Saturday, May 06, 2006
MY FIRST BLEG. Dear readers: What the fuck?
10:20 AM by roy edroso
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Thursday, May 04, 2006
SIX BLIND MEN OF HINDUSTAN. Remember that wild speech Ned Beatty gave in Network?You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels...
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.... Of what or whom does that make you think? Here's what it makes The Anchoress think of:Then you hear him make his speech, and what seems “familiar” becomes recognizable as the sort of simplistic, happy-talk, one-world rhetoric we hear today, by people like Angelina Jolie and Sheryl Crow and other attendees of things like the World Economic Forum in Davos or the Clinton Global Initiative or folks who shill for the UN on any given day. This did take me by surprise at first -- Arthur Jensen makes her think of Angelina Jolie? -- but eventually I came to understand her point.
How odd to think, though, that there are (at least) two distinct visions of the Great Menace, each arousing the wrath of a particular political constituency: To some of us, it's berserk international capitalism, but to others, it's the U.N. For some of us, it looks like Rupert Murdoch; to others, it looks like George Soros. Some of us see the menace in the commodification of water; other are much more worried about...
Son of a bitch. I almost forgot that they were nuts.
But here's my real point: It's funny that such a wide variety of people hate some version of global conspiracy -- and how that menace's appearance changes, depending on who's denouncing it.
12:54 PM by roy edroso
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SPOKEN WORD. I love the way they talk. People, I mean. Here a lovely random find of a message board ca. 1999 on colloquial speech, mostly British but with American contributors:At the start of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" by George Harrison, you'll hear him say "hey up." Northern England style "let's go." Fuck me! I never knew that.In the piney woods down here (relatives of the georgia penal colony recruits) they say "he showed his ass" when someone gets mad or acts rude...
A dialect word I learned from a climbing mate from Nottingham was "nesh" = to complain overly about being cold. My mum was stationed in the potteries during the war and remembers people there being "starved with cold." Then of course there's the ubiquitous "it's brass monkies," "Brass monkey weather" etc. And finally "A lazy wind" = one that can't be bothered to blow round you...
My father, the collar [minister], would refer to a smidge, a dolp, and a wham for any small amount of anything. My crooked cousins was a "Slick as spit." My mother's cooking was piling (in that she cooked a lot)...
I was always amused by a Liverpool expression. "I'll gerroff at Edge 'ill" Edge Hill station was the penultimate station on the RR line from London to Liverpool Lime Street. There also being a large number of catholics in the town, to get off at Edge Hill meant you intended to use Coitus Interruptus...
we called necking on the riverbank "watching the submarine races" and "getting mud for my turtle" when I went to Michigan State in the 60s...
Glasgie farewell = the action of applying ones forehead forcefully to anothers nose. Birmingham/Irish screwdriver = hammer... That contributor also tells us, "Loose your bottle = It is the ultimate insult in the services, but is actually quite hard to define."Lancaster, Pennsylvania is LANN-KASTER. No, no, brother, I've been: it's "Lang'c'ster." And some entries are poems all by themselves:My dad, to this day, calls the Pope, the "Holy Pappy in Rome"
Yonder is a loving word, LeeJ, some old songs make good use of it. Somewhere Sean O'Casey is smiling.
These things stick in the mind, hopefully like cloves that flavor our own speech. I had a North Carolina girlfriend once, and her mother had no end of lovely expressions. She once referred to spoiled fish as smelling "right boo-booey." Could that be from the French "boue," somehow? In any case I consider myself improved by having heard it. Also by hearing my old Italian landlady say of meeting her husband, "He look at me anna I fell like a pear." And, Texican this, "he got a wild hare," variously "wild hair up his ass" -- or "wild hare" up same -- never have got that straight.
This post is in tribute somewhat to Editor Martin's Rusticor, which has here been too long neglected, and which contains a spiffing analysis of an old engraving captioned with a 19th-Century British slang poem:Spree at Melton Mowbray: or doing the Thing in a Sporting-like manner (Quick work without a Contract, by Tip-Top Sawyers)
Coming it strong with a Spree and a spread,
Milling the day-lights, or cracking the head;
Go it ye cripples! come tip us your mauleys,
Up with the lanterns, and down with the Charleys:
If lagg'd we should get, we can gammon the Beak,
Tip the slavies a Billy to stifle their squeak.
Come the bounce with the snobs, and a [?] for their betters,
And prove all the Statutes so many dead letters. Marty and I used to read together from Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, and retain from it as a catchphrase, "the female pudend: low."
Really, though, this post is a tribute to the English language as it has been lathed by common speech. I am strong for the dictionary and good English grammar; as a teacher of remedial English and as a writer, I cannot endorse and could not abide a lawless verbal state, and admire the architecture of a proper sentence. But even the soundest structure should be filled and faced so that a person can live in it comfortably; otherwise, it's just a hangar or a prison. Our Information Society does not require human comfort -- it only requires the achievement of talking points -- but the human spirit does, so the genius of language is more likely to come from the bottom up than vice-versa. The miracle is that, even in this age of spin, the air remains full of raw material -- patois, argot, Spanglish, rap, etc. Well before it's printed, it's spoken. All you have to do is listen.
12:10 AM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, May 03, 2006
STAY IN THE PINK WITH CIGGIES AND DRINK. I'm sure there are all sorts of thing wrong with this study, but still it gladdens my heart:Health-conscious Americans may want to reach for a plate of fish and chips or a pint of ale after digesting the results of a new study.
Older British citizens are far healthier than their U.S. counterparts -- even though twice as much is spent on health care per person in the United States annually. That's according to a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study mentions that "The Americans tended to be overweight and the Brits too fond of alcohol," says National Geographic, which includes a lovely photo of Prince Charles hoisting a pint.
The subjects are older even than me, and must certainly recall a time when health-hectoring was nothing like what it is today, when bangers and mash and toad in the hole were considered nourishment, when men drank Guinness For Strength. It also must include '60s people, so them what wasn't poisoning themselves with Bleeding Watney's Red Barrel might have spent a long run in some early, environmental production of Withnail & I.
I am not one to disdain medical science, Lord knows, nor do I reflexively reject the obvious data on behaviors and physical condition. But I have spent several weeks in England, usually among the sort of people who subsist on fried foods, strong drink, and Players cigarettes. They were not always the most appealing specimens, by American standards, and their skin often had the color and consistency of trifle, but they were cheerful despite the lousy weather, cold flats, and allegedly oppressive Welfare State. And very few of them belonged to a health club, or ate organic foods.
We are speaking anecdotally, which is to say out our ass. It may be that the better-educated component of English study group, less likely to spend their evenings in the boozer eating crisps, or some other statistical outlier affected the results. But I will say that my own narrow experience suggests that the Brits did well to give the Puritans reason to come over here to work out their program of self-denial.
9:36 PM by roy edroso
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ARTOTROGUSES AND GLORIOSUSES. Deflection of a popular joke about oneself by owning to it -- as John McLaughlin once did by appearing in Saturday Night Live's parody of his own show -- is an honorable tradition, and carries benefits for both the mockers and the mockee.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work if your sense of humor is so underdeveloped that you have to explain, at length, that you possess one -- especially when this is among the evidence offered.
I think Captain Ed misses the chickenhawk point. It isn't that non-combatants should be disqualified from commenting on military matters. It's that a non-combatant who engages in chest-thumping, star-spangled, locked-and-loaded bellicosity and cute military affectations (like calling blog buddies "deployed" and forming a "Northern Alliance" of warbloggers) is like an Air Raid Warden who thinks he's George Patton -- or a suburban nerd who acts like a rap star -- or anyone whose presumption is out of key with his circumstances: that is, an inviting target for ridicule.
Plautus knew all about it, but try telling that to the Everything Has Changed crowd.
UPDATE. But I would think that, being WaPo's Internet clown of the moment. I will enjoy this while it lasts (nine hours, thirty-five minutes), and pretend that when local mothers pull back their children at my approach, it is because they fear the lash of my tongue, and not because of the posters on the telephone poles.
2:01 PM by roy edroso
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SPLIT PERSONALITY. The Ol' Perfesser seems to be saying that conquering tyrannies for their petroleum resources is a good idea. Do you think it strange that a guy who is constantly mocking "No Blood for Oil" types approves, indeed recommends, blood for oil?
The Perfesser has never been a stickler for consistency, but this is rich even for him. A clue to the cause may be seen by a scan of the Instapundit page at this writing. That exercise usually reveals a vast plain of right-wing boilerplate interrupted only by the odd gay-rights token and an "Indeed" or two for filigree. But look at the Instaday so far:I perceive drift. God knows a steady job of recycling Republican talking points while insisting he's not-a-conservative would wear on any man with a conscience, but I always assumed Reynolds has none, and suspected that his Janus act meant he'd already been nanotechnologically engineered into a robot lawyer incapable of cracking under the strain of self-division.
But the strain is telling now, and I can guess why. All American conservatism is in a weird, feeble state these days. Its operatives run nearly all American government, yet the American people are not content. The big thinkers of the movement are having a hard time figuring what went wrong; some blame Bush, but it comes not easily to them. They are growing fractious and divided against themselves, too -- sometimes, as with the Perfesser, in the schizophrenic sense, but also schismatically.Look at the imbecilic Crunchy Con and South Park Con sects. Look at Arnold Kling, who thinks the fucking American Enterprise Institute is too far off the reservation ("Maybe the AEI is getting ready to play a role in the Hillary Clinton administration"). These are surely portents of end times.
The canaries in the coalmine, of course, are those conservative spokesmau-maus already halfway to Bellevue. Take Eleven-Star-General Ralph "Blood and Guts" Peters, always excitable to the verge of incoherence but now, alas, over the edge. He begins his latest screed against Mescans with expected froth against "the intellectual porn of left-wing fantasies" that "nationality was an artificial construct" -- but ends with a rant against the global economy! "There's a worrisome divide between the multinational executive who retires with a $400 million farewell smooch (and who naturally supports globalizing trade)," muses the General, "and the worker maxing out a credit card to pay for a tank of gas." Well, yes. But who's the enemy, General? Them there dirty hippies, or Larry Kudlow? Maybe it's both -- a new Buchananite synthesis, pitched to veterans who have run out of Lithium! Time for a new National Review blog!
Maybe I'm just sensitive today, but I really think they're cracking up. Keep your eyes peeled for outbreaks of Dancing Mania.
9:55 AM by roy edroso
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Monday, May 01, 2006
NO END OF HISTORY. Just finished A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman’s history of Western Europe in the 14th Century. Tuchman wrote beautifully and can make any half-attentive reader feel like a history buff for a couple of days at least. I still found parts of it slow going. To supply human detail to her great, turbulent tapestry, Tuchman takes time to explicate several particular intrigues and power struggles. Many of these are rich, as when Jean de Montfort, Duke of Brittany, kidnaps his houseguest, the Constable of France, over a ridiculously small matter:…Laval cried, "What are you doing? Do not harm my brother-in-law, the Constable!"
"Mount your horse and go from hence, Monfort answered him. "I know what I have to do"… At that moment another of Clisson’s party, Jean de Beaumanoir, hurried up in anxiety. Monfort, who hated him too, pulled his dagger and, rushing upon him as if possessed, cried, "Beaumanoir, do you wish to be like your master?" Beaumanoir said that he would honor him. "Do you wish, do you wish to be just like him?" the Duke cried in a fury, and when Beaumanoir said yes, Montfort screamed, "Well, then, I will put out your eye!"… The resolution of the case takes months and scuttles a planned invasion of England. I do get a kick out of it, but these clowns were pulling this sort of shit all the time, and after a while it’s just depressing.
Of course, all Europe seems to have been treading the same muddy, bloody circles throughout: ginned-up wars are prosecuted by companies of knights who freely pillage every town in their way, including those in their own country; popular uprisings, driven to the last extremity by this disastrous mismanagement, go berserk and are suppressed mercilessly; the Church flits the papacy from Rome to Avignon and back, taxing the hell out of the people to funds its follies, causing more knightly expeditions and a general dissipation of the Faith. And of course there was the Plague.
It is a blessed relief to get to the epilogue, and the first stirrings of something more like what we recognize as civilization. (I don’t think I realized before what a boon to society was the formation of standing armies.)
Survey-course history, of the sort some of us got in school, is mostly reassuring, in that we are led along thick lines (albeit smudged in places) from the primordial muck to the relatively enlightened present. Americans have a further advantage in that we’ve compressed a lot of action into the last few pages of history, which gives it vigor and a sense of propulsion; even in the Howard Zinn version, we can imagine that another growth-spurt of enlightenment might be up around the corner. But I get a chill whenever I am forced to consider that humankind can slog weary decades through muck before recovering its instinct for higher ground, and that such instincts, under duress and disuse, may be bred out of both animals and men.
11:26 PM by roy edroso
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Sunday, April 30, 2006
THE WONDER IS, HE HATH ENDURED SO LONG: HE BUT USURP’D HIS LIFE. I am in some sympathy with James Wolcott, who has tired of "The Sopranos":…Sunday the Sopranos temporarily abandoned Vito to his antiquing and fobbed off an episode partially involving Christopher and associate flying to LA to pitch a film idea to Ben Kingsley poolside at what looked like the Bev Hills Four Seasons… Having The Sopranos slop over into Entourage and Ricky Gervais's Extras starfuckiness made a show already afflicted with acute self-consciousness go even more meta on us.. When Hollywood stars played themselves on I Love Lucy, they weren't catering to cynicism about celebrity and autographing it with their own smirk; they presented genial versions of themselves. I prefer those antics to the hip jadedness that's become de rigueur today and winks at the audience as it winks back. All that winking has degenerated into a spastic tic. I understand Wolcott’s unease with the current Soprano malaise, but (perhaps because I am not a Vanity Fair type of scribe, to say the least) I have a different interpretation of events.
From the beginning "The Sopranos" has had two major streams. On the one hand, there is the grotesque crudity – the source of many cheap laughs, which is what I think bothers Wolcott about the Kingsley/Bacall storyline, and which also gains most of the water-cooler talking points and tabloid ooh-aahs. Hacked-off heads, surprise deaths, etc.
In opposition to this baseness, there is something larger and more dramatic -- operatic conflicts, behaviors, and emotions. The crude stuff is also outsized, in a grand guignol sort of way, but the latter is the meat of the dramatic interest, because even in this debased age we are still more interested in characters than in splatters, if only slightly so.
True, these characters will go far beyond what most of us would ever dream of doing in the course of business. We expect that from Mafiosa, and if Tony’s crew just killed for fun and profit, it would be a very different show. But often it’s not about business, but about septic souls crying out for vengeance, recognition, or what passes in their peculiar lives for closure.
The Cifaretto/Pie-o-my story line is a great example of this: because Tony lives in a world where sudden violence is common, it’s no big deal when he kills Cifaretto for, essentially, making Tony face who he really is. The filmmakers go out of their way (even availing a dreamlike insert) to equate the stripper girlfriend Ralph murders with Meadow Soprano; and Pie-O-My is, in the show’s terms, a larger version of the baby ducks that kicked this whole thing off. One might say that Ralph Cifaretto dies for Tony’s sins. The quoditian violence is fun, but vengeance against self-knowledge is "The Sopranos"’ aglio e olio.
This is still the case in Season Finito. But, as Wolcott observed, things have gone a bit more sour. As the gears of the show wind down, and we lose dramatic velocity, we are being led – purposefully, I think – toward the natural result, not of the cartoonish violence –- that can and will go on forever, as it has – but of the pathetic disposition of the human cases to which our attention had been previously directed.
Take, for example, Paulie Walnuts’ recent crisis over the identity of his mother -- which leads, as it always does with these people, to a senseless act of violence. In this case the act is linked (by use of bridging shots of foliage) to Tony’s momentary feeling of well-being after he gets home from the hospital.
That is, I think, a very instructive segment. We’ve been watching Tony in therapy for years now. It has been amusing to watch him reduce his alleged therapeutic insights to things his narrow mind can understand – the Art of War, the "circle jerk of life." But I think the show’s creator, David Chase, has from the beginning been after bigger game than the comic juxtaposition of gangster ethics with movie stars, writers, academics, rappers, doctors, politicians, etc.
That particular fish-out-of-water gag was old when Billy Wilder used it in Ball of Fire -- but back then, Wilder’s time being what it was, the gangsters were the butt of the jokes. A lot has happened since then, and in "The Sopranos," the gangsters have usually had the edge. Nowadays there’s always a reason to think the straights have it coming. But eventually any viewer will come to think, at some point, that the hoods have gone too far. The Hollywood freebie schtick in the Kingsley episode chafes Wolcott, maybe because he is familiar with that scene and feels that Betty Bacall getting socked in the jaw isn’t funny.
It is and it isn’t. Chase has gone out of his way to link the Mob to just about every aspect of modern society, in an obvious social critque. ("Niggers!" the family man cries when his vehicle is jacked, followed by Tony admiring a Polaroid of his latest hot car.) But I don’t think that means Chase is shrugging to us that the Mob run things and whattaya gonna do –- because big-S Society is not really what the show is about.
Chase dropped a fat clue in the episode involving Charles S. Dutton as a traffic cop reduced by Tony’s pique. Tony tried to buy his psychic way out of the consequences of that cruelty; Dutton refused. That was the same episode (I believe) in which Tony wound up belt-whipping Peter Riegert’s corrupt politician, who had been Tony’s cats-paw in the affair.
By his own lights Tony is justified, and because we’ve been living with him so long, we sort of take his point of view (the politician was fucking Tony's old girlfriend, after all). That’s the power of character identification.
But even as we sympathize, we have to know that Tony's point of view is insane. How long can we keep in sympathy with him? When, as he once predicted for himself, Tony’s "dead or in the can," what will we feel?
Do you remember the episode in which Dr. Melfi sends Carmela to a shrink, who turns out to be an Old Testament Jew who swiftly advises her to take the children and get away from Tony, and refuses to treat her further? I thought of that moment during the current season opener, in which Carmela is childishly delighted with a new car Tony has bought her. It is astonishing to see such a strong character so reduced in the home stretch of a story.
Consider also last week’s agon of Artie Bucco – sort of a fool, but a fool out of Lear, whose privileged position as a noncombatant feeder of the troops and childhood friend to Tony allows him surprising latitude for truth. When Artie mourns in front of Tony the folly of his father’s simple idealism, and then cooks his maliciously-killed rabbit – "Some people don’t like rabbit!" – from a recipe out of his father’s old notebook, clearly we are not being led toward just another fun permutation of the life of a funny mobster-hanger-on. Even the joke of Nuovo Vesuvio turning into a coupon joint is not cheering. Against the impression the show’s previous success has given us, we are led toward an emotion that must (if we are still human) have been present under our laughter and even our sympathy all this time.
That emotion is disgust. The Sopranos and all their works are disgusting. You know it, I know it. Chase probably knew it all along, but now he is hustling whatever chickens have not yet come to roost into the death-coop at last. So now is the perfect time for Tony Jr. to implode, for Vito’s absurd gay-mobster story line, for Christopher to wear out what was left of his welcome -- and, I suspect, a lot more unsettlingly tawdry business to come, which will only seem out of key because the key has suddenly been changed.
This is the blight these mooks were born for. It is not a tragic fall, but an appropriately pathetic collapse. I am put in mind of the end of the ill-received Don Giovanni in Amadeus, when the demon clumsily tears down that upstage drape. It is not pretty and the house may not react favorably, but it is exactly right.
11:58 PM by roy edroso
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