Not Exactly a Winning Proposition

A

ll things posed at the entry-level to Valhalla come past a frog; hell is for Christians. It’s not a Norse world, anyway—even if God created the Norse, much as weevils make their presence known to flowers in the appropriate season. They are like human beings in that respect. I mean, carrots are okay, but they’re also a little bit lame—like eating them all day. Do you eat carrots all day? What is the story of the frog and the cricket? I don’t quite remember it from days of yore, but the frog ends up eating the cricket anyway.

Galileo Galilei RIP [2007]

[Originally posted 15 February 2007]

Y

e men of Galilei, why stand ye gazing up into the heavens? So an opponent of Galileo is said to have preached—the reference is to Acts 1:11—in opposition to his astronomical discoveries. Galileo’s tiny telescope was not even as good as the binoculars my father used when I was six or so to show me the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter, but with it he turned the world upside down, as Martin Luther put it. Mountains on the moon, spots on the sun, the phases of Venus—these things may seem commonplace now, but they were revolutionary at the beginning of the seventeenth century. They weren’t in the Bible, or Aristotle, or any other authority from antiquity, and they suggested ideas that challenged the common sense notion of the world that then prevailed.

That the solid earth we stand on might be hurling at some inconceivable speed through space is counter-intuitive, to say the least. But if we accept it—and the idea was by no means new when Galileo started peering through his primitive telescope—might not the other bodies we see be worlds as well? The moon, Venus, Jupiter? Could they be inhabited? And why hadn’t the authorities, either religious or secular, said anything about all this? And if God wasn’t up there sitting above the sphere of the fixed stars, keeping everything in motion, turning the cosmic mechanism with a gigantic crank—well, then, where was he?

In the end Galileo, and Kepler, and Newton, and those that followed them would crack the tiny medieval cosmos open like an egg, revealing the splendor of the universe we know today. More than that, as time and distance commingle, we get to look back in time, and see the universe as it was. It’s been one hell of a trip from the tube Galileo looked through to the massive arrays of mirrors here on earth and the Hubble out in space, but he was there at the beginning, and he helped to start it all.

And in the News [1994]

[From my pre-weblog, 14 February 1994]

A

lex Efty of the Associated Press reports that “Iranian leaders remain adamant that all Muslims have a religious duty to kill” Salmon Rushdie, because some members of the faith chose to take offense at one of his books. He adds that this decree “was en­dorsed by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which rep­resents 51 Muslim states.” If this is true, then Islam has passed judgment on itself, and joining hands with the white-robed night-riders of the Ku Klux Klan, the brown-shirted shock troops of the Third Reich, and the grey-suited gay-bashers of the evangelical right, now marches off to the gallows reserved for the outcasts from humanity. Islam is bankrupt, and no longer deserves to exist. [source: Oregonian, 14 February 1994, A5]

In the same paper I read that Oliver North, the man who supplied weapons to America’s enemies to finance his political projects, while wearing the uniform of the United States, is running for the Senate in Virginia. It’s a measure of the bank­ruptcy of the Republican party that they can stomach putting up this near-trai­tor as a candidate. As a Senator he would be privy to many of our secrets, our defenses, and god only knows what he might take it into his head to do with them the next time he got a notion to indulge in his own private foreign policy. He should not be elected to the Senate—and currently he is far behind in the polls—but if he is elected, he should not be seated. There is no place for traitors there.

Ku Klux Katholicism [2007]

[Originally posted 13 February 2007]

S

core two for Bill Donohue and the pack of bigots who support him and his Katholic Inquisition. I hear on the news that the two bloggers he falsely accused of intolerance (without a shred of evidence by the way—see Catholic Bigots at Work) have now resigned. Well, why not? If Turner Broadcasting can pay for cleansing Boston of imaginary aliens, I suppose John Edwards can pay for ridding his campaign of imaginary bigots. Of course I would have second thoughts about voting for Edwards now, after the way he bungled this whole business, except that I wouldn't be voting for him in any case, what with being a Republican and all.

And the world continues to turn. I can’t help but feel that these Ku Klux Katholics need to get out in the real world a bit more. There’s real anti-Catholic bias out there, without making things up.

#1 The Stranger

The banshees howl, the mountains belch forth smoke
The lake retreats and the fishes die
The superior man takes notes and feeds his fire

Forget it.
No blame.

Commentaries

An unarmed man has no business on a battlefield.

The banshees howl, the outsider can only stand and watch. He has no understanding. The superior man takes notes and uses them to start a fire.

Fragments above, disorder below. The shadows unite. There is no hope.

Interpretation

Here the subject is surrounded by fragmented and meaningless events and perceptions. He cannot act, for he cannot affect the confusions; he cannot learn, for there is nothing for him to learn; he can only watch. In Gnostic mythology this is the fundamental state of all men. Taking part in the confusions surrounding the subject can only bring further illusions. No action is possible.

Memories of the Portland Zoological Gardens

W

hen I was young going to the zoo was a favorite excursion. Even then I had mixed feelings about it; I liked seeing the animals in real life, not just as illustrations in books or passing images on TV, but I really didn’t like the idea of them being locked up, unable to move freely through the jungle, or race across the grasslands, or soar over the canyons. One scene has stuck with me vividly from an early visit—this mountain lion pacing in a cage that was obviously too small for him. Over and over again he would cross from the right side of his cage in front of us, turn when he reached the left side, leap up onto a raised area there, cross from left to right at the back of his cage, turn towards us when he reached the right side, and cross again in front of us. That was his life, as far as I could tell. Pacing the same old pattern day after day after day. It filled me with a horror I have no words to express. The one good thing to look forward to (adults assured me) was that the new zoo was almost finished, and that soon he would have a more spacious environment to live in.

It must have been late in 1959 when I saw him again; the Portland Zoological Gardens opened that year at its new site, and the big cats were not moved there (it seems) until November. I was eager to see him in his new location. And I was not disappointed. The new enclosure was much larger; he had space to move about and stretch his legs a bit. And there he was in one corner of it, still pacing as I’d seen him before, tracing the walls of his former cage, endlessly going from one intangible wall to the next, even jumping up onto something at the corner and dropping back down again. It was heartbreaking to see.

Mind you, that wasn’t the end of the story. On later excursions I would see him again, wandering about his enclosure, seemingly more relaxed and less neurotic than when I’d first seen him. But that image of him still stuck in the cage of his own mind sticks with me—not as a lesson, exactly, but as a depressing reminder of our internalized limitations.

On a possibly different early visit to the new zoo, when the new zoo was still new, I had a disquieting encounter with a raven located somewhere near the entrance. (I believe this was at the Portland Zoo; it is barely possible that this is a memory of my one visit to the San Diego zoo or the like.) In any case, I addressed him. If you’re a raven, I said, say “nevermore.” Come on, say “nevermore.” The bird stared at me, and then, with the air of somebody who had heard that one way too often, remarked, “Edgar Allen Poe.” He was silent for a moment, and then muttered somewhat less distinctly, “Edgar Allen Poe” again, as if to himself.

In April 1962 people from all over flocked to what I still thought of as the new zoo; one of the elephants, Belle, had given birth, the first elephant born in the Western Hemisphere in 44 years (or something like that). It was a big event, anyway, and I was there in the crowds that went to see him when he was first put on view. The zoo was incredibly crowded, and it was a long wait to get close enough to see anything, and when I did get to a good vantage point, Belle had interposed her bulk between us and her baby—Fuzzy Face (or something like that) they were calling him then. And then came one of the zoo moments I have never forgotten—out of the straw emerged a thin pinkish trunk, incredibly small, as the baby reached for his mother.

And that was my first and most memorable sight of little Packy—as he would soon be named. There was a contest, if I recall correctly, and I think I submitted a name myself, though I don’t recall what it was. I didn’t think much of the name chosen, but I was probably prejudiced, and in any case it didn’t matter. Packy grew to be tall, possibly one of the tallest elephants of his kind, and he had offspring, though I don’t know if any of them survive.

I saw him often on later visits to the zoo—but I won’t be seeing him again. Packy was put down the day before yesterday.

Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel

I

t seems that 10 February is the Feast of St. Paul’s Shipwreck in Malta, and Fenkil Day in Eritrea, and while those are doubtless worthy holidays in their way, neither of them inspire me with any thoughts at all, worthy or unworthy. The worthy Sabine Baring-Gould tells us it is the feast day of such notable figures as St. Scholastica (Monte Cassino), St. Trumwine, St. William of Maleval, and Saint Austrebertha. Wikipedia tells me that Saint Austrebertha once talked a wolf into carrying the laundry belonging to the convent on the grounds that the wolf had killed a donkey whose job it was; the wolf supposedly carried the laundry for them for the rest of his life. Why the wolf agreed to this the article doesn’t explain. Nor, for that matter, what language she and the wolf conversed in.

Voice Fiddle and Flute No Longer Be Mute [2011]

[Originally posted on 9 February 2011]

I

 see in the world at large that some pop singer is in trouble for mangling the US national anthem at a major sporting event. To be honest I’m not quite clear on who exactly Christina Aguilera is—an ex-Mouseketeer or something?—or what is the significance of the Superbowl in American culture. Early twenty-first century US history is way outside my field of study. Still, however, no matter my level of incompetency, I feel a few observations are in order.

We don’t really require much of a national anthem. It should be singable by the average untrained citizen, for one thing—no difficult intervals, range not much more than an octave, no tricky chord changes—and the words should be relatively simple. It should sound reasonably decent whether sung a cappella or played by a military brass band. It should invite people to sing along with it. “Paint it Black” would make a good national anthem.

“The Star-Spangled Banner,” however, fails on all counts. The music, with its octave-and-a-half range, seems made for the unearthly banshee howls of a theremin rather than a normal human voice, and the words are impenetrable in their obscurity. “Oh, say, can you see by the dawn’s early light what so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming, whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, o’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?” Try diagramming that sentence sometime. Hey, now that the sun’s come up, can you still see the stars and stripes flying? You know, that thing we saluted so proudly last night and saw glimpses of it streaming over the ramparts while we watched the battle last night? That thing? Is it still there?

I mean, it must have been one hell of a moving moment for Mr. F. S. Key, held prisoner on a British ship till the battle ended, to “see by the dawn’s early light” that the American flag was still flying over Ft. McHenry, showing that the British attack had failed and at least for the moment the city of Baltimore had not fallen. But you had to be there. What does the defence of Ft. McHenry mean to a twenty-first century American citizen? Not much, apparently—as the first draft of a film presentation that escaped into the interwebs showed. Its author apparently thought that Ft. Henry (as he called it) was under attack during the Revolutionary War, not the misnamed War of 1812. The ace researcher whose account he used failed on even the simplest of facts.

And not to put too fine a point on it, Key himself doesn’t seem to have taken the thing too seriously. His piece was a double-retread—not only was the melody an old English drinking song (“To Anacreon in Heav’n”) but the words were recycled from an earlier song he’d written about the return of Stephen Decatur from the war with the Barbary pirates:

In the conflict resistless, each toil they endured,
’Till their foes fled dismayed from the war’s desolation;
And pale beamed the Crescent, its splendor obscured
By the light of the Star Spangled flag of our nation.
Where each radiant star gleamed a meteor of war,
And the turbaned heads bowed to its terrible glare,
Now, mixed with the olive, the laurel shall wave,
And form a bright wreath for the brows of the brave.

Same tune, same star-spangled flag, same rhyming of wave with brave. Originality clearly was not Key’s strong suit.

And, you know, revisiting Key’s published output, I’m struck by one thing. To describe Key as a mediocre poet would be wrong. No, not just wrong—it would be a flat-out lie. It would be such over-the-top flattery that even Donald Rumsfeld would choke on the bald-faced mendacity of it. Key was a wretched poet. Not as bad as Edward de Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford, perhaps the brass-standard of wretched poets, but a vile wordsmith from the same misbegotten tribe. Sham religiosity, pedantry, forced rhymes, pedestrian observations—gack. Consider the eighth and final quatrain of his exquisite “To a Rose-Bud”:

Then haste, and when, with anxious step,
Thy growth to mark, I next shall walk,
Then let me see thy blushing head
Bend with its dewy weight thy stalk.

Or here’s Key apparently channeling the spirit of a backwoods pre-Victorian schoolgirl:

Farewell, ye once delightful scenes! farewell!
No more your charms can soothe my aching heart;
These long-drawn sighs, these flowing tears, can tell
How much I grieve, sweet scenes! from you to part.
  [—opening verse of “Stanzas”]

And here’s Key picturing some joyous future scene when the deaf will finally hear:

They shall hear the trumpet’s fearful blast,
And the crash of the rending tomb,
And the sinner’s cry of agony,
As he wakes to his dreaded doom.
  [—from “Lines Given to William Darlington, a Deaf and Dumb Boy”]

I bet the deaf kid could hardly wait for that moment. Seriously, this is our best? In a country that boasts the likes of Carl Sandburg and Wallace Stevens, this incompetent hack is our National Lyricist? And as for the music—again, in the land of Charles Ives, Duke Ellington, and Kurt Cobain we have to fall back on a tune written by John Stafford Smith, a composer who is not only obscure, but British to boot?

Who picked this thing, anyway? Wasn’t that John Philip Sousa, composer of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and other patriotic marches? Why the hell didn’t he write something himself? At the very least it would pass the brass band test.

It’s not like we don’t have a wealth of patriotic songs to choose from. What about “My Country ’Tis of Thee?” It’s singable, anyway. Okay, the lyrics suck and the tune is the British anthem “God Save the King”, but even so it’s better than what we got stuck with. And there’s “America the Beautiful”, right? Samuel Ward’s music is reasonably melodic, and not too hard for the average voice to wrap itself around. But the words…

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears.

Yeah, there’s an image to conjure with. If human beings aren’t weeping, who, or what is, in these alabaster cities? Crocodiles? Okay, how about Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic”?

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”

Say, what? That’s pretty strange stuff coming from a Unitarian, not hardly PC at all. And way too much God for our modern secular state. But it's stirring, you gotta admit.

Or we could consider Woody Guthrie’s paean to mindless greed, “This Land Was Made for You and Me”. Or Israel Baline’s trite but reliable “God Bless America.” They're both noted for their sing-along qualities at any rate. I mean, there are other possibilities.

I’ll give you one example. It’s singable, it passes the brass band test, it’s got eagles flying and freedom ringing and all that good stuff.

To hear the sound of freedom many gave their lives;
They fought for you and me.
Those memories will always live inside us,
And now it’s our time to be free.

Where the eagles fly I will soon be there.
If you want to come along with me my friend,
Say the words and you’ll be free
From the mountains to the sea
We’ll fight for freedom again.

Okay, maybe it sounds a bit more like an air force recruiting song than a patriotic hymn, but what about it? Anyone for Manowar?

Why Hens Have No Teeth [2006]

[Originally posted 8 February 2006]

K

eep the mind perfectly still, place the fingers on the home keys, and begin typing. Whatever emerges—that’s mindscum. Today's episode of mindscum features the Byzantine Majority Text, or maybe the Beatles' 1964 Australian Tour—it’s sort of hard to tell the difference. The vitriol that has been thrown is sort of amazing, when you think about it. How much difference is there, say between the Textus Receptus and Ringo Starr? or between Jimmy Nicol and the Byzantine Majority Text? And if they can all be added together, do we really gain anything? Nicol I can’t help but feel sorry for—where do you go from here? asks a reporter. Well, Ringo’s going to join them in Brisbane, and then it’s off to oblivion for me says Jimmy. And he disappears from the scene, a handsome guy with a drumset and no future. Still, it beats being a Spinal Tap drummer, I suppose.

But the Byzantine Majority Text—there’s a losing concept. Let’s count the readings, and see how many variants it takes to fill the Albert Hall. Create your own New Testament. Wanted: three thousand Greek calligraphers to write new version of the gospels; must be able to follow copy with ninety-five percent fidelity…. Who comes up with these things? Of course we could fall back on the Textus Receptus, the Mr. Ed of the textual world. Sure we know who created it, and when, and on what basis—but hey, Erasmus got it straight from the horse’s mouth, or maybe from the Holy Ghost. Would he lie?

Throw the two into a pit and let them fight it out—two doddering old lamplighters on their last legs, throwing punches into the air and hoping for the best. Pitiful, just pitiful, as Jed Clampett might have observed. Like watching the Old Globe text duke it out with Pope’s—is there some point to this? Where is Dr. Gonzo when you need him?

I wonder if Jimmy Nicol and Pete Best ever got together. Them two, Andy White, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr could get together and form an all ex-Beatles drummer band. It would probably have as much validity as the Byzantine Majority Text. At least you could dance to it.

From the Notebook of James Erskine Harvey, Writer

[A passage from the notebook of James Erskine Harvey, a character in Cellophane Visions, written 7 February 1981]

S

o far the trip has been fairly dull. No one else seems to be able to get into the spirit of the thing. I have had to interject all the fun myself, which is hard work. I don’t mind it though. I am afraid that my jokes and clever sayings have been going right over the heads of my companions. They are not a very sharp bunch. I have been giving the benefit of my entertainment to even the people on the street who we go past. Some of the chicks have responded favorably to my lines; if we were not speeding by at 60 mph I would have scored a score of times I bet.

Now we have stopped to eat. Our waitress is wearing a short skirt. Her name is Deborah. None of my companions is very observent. They have not noticed her.

Rattlesnake, Cascadia. I am not sure of the date. We have spent the night in a motel here. They had rat poison in the refrigerator and the lampshades are made of plastic trays with holes cut in them. They pictures on the walls are jigsaw puzzles glued together. We did not tell the proprietors how many of us there were, which was just as well because it would have cost us more money if they knew. They say that anyone staying after nine will be charged for another day so everyone is packing to get out of here and get an early start before they get up.

Nowhere, Nirvana. We have stopped here to eat. This little town has historical interest, for it was here that the Silicon Kid met his dismal end in a gun battle with Sheriff Hawk. He was only 23 at the time. We are buying hamburgers and stuff at a fast food joint. I read all about it in one of those historical signs they put up along side the road.

Dusty, dry, the road stretches before us like an endless ribbon on a typewriter. Beside it are the skulls and bones of unfortunate creatures that were not fast enough in crossing the road and whose internal parts in consequence lie bleaching under the hot desert sun. They impress one with the impermanence of life in this world. Is there another world to which one goes after death? I often wonder. Or is death simply the end for us all, the end of the road of life? Other people never think of things like that, but are content to take things as they come, without asking questions. Sometimes I wish that I too was like ordinary people.

The next town is Deadwood. It is more than fifty miles away. It is not as hot as I had expected it to be but that is because it is November.

The road of life. If life is a road where do we find the road signs? Are they the words of the prophets and sages of antiquity, or are they written inside our heads? Do we each of us have to find our own road signs? And what if we should come to a bridge that has been washed out by a torrent? Is that the end, or can we get across it to the other side?

Pointless, Aimless, Graceless, and Feckless [2007]

[Originally posted 6 February 2007]

I

 see in the news that Homeland Security has taken time out from its important mission of keeping medicine out of the hands of old ladies to repel an invasion of Mooninites in Boston. Orson Welles must be having a good laugh, wherever he is today. And somebody or other has kidnapped an Iranian ambassador in Iraq using American equipment—shall we start a pool now on who exactly is responsible? Is this payback for the Iranians seizing American diplomats back in the bad old days before The Hidden Hand took charge of everything?

Isn’t it high time that we disband the department of Homeland Security? And who picked that appalling name, anyway? It sounds like something out Orwell, or the Soviet Union, or the Third Reich. But, horrific names aside, any outfit that can’t tell a bomb from a glowing advertisement is wasting the money the citizens have been throwing at it.

We’ve seen its glorious triumphs in New Orleans, in Boston, in the arrest of a (relatively) harmless lawyer here in Portland. We’re assured that it’s accomplishing great things that we are not allowed to hear about, but how the hell are we supposed to know that? When we do hear anything, it is these mare’s nests and smoke-and-mirrors parlor tricks. Conspiracies of the impotent, old people in need of medicine, foreign med students enjoying a quiet lunch—these are worth going after? And to cap it off, now we learn that they seriously regarded a cartoon villain—and at that the lesser Mooninite, one of the least effective villains of all time—as a threat?

Gack. The world wonders. There is some good news out of New Jersey, however. Coach David Paskiewicz, who took to preaching in a United States History class, has been vindicated by his school board. Believe it or not, the board decided to ban voice recorders in classrooms. It also concluded that teachers should be instructed in the proper ways of smuggling religion into the classroom, or, at any rate, that’s what I got out of it. They were to be reminded of the distinction between church and state in America or something like that. When I told that bit of news to my nephew Brandon, he asked, “Shouldn’t they be teaching that to the students?” Exactly. Of course all this has nothing to do with the coach’s real sin in all this—his confusing the students in the class by misrepresenting the nature of science. He blatantly lied to those who (it seems) trusted him by saying that scientists say that “nothing somehow exploded”, that the age of the earth, and of the universe, cannot be scientifically observed, and so on and so on. But for the principal of his school, these are “high level” discussions that should be encouraged. If filling the kids’ heads with religiously-inspired lies—and that’s what his “high-level” discussion consisted of—is what passes as education in New Jersey, and should be encouraged, then New Jersey is on a slide straight to hell.

Amtrip [1986]

[A passage from my journal, 5 February 1986]

8:24 am MST on board Amtrak between Salt Lake and Provo—I got up early (about seven?) and did some last-minute packing and straightening up. I still managed to forget my flashlight and to put stuff away. I had salad and chips. My father came about ten; I caught the train, sat by the exit in car 2615 (I’m still there), and like that.

Episode of the loony

Some character came through, addressing me about something or other that made no sense. As near as I can make out, he was accusing me of having “crowded” in front of him in line somewhere. But the only line I was in all day was for the boarding pass, and I was last in it for some time. Weird. There was some guy that kept trying to sort of elbow me out of my space when we were waiting at the gate (you could hardly call it a line, though), whom I ignored—but anyway I was there first and I don’t think he was the same loony as this one.

Food

There were only ham and cheese sandwiches, so for food I had (1) salad and chips at home, (2) a ham and cheese sandwich, potato chips, and coke, (3) a ham and cheese sandwich and coke.

I sacked out early, about seven.

Episode of the portable TV

The guy that sat behind me had a portable TV which he insisted on playing loudly when I was sleeping. He had atrocious taste too—he listened to the fluff in the news (like Reagan’s address replays and the Life / Sports Illustrated covergirl controversy) while turning away or off any time anything of substance came on.  He left near Salt Lake City, but I don’t know if he’s gone.

Episode of the luggage

Some jerk moved my suitcase which I had carefully stashed downstairs; he moved it so that it was in imminent danger of falling, so I lugged it upstairs and stashed it above my seat. Fucking asshole.

9:13 am MST—There’s lots of snow this trip, especially in the Blue Mountains last night.

Episode of the power-outage

We lost power around five this morning, I guess. It woke me up, anyway. Somewhere in there the ass with the TV started in again, so I got up. The power didn’t come back up until they hooked our train (26, the Pioneer) and 36 (Desert Wind—the same train I used to take from LA to Pomona) up to the California Zephyr (6).

I woke up around five. I ate breakfast—a cheeseburger—around nine; I sat in the lounge for that but came back to my seat afterwards. That’s all so far.

A Slow Day in a Screwed-Up Week [1999]

[A passage from my journal, 4 February 1999]

9:56 pm PST—A slow day in a screwed-up week. Sleep has been a hard commodity to obtain these past few days. I was up to talk with my brother, and then got up again about noon, only to learn that my phone service has been switched to a godawfully expensive long-distance carrier. The wonders of deregulation. I got a letter out of the blue saying that if I didn’t respond within fifteen days of the date on the letter my service would be auto­matically switched to this outfit I never heard of—and the let­ter was dated 15 January. Yeah. Well, I was still taking this in when my brother came back through to say that he was sick, and he was taking his dog and going home. Well I spent the rest of the day calling these people and getting my calling-card turned off, and I found out that they’d only switched over as of the 2nd, so presumably I haven’t racked up too many calls at twenty-eight cents a minute when I thought I was spending ten. None, I hope. And to add to the nothing quality of the day Zephyr turned up with a limp; her left front paw isn’t working right. Crap.

A Man For No Season [1970]

[The opening of A Man For No Season. Written 3 February 1970]

The stage is dark. Suddenly a single spotlight lights up the center of the stage. It illuminates nothing. Enter the Common Man. As he enters the light, he stumbles over his feet and falls heavily. He picks himself up and addresses the audience.

Common Man: Look at me! I’m a common man! I occasionally philosophize, I change costumes rapidly, and I also change sides quickly, but the main thing is, I’m common. I’m going to act as an interpreter for you—this play is almost incomprehensible without one.

(He puts on his costume for the next scene.)

This is a costume. It covers me; it keeps me from being naked, and more important, it allows the play to begin.

Lights! Lights! (He turns towards the audience.) A street scene. It’s my proposition, the commoner a man is, the better. (He spits into the audience.)

(The lights come up revealing Lincoln, the two Betses, Williamson, Sherwin, Doll Williamson in a shirt of mail and a whole crowd of revolutionaries of all shapes, sizes, and times.)

Come, come, we’ll tickle their turnips, we’ll butter their boxes! Shall strangers rule the roost?

Betts: Brother, give place and hear John Lincoln speak.

Common Man (sings in a cracked voice): Aye Lincoln my leader
And Doll my true breeder
With the rest of our crew
Shall ran tan tarra tan.
Do all they what they can
Shall we be bobbed, braved? No!
Shall we be held under? No!
We are free born
And do take scorn
To be so.
[Corrects himself] To be used so.

Doll: Peace there! I say, hear Captain Lincoln speak. Keep silence till we hear his mind at large.

Common Man: If his mind’s at large, we’re all in trouble. (To the audience) That’s Lincoln. He’s running this riot.

Earth-Pigs (2008)

[Originally posted 2 February 2008]

O

ne of my favorite animals is the aardvark, the amazing African digging machine that eats termites and appears to be unrelated to any other mammal on the face of the earth. When I last looked, anyway, the aardvark stood alone—a single species occupying a single genus in the sole family of its order. Only when we reached its class (it is a mammal after all, and a placental at that) did it have the company of fellows. It is not at all related to other similar-looking animals with much the same lifestyle—the giant anteater, say, or the pangolin—but walks alone among mammals.

The Dutch named it aardvark—aarde being a cognate of our own earth, and varken (I suppose) somehow related to the Indo-European *porko, whence comes Latin porcus and English pork. Or maybe it's some Dutch abomination unrelated to anything elsewhere. I could look it up, I guess, but that would mean getting out of my chair and wandering around the cold house looking for reference works probably buried in the basement.

In any case the Dutch settlers named the beast an earth pig, aardvark in their defective tongue, and English borrowed it from the Dutch. Why they thought the thing was a pig I don’t know. I remember some writer who described the four pigs of Africa, including the aardvark among more conventional suidae, but it never made any sense to me. Tell me, does that thing look like a pig? The earth part I’ve got no quarrel with, seeing that the creature out-burrows strong men with shovels, but it seems to me that you might as well call it an earth-cow, or an earth-goat, as an earth-pig.

Of course we’ve always had problems with pigs in English. When they’re out in the pens, on the hoof as it were, they’re plain old pigs, a good old Anglo-Saxon word of unknown derivation. Or swine, another good Anglo-Saxon word, this one going back through Old English to Proto-Indo-European *suino maybe, or something like that. After we’ve slaughtered them and delivered their roasted flesh to the table, they’ve turned into pork, from the Old French porc, and ultimately back to Latin porcus and Proto-Indo-European *porko. Or maybe they've turned into bacon, another Old French word I'm pretty sure, though I don’t remember what it means. When we call them, however, for some reason we call them in Latin. Sui, sui, we say, and I guess they come.

Earth is a more straightforward proposition. Synonyms include dirt, ground, soil, mud, filth maybe. If we were looking for a decent English approximation of the uncouth aardvark we could do worse than start there. Dirtpig, soilhog, and maybe when we bring it to the table we could call it mudpork. Claybacon. I'm not even going to try to figure out how we'd call one. Terrasui? My Latin sucks.

I started this post a couple of weeks ago, but for some reason it seemed appropriate to publish it today. Happy Groundhog Day!

Attributed to George Peele [1993]

[1 February 1993]

S

amuel Schoenbaum writes, “Of unknown authorship and date, The Life and Death of Jack Straw (printed in 1593) limits itself to the Peasants’ Revolt. The play is short, but few can have wished it longer. It has been attributed to George Peele, mainly (one guesses) on the unstated grounds that any play, mediocre or worse, from the early nineties that happens to be knocking around without an author had better be ascribed to George Peele.” (Shake­speare and Others, p. 84.) The aptness of this observation needs no comment, though it reminds me of an observation by Helmut Koester (I think it was) about the tendency of dating un­ca­noni­cal gospels to 140 CE.

I also like “There is nothing like a hypothetical manuscript to resolve an awkwardness of chronology.” (p. 89)