jumped up onto the bed, and vomited on my pants, which lay on top. It was a deliberate choice to throw up there in particular.

55: The calm after the storm.

Random memory: Every now and then I revisit high school skills that have faded. I’m not sure why I engage in this strange behavior given that the only reason the skills fade is that I don’t have a need to use them regularly. Perhaps it’s an unconscious (until now) way to deny aging. If so, it doesn’t work. Anyway, because it coincided with other events I can place securely in time, I remember it was age 55 that I last revisited my old algebra text, which I still had (and have) on a shelf. (I didn’t have the temerity to tackle trig or calculus.) Sadly, I’d probably have to do it again before successfully factoring any but the simplest quadratic equations, and what is f(x) anyhow?

**** ****

The next double is almost here, but just “almost” so there isn’t much to say about it yet. With any luck (and I wish the same luck to the reader on whatever highway number on which he or she may be traveling) the route through the next year of life will be the full length, will have few potholes, and will not be without kicks.

Nat King Cole – (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66 (1946)

Wanda at 48

The first Kurt Vonnegut story I ever read was Cat’s Cradle, a quirky apocalyptic novel published in 1963. I picked it off a drugstore paperback bookrack during some summer month in 1966 or 1967. Cat’s Cradle is science fiction, more or less, and I commonly read science fiction recreationally during my teens as I still do today. It already had something of a cult status, but I wasn’t aware of that back then, nor was I familiar with the author. I’m pretty sure I picked it out based solely on the description on the cover. Thereafter, however, I did make a point of seeking out Vonnegut, usually buying the hardcovers of his new works rather than waiting for the paperbacks. As the 1960s closed, Vonnegut tried his hand at drama. His play Happy Birthday, Wanda June, starring Kevin McCarthy and Marsha Mason, opened at the de Lys in New York on October 7, 1970 and closed March 14, 1971.

I was a broke college freshman in Washington, DC, at the time, so I didn’t see it then, but I did buy the book, which I have read with pleasure repeatedly since and still own. There also was a 1971 movie starring Rod Steiger and Susannah York. It is not uncommon for authors to hate movie adaptations of their work, sometimes with cause and sometimes without; Stephen King famously disliked Stanley Kubrick’s award-winning version of The Shining, for instance. Vonnegut in the intro to Between Time and Timbuktu had this to say: “I might as well say something about the filming of my play Happy Birthday, Wanda June. It was one of the most embarrassing movies ever made, and I am happy it sank like a stone.” In truth the movie isn’t as bad as all that. It isn’t actually bad at all, though there is no denying that the script, which repeatedly breaks the fourth wall, works far better as a play with a live audience than on the screen. I was pleased to get a chance last Saturday (48 years late) finally to see it on an off-Broadway stage.

Harold Ryan is a Hemingwayesque character: soldier, mercenary, hunter, and adventurer. He has been lost in the rain forest for eight years in the company of Looseleaf Harper, who dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. Harold is presumed dead, so his wife Penelope (an obvious nod The Odyssey) has been dating a vacuum cleaner salesman named Herb and the very pacifistic Dr. Norbert Woodley. Both of them are despised by Paul, the son of Penelope and Harold. It is Harold’s birthday, so, in an attempt to please Paul, Herb buys a birthday cake even though it reads “Happy Birthday, Wanda June.” Wanda June is a 9-year-old who was hit by an ice cream truck earlier that day, which is why the cake was never picked up at the bakery. She provides some surreal narration as do other deceased characters. Harold is not dead, and his sudden arrival home creates an uproar. During his eight years in the forest a major cultural shift has occurred with regard to sex. He is dismayed to find that his notion of manliness is an atavism and that his wife is no longer the air-headed carhop he married.

The Wheelhouse production of this play currently at The Duke theater made some directorial choices at variance with both the original production and the movie including a different ending. In 1970 Kurt Vonnegut experimented with different endings, so it is possible the Wheelhouse ending was one of them, but it is not the ultimate one in 1971 or the one found in the published play. It is one that puts Harold in a far worse light, which is in keeping with the Wheelhouse choice to present him as animalistic (literally sniffing around) and crude to point of pantomiming sex acts. McCarthy and Steiger in the role, by contrast, made him gruff, blustery, and offensive, but not a comic book villain: villain, yes, but not to such an extreme. Since Vonnegut remarked on his own inability “to make Harold or anybody thoroughly vile,” I think McCarthy and Steiger had it right. The point, after all, is that there is some appeal to Harold – he did after all fight Nazis and explore the wild among other impressive things – even though his time has passed to the point that he has (without changing) become a villain. The 21^st century tendency to portray opponents – not just on stage but in real life – as not just wrong but evil might have influenced the presentation of Harold as so much more detestable. That said, the play still works, and I like everything else about the Wheelhouse presentation. The surreal elements were handled well within the limits of the sets, and the small cast was used creatively. All of the actors, including Jason O’Connell (Harold Ryan), were enjoyable and effective. Vonnegut’s offbeat sensibility is as captivating as ever and his dark humor still bites.

Despite my reservations above, this is still very much a Thumbs Up review. It is worth catching at The Duke during its final weeks. Happy Birthday, Wanda June is revived elsewhere around the country from time to time as well, and I recommend not waiting 48 years to see it.

Introductory Scene from The Wheelhouse Production of Happy Birthday, Wanda June

November Homestead

I like summer in toto better than autumn in toto, but November nonetheless is my favorite individual month. There is Thanksgiving, of course, and a good excuse to overeat is always welcome in my house. Additionally, I have a birthday late in the month, and who among us has so little of Narcissus in him or her not to enjoy a celebration of one’s own existence? Several other anniversaries and circumstances also contribute to making November just a little extra special in my book.

No month is perfect, however, and one serious drawback that November shares with February, May, and August is that quarterly property taxes are due on the 1^st. New Jersey has the highest property taxes in the nation bar none, a personal income tax second only to California, and a ludicrously hard to calculate sales tax of 6.625%. Living costs are high (22% over the national average) and incomes stagnant. Moneywise magazine placed NJ as the second worst state in which to retire. (Kiplinger more kindly ranked it 4^th worst, after New York, Massachusetts, and Maryland.) So, it is no surprise that NJ has the highest net interstate out-migration of any state, with 63% more residents leaving than moving in each year. Consequently, even amid the general pleasantness of November, while writing oversize checks for the powers-that-be to squander I’m apt to consider whether to join the exodus and enjoy future Novembers elsewhere. So far I’ve resisted the call of the wallet, mostly out of nostalgia though this is a costly indulgence.

In a mobile world in which people move from one abode to another thousands of miles distant with scarcely a thought, I’m an oddly atavistic duck who lives 11 miles (18km) from the hospital where I was born. Except for my 4 college years in Washington DC, this is as far away from that point as my residence ever has been. I’ve traveled, of course, but home base always has been in close vicinity to where I presently reside. There is something… well… homey about it. It is hard to turn onto any local street without evoking memories: some good and some not so good, but all of them formative. I’m only 3 miles (5km) from my old prep school, 4 (6.5km) from my old brokerage office, and 10 miles (16km) from Morristown High School where my parents met. I live on a street I helped construct (my dad was a real estate developer); I built by hand several of the granite crossdrain headwalls. I live in a house built by my parents. There are traces of personal history everywhere, most of them invisible except to me. The tax collectors may chase me out yet, but for now I’ll pay the premium to stay.

Raked, reseeded, and hayed

Change is as much a constant locally, of course, as it is in the world at large, and that is fine; I still can see the old layers beneath the new. For example, I noticed a few days ago that one personal trace has transitioned from detectable to undetectable to an objective observer. As long ago as 1978 I gave a driving lesson to my girlfriend of the time. (For a more detailed account, see The Driving Lesson.) It did not end well. Though 25, as a resident of NYC she had never gotten a license. The lesson took place on the street where I now live, which was newly built in ’78 with no houses yet constructed. Things went wrong at the cul-de-sac when she failed to distinguish between the brake and the accelerator. With the accelerator pushed to the floor, we leapt the curb in reverse and climbed halfway up a grassy slope. Up until this very year, the faint traces of those car tracks on the slope remained barely visible if one looked closely enough. No longer. The slope recently has been raked, reseeded, and hayed, so the tracks are gone. I still can see them, though, even if no one else can.

Garbage - Driving Lesson

November 10 Intraleague Derby Bout

In its final bout of the 2018 season, the Jerzey Derby Brigade won – and lost. It was an intraleague game in which the JDB divided itself into two ad hoc teams: Turkey and Tofu. (As someone with vegetarians and carnivores at my Thanksgiving table, I’m familiar with this particular division.) The question was how closely the skill sets in the two groups were balanced.

Early on, the scale seemed tipped toward Tofu. #8 Lil MO Peep (Tofu) put the first 10 points on board starting a trend for the team that would last through the first half. The blockers didn’t noticeably pull their hits on their own league-mates, with Lil MO Peep (Tofu) taken down hard and #3684 Californikate (Turkey) stepping over the top of a downed blocker, and #128 Val Royale (Tofu) in a late power jam knocking on #66 Little Loca. Despite a power jam in which Californikate added 23 points for Turkey, Tofu finished still in the lead, 87-96.

In the second half the scale wobbled as a series of hit-and-quit jams closed the gap between the two teams and put Turkey into a 1-point lead. #235 A-Bomb (Turkey) expanded the lead to 114-108. #8 Lil MO Peep recovered the lead for Tofu in a power jam 118-125. #8 Lil MO Peep, #2 Tasty Twolips, and #235 A-Bomb all showed the success smaller jammers can have, able as they are to exploit holes that taller skaters such as (still successful) #3684 Californikate often have to power through. Blocking and jamming remained competitive and included close jammer-on-jammer action including between #235 A-Bomb vs. #8 Lil MO Peep and #66 Little Loca vs. #66 ShenAnakin Skywalker. In the final minutes Turkey edged ahead. In the final jam #3684 Californikate (Turkey) pushed through tough blocking and called the jam when the clock ran out.

Final score: 186 – 173 in favor of Turkey

Happy Thanksgiving

MVPs:

Tofu:

#66 ShenAnakin Skywalker (jammer)

#64 Madeleine Alfight (blocker)

Turkey

#3684 Californikate (jammer)

#530 Deadpoole Slap (blocker)

Scores 2018 Season

The Road Less Traveled

For armchair historians, personal travel journals breathe life into the past as few other documents do. They are no substitute for broader histories to be sure. A few writers deliberately combine travelogue and history as Herodotus (c.430 BCE) did so extravagantly, but in most cases the historical notes in travel journals are incidental, as when Pausanias (c. 150 CE) gives background to the sights in his Travels in Greece, or when Bill Bryson describes a road trip around the 1980s USA. Nonetheless, journals give a far better sense of what it was actually like to experience a given time and place than a general history ever can. One short but interesting account, which I revisited this past weekend, is that of Sarah Kemble Knight who traveled from Boston to New York in 1704.

I live in the outer suburbs of NYC and have traveled to Boston and back numerous times over the years. The trip is less than 5 hours by car or 4 hours by train. (I’ve flown there, too, but that is pointless; yes, the flight itself is only 50 minutes but the time spent to, from, and at the airports wipes out any advantage.) I couldn’t help but imagine what the journey was like when the paths were less well-worn and the en route conveniences scarcer. In the center of my hometown a restaurant is still in business that opened as a stagecoach stop in 1742, but even this establishment was decades in the future from the perspective of Madam Knight.

The widow Sarah Kemble Knight ran a boarding house in Boston. Leaving her mother and offspring to run things in Boston, she embarked at age 38 on an overland trip on horseback to New York in order to settle her husband’s estate. I-95 was not an option. She was unaccompanied except for the several guides she employed in sequence along the way (most of them carrying post), often on routes that scarcely qualified as paths through largely unpopulated land, “the way being very narrow, and on each side the trees and bushes gave us very unpleasant welcomes with their branches and bows, which we could not avoid, it being so exceedingly dark.” Rivers needed to be forded or canoed: in the latter case the horses either swam or were rafted.

Sarah has chances to eat at the post stops on her journey but is rarely impressed by the rudimentary fare, “what cabbage I swallowed serv’d me as a Cudd the whole day after.” There are inns, of sorts, along the way, but most are no more than private homes with a room or two for travelers. She describes one room as “a little black Lento, which was almost filled with the bedsted, which was so high I was forced to climb on a chair to gitt up to the wretched bed that lay on it.” Sometimes, though, she was forced to rely on the kindness of strangers who did not host guests as a business; one night she stayed in a hut with clapboards “so asunder that the light came through everywhere…The floor the bear earth; no windows but such as the thin covering afforded; the door tyed on with a cord in the place of hinges… The family were the old man, his wife and two children; all and every part being the picture of poverty…I Blest myself that I was not one of this miserable crew.” She nonetheless appreciated the roof for the night and picked up a “Tattertailed guide” who also stopped by the hut: “as ugly as he was I was glad to ask him to show me the way to Saxtons.”

Sarah finally had a good breakfast when she reached New Rochelle. She liked New York when she got there: “The Cittie of New York is a pleasant, well compacted place.” New York at the time (population 4937 in 1700) was smaller than Boston (population 6700). She ate well there, too, and had good accommodations. The trip to NYC had taken two weeks. She did not return to Boston until 5 months after her departure. Her journal remained in manuscript until 1825 when it was published in tandem with another manuscript as The Journals of Madam Knight, and Rev. Mr. Buckingham: From the Original Manuscripts, Written in 1704 and 1710. The Introduction to the 1825 edition remarks on the comparative ease of travel in the modern 19^th century with its comfortable inns and “elegant steamboats.”

It is striking to a 21^st century reader that at no point does Sarah Knight express any concern for her safety from any of the rough characters she encounters. This is not because she has a particularly brave nature: she has no qualms about expressing terror at other risks such as drowning in rivers or even just traveling at night, but she doesn’t fear harm from people. Nor is this proof of naiveté, for her trust proves well-founded. While some of the men and women she meets are gruff or rude (or drunk), none is in any way menacing and most are helpful, though a few need to be nudged in that direction.

John Waters thumbing to SF

This is still more often true today than we are apt to acknowledge. True, there are human predators out there as there always have been, and nowadays their crimes are very high profile. Yet, while petty thieves and con artists are common, the odds of encountering the lethal kind of predator are low. Film director John Waters in 2012 put this to the test at age 66 by hitchhiking from Baltimore to San Francisco despite being told by all his friends that it was much too dangerous in “today’s world.” He was given rides by a cop, a male nurse, an indie rock band in a van, a Republican town councilman, and truckers, among others. All were at least polite. Most were kind. A farmer in Kentucky thought he was a homeless man and tried to give him $10 for a meal when he let him out of the truck. John made it to SF alive and well. This is as I would have predicted, but it says something about modern expectations that the experiment was deemed extreme enough to be worth a book (Carsick by John Waters).

I traveled more when I was younger than lately. My longest single road trip was about 10,000 miles (16,000 km) driving around the USA for a couple of months in 1975. Most of the time was spent on extended stopovers. When actually on the road I always exceeded each day the 216 miles (346 km) that Madam Knight journeyed in two weeks – not always by a lot (Phoenix to Las Vegas, for instance is just 300 miles) but it always was enough to have seemed a lot in 1704. (I didn’t keep a journal in ’75 but later reflected back on the peregrination in short pieces here and there as in The Roxy Caution.) In some ways, however, a horseback journey through semi-wild country sounds more fun than cruising the Interstates, even if the cabbage encountered on the way repeats.

Canned Heat - On the Road Again