Who Lays Dying; or, Lie, Lady, Lie

Our first text today is from E. L. Doctorow, whose command of American English one shouldn’t have reason to doubt. In his foreword to the new Modern Library edition of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Doctorow says, after summing up Faulkner’s drive to be an innovative writer, “And so now we are here with the Bundrens, a down-at-the-heels family of dirt farmers in Yoknapatawpha County. Who lays dying is Addie Bundren, the mother.” 

Did that last sentence not give you pause? Back in Doctorow’s adolescence—in the 1940s—no English teacher would have let pass a failure to distinguish properly between “lie” and “lay.” She—or he—would almost certainly have hewn to the distinction set forth these days in the latest edition of the fussbudgety Chicago Manual of Style:

lay; lie. Lay is a transitive verb—that is, it demands a direct object {lay your pencils down}. It is inflected lay–laid–laid {I laid the book there yesterday} {these rumors have been laid to rest}. (The children’s prayer Now I lay me down to sleep is a good mnemonic device for the transitive lay.) Lie is an intransitive verb—that is, it never takes a direct object {lie down and rest}. It is inflected lie–lay–lain {she lay down and rested} {he hasn’t yet lain down}.

In other words, the title of Faulkner’s novel has it right; “lay” is used as the past tense of “lie.” Doctorow, by contrast, has seized upon the wrong verb, at least from a stickler’s point of view.

Perhaps, the memorable paradox of Faulkner’s title colored the wording of the sentence in question. More likely, though, Doctorow has absorbed what is a nearly standard usage in the twenty-first century. I doubt that anyone would have a problem with “Who lies dying is Addie Bundren.” The conjugation of “lie” is nested in any literate person’s mind. “Lay,” however, is so pervasive a substitute for “lie” that articulate people in publishing and journalism use it instinctively. (“What a rotten author I’ve had to deal with! I want to go home and lay down.”)

“Lie” could sound wrong, though. Unless Bob Dylan had wanted his lover to misrepresent his misdeeds, would he have written a song called “Lie, Lady, Lie”? He might have urged her to “lie across his big brass bed,” but his deliberately countrified song-writing style could only have led him to “Lay, Lady, Lay.” (And no approximate poet would have passed up the assonance of the “-ay” sound.) So Dylan crooned, “Lay across my big brass bed.” And it’s hardly a stretch to suppose that he was also thinking of “lay” in a transitive sense; he wasn’t looking to just hold hands.

Dylan’s album Nashville Skyline was released in 1969, and in the decades since “lie” has largely ceded ground to “lay.” Though Dylan may not have been a significant influence in this shift, he could well have helped license the use of “lay” among my cohort in college at that time, whose grammar school and secondary school education would not have differed much, at least in terms of syntax and usage, from Doctorow’s of twenty or more years before.

There are some who would say that language evolves because it’s an organic entity, and I would mostly agree. But biological entities and linguistic entities are fundamentally different. (When I earn my Ph.D. in philosophy sometime in the next twenty years, I’ll explain why.) The organic nature of language is fundamentally different, I suppose (or propose), because it doesn’t have strict DNA, according to which a slippage in syntax has an unequivocal logical consequence.

What I do think matters is whether a verb takes a direct object or doesn’t. The problem with favoring “lay” over “lie” is a failure to feel that the verb is directed at something beyond itself or is simply directed at its condition.

I lie down. I lay the table. She lay on the table. He lies in the shadows. She lays the book on the sideboard. I have lain with my enemies and have risen with fleas. He laid down the law. She laid the guy she most loved. If I’m a hugely wealthy tax dodger, I lie to the IRS {different verb!}.

Gradations of verb use matter. To the degree those gradations get blurred, the language is degraded. And we are less able to articulate what we mean.

Gradations of rape per Ryan

Todd Akin­‑Paul Ryan’s definition of rape:

Akin and Ryan cosponsored legislation that essentially said that rape only mattered if it was “forcible.” If you believe it, parse it.

In every way, shape, and form, this is reprehensible.

What Can't Be Said: Gun Control

Yet another horrific act of gun violence . . . and, predictably, nary a word is said about what ought to be an obvious concern: the need for gun control. Only one major politician has brought the subject up, but Michael Bloomberg has the advantage of being mayor of a city where the National Rifle Association lacks a constituency that seriously menaces him.  Though he can call on leaders of both parties to speak out, Bloomberg surely knows what holds any national politician back.

Neither Obama nor Romney could weather the hurricane of vitriol and demonization if one or the other were now to propose even modest limits on the sale of assault weapons and super-lethal ammunition.  Among Romney’s most avid advocates at this point must be the NRA and its frenzied adherents, simply because they are convinced that Obama hungers for the chance to curtail the freedom to wield a firearm.

The very people who clamor about Obama’s being an elitist with a dictator’s mentality have imposed on the country a tyranny from which there seems to be no escape. After the massacre at Columbine, one might have thought politicians would have worked up the courage to argue for commonsensical limits on access to guns. After the terror unleashed at Virginia Tech, you might have said to yourself, Oh, come on now, we’ll at least have a debate. After Gabby Giffords was shot in the head, anybody with any sense would have urged, No free use of weapons of mass destruction. No, of course not. End of discussion.

The gun zealots in effect contend that a random mass killing is the exercise of Second Amendment rights that has gone too far—and thus remains an acceptable price for a cherished “freedom.” As long as they hold to that conviction and as long as political discourse is held hostage to them, nothing will change.

Republican and Democratic leaders alike easily lean on the crutch of the platitude that says, “America is the greatest democracy the world has ever known.” It’s not, though—not if a candidate for public office can’t openly talk about a matter of life and death.

In Memoriam Dorothy M. Voitle

I first met Dorothy in the spring of 1974, not long after my mother died. It was only much later that I recognized a kind of crossing over from one relationship to another, not exactly akin but still deeply meaningful, almost familial.

As it happens, Dorothy and my mother were both born in 1921, Dorothy in Washington, D.C., my mother in New York City. And both grew up in genteel circumstances: in Dorothy’s case, thanks to her father as a pivotal manager at the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation in Pittsburgh; in my mother’s case, owing, at least in part, to relatives of her widowed mother who were munificent toward a dear niece. Both had—especially in the economic circumstances of the late 1930s—the privileged experience of going to fairly exclusive colleges: my mother to Wells College in Upstate New York; Dorothy to Oberlin College in Ohio. Curiously enough, both chose to major in chemistry, certainly not commonplace for women college students of that time. And both were to marry rather temperamental men of sharp intellect, and neither was to pursue a professional career.

Unlike my mother, however, Dorothy did make use of her college training for a while. During the time that her husband, Bob, went to Harvard, as an undergraduate and then in the graduate English program, Dorothy worked as an assistant in the lab of Robert B. Woodward, who came to be regarded as the foremost organic chemist of his time and who was to win the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1965. Woodward knew how to share credit; when he published papers, he listed as coauthors his assistants, including Dorothy, a matter of great pride to her.

At the time that I got to know Dorothy and Bob, I was in graduate school here in Chapel Hill in comparative literature, along with my friend Michael Mellin, who was to become Jane Voitle’s husband. By that spring of 1974, the Voitles were famous for hosting dinners for UNC colleagues, a wide range of friends, and Bob’s students in the English Department. At their house on Country Club Road, the candlelit dining-room table was the intimate arena for Dorothy’s carefully crafted meals. Although she drew upon her extensive library of cookbooks, she was hardly slavish in following recipes. More than capable of improvising and working out variations, she had the touch of an Elizabeth David, one of her favorite authors, for whom specifics regarding temperature and amounts were secondary to sensing the right combinations.

You could see the same flair and inventiveness in another of Dorothy’s notable skills, knitting. She never tired of making scarves, sweaters, and shawls of radically varying patterns—some a little loud, some subdued, some with striking geometric patterns, some of a seemingly random patchwork nature that might well have a sly coherence. Some of the best colors of yarn in Dorothy’s wide palette were of her own devising. She had a knack for creating plant-based dyes that enabled her to produce shades of a heatherlike rainbow--rust, umber, ocher, olive, and related earthen hues—reminiscent, I suppose, of the landscapes of the Hebrides in northern Scotland, a favorite place of hers.

Despite the energy and wit that Dorothy brought to her enthusiasms, she was incorrigibly self-effacing. It was predictable that she would disclaim any special talent and portray herself as someone whose views were perhaps not of much consequence. And she could be maddening in failing to put herself forward, to act to her own advantage.

Yet in her quiet way Dorothy was as ingratiating and charming as a person could be. Over the years, she and Bob acquired friends wherever they went, friends who remained intensely loyal and were always eager to see them, whether in Chapel Hill and on up the Eastern Seaboard, or in England and on the Continent, or beyond to Jerusalem.

One of Bob and Dorothy’s great bonds was their enjoyment of travel. They relished the prospect of going to new places, while they also delighted in returning again and again to locales that had given them pleasure the first time they had visited. So it was, for example, that they journeyed back any number of times to Ravello on the Amalfi Coast of Italy, not far from Naples. And they were always amused and gratified by how the staff of the hotel where they stayed graciously honored their well-recollected wishes.

The avid desire for new vistas and the treasuring of the comfortably familiar may account, in part, for the durability of Bob and Dorothy’s friendships. They were genuinely engaged by life; they never ceased to be curious; they made people interested in what they did and had to say. They were, in the best sense, memorable.

What had first taken Dorothy and Bob to Ravello was Bob’s decades-long research into the life of the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, the eighteenth-century English moralist and philosopher of aesthetics whose life came to an end in Naples.  Like Bob, Dorothy became deeply enamored of Italy—its culture, its cuisine, its language. In midlife, she made what might have been a dabbling interest into a course of study: she enrolled in the UNC masters program in Italian and earned her degree by translating F. T. Marinetti’s Cucina futurista (The Futurist Cookbook), hardly a conventional account of how to entertain, more or less, with notions of food.

No less than Bob, Dorothy had a catholic taste in literature and like their daughters, Jane and Nancy, a compulsive love of reading. She could turn with equal relish to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf and a Patricia Cornwell mystery, to Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa (a book she reread numerous times) and any antic little volume by Edward Gorey.

One reason, perhaps the reason, Gorey captivated Dorothy was his anthropomorphic characterization of cats. Anything that played up the quirky, mischievous side of felines would bring a smile to her. She would stock up on cocktail napkins with cat cartoons and chocolates in foil shaped as plump pusses. But the real thing mattered most, of course. Of all the cats in her life, none captured her heart more than Tina, who lived seventeen years and whose sculpted effigy stayed with Dorothy to the end.

Dorothy readily acknowledged that she was more than a bit timorous around big dogs; so she was not altogether enchanted when Jane and Michael delivered to Country Club Road their German shepherd mix, Prunella, to be kept there when they departed Chapel Hill. But Dorothy soon discovered that Prunella was the most companionable of guardian spirits, and she was glad to have her as a permanent resident. Even in her last days, Dorothy spoke fondly of how Prunella would suffer having her tail swatted by cats she could have devoured—and even amiably licked their little heads.

If Tina and Prunella were almost like family to Dorothy, family itself was her anchor. Again and again, she looked to her roots in southern New Jersey. Both of her parents, of Welsh and Dutch extraction, came from Tuckerton and had strong ties to the Shore and the Pine Barrens. The powerful affinity that Dorothy had for her father was written in their physical resemblance.  In retirement, Bill Morris served as mayor of Brant Beach on Long Beach Island, where Bob and Dorothy long kept a summer home, sojourning there annually, often in the company of children and the steadfast of friends.

As the years went by, I was aware of how profoundly affected Dorothy was by the passing away of, first, the oldest of her friends from Pittsburgh (who happened to live in Long Beach Island), then her parents (who moved down to Chapel Hill), then several other deeply regarded friends, then Bob, whose death inevitably marked a dividing line, a before and an after. It was heartening, though, to see how Dorothy lived reasonably happily with memories of Bob and beyond them, fashioning a life on her own that was blessed with modest pleasures and continued friendships.  Not the least of what sustained her was the bond that she felt with Jane and Nancy and with the youngest link in her life, her granddaughter, Julie. At the prospect of a visit from Julie, Dorothy’s eyes would literally light up—as was the case earlier this year.

In spirit and in the way she conducted her life, Dorothy was, in the truest sense of the word, liberal. Perhaps that was nurtured in her during the formative years she spent at Oberlin, a college that before the Civil War had enrolled both men and women and had opened its doors to African Americans. One overt sign of Dorothy’s liberalism was her sense of religion. Fascinated though she was by biblical stories and traditions, doctrine per se was anathema to her; she took pride in avowing her faith as a Unitarian, which seemed to mean a faith in things spiritual without insisting on certain religious convictions exclusive of any others. Above all, she had faith in those she loved.

Dorothy lived nine full decades. One could suppose that each decade was a chapter, a life of its own. I think she would have liked the notion of having had nine lives.

NYC: Remembrance of Things Not So Past

This blog—very intermittent though it may be—usually deals with irritants in the verbal gristmill. The present post, however, concerns a recent trip to New York that MM and I took, and the blog happens to provide a means of memorializing an enjoyable experience.

April 11, 2012
Let’s just briefly touch on how we were (just maybe) scammed by the ground transportation operators at LaGuardia. Once the van had crossed into Manhattan via the Queensboro Bridge, the driver snarkily commented that our paid invoice was from a different transport company, and, by the way, we’d have to pay him a larger fare for being taken to our destination.

The Dylan Hotel, on E. 41st St. between Madison and Park, is around the corner from Grand Central and a block and a half directly east of the main entrance to the New York Public Library. A somewhat pricey place worth the comfort and the convenience it afforded. Whether by bus up Madison and down Fifth or across town on 42nd St. or by subway on the no. 6 train running the length of the East Side, we settled for public transportation throughout our visit—a relative bargain in a borough now catering mainly, it seems, to the “1 percent.”

The hotel and the subway held a surprise. Never have I cottoned to the rudeness that many a New Yorker has seemed to regard as an urbanite’s normal behavior. But the members of the hotel staff were genial, expressing a genuine desire to be of help. And subway riders, especially ones in their teens and twenties, often exhibited a courtesy as unexpected as it was welcome.

Something else about the subway: it was clean. At least where we traveled, the subway cars weren’t festooned with graffiti; the stations didn’t have grimy scatterings of dropped papers and drink cups. Compared with the Paris métro or the U-Bahn in Berlin, though, the subway system in Manhattan is frumpy. The art deco tiling in most of the stations we went through is chipped and age-stained; the stairways look as the dank as they always have; many of the gloomy platforms are too narrow for the throngs debarking from and jostling onto the trains.

After more than a decade of not having visited the city, I was seeing it in something of a new light. I don’t want to credit Giuliani or even Bloomberg with noble impulses, but, for whatever reason, during their mayoralties Gotham has evidently evolved into a less gothic place. But I have to wonder what happened to the cardboard-box camps that haunted Midtown in the late nineties. It’s not as if the homeless can have been gentrified in the last several years.

****

For our first night’s entertainment, we went to the Frank Gehry-designed Signature Theater on W. 42nd St., between 10th and 11th Aves., to see a production of Edward Albee’s The Lady from Dubuque. The play bombed when it was first staged in the 1980s. Perhaps Albee polished and tightened the script over the years, but it’s not hard to see why the play failed back then and didn’t now.

The setting is the living room of a suburban home where three couples regularly gather to drink heavily and banter acidly. The inauspicious start has the host insistently asking, “Who am I?,” in an attempt to coerce the guests and his wife to engage in a game of 20 Questions. The improbable answer to Sam’s existential question (“Who am I?”) is “Romulus and Remus.” The rationale for getting to this problem of identity emerges as Sam’s wife, Jo, talks with sardonic humor, at moments directly to the audience, about the helplessness and isolation she is experiencing as a victim of cancer now very near death, solaced only by morphine and drink. Though anxious despair and surges of pain shadow everything she says, her quick tongue is as benign as a scorpion's sting. Before her husband has to help her desperately to bed, she thoroughly humiliates one of the two other women.

After much noise and anger, quiet reigns. Enter the lady from Dubuque and her aide-de-camp, Oscar. The audience began to applaud at the sight of Jane Alexander, who, as the lady, put her index finger to her lips to silence the scene. A cool gesture made completely in character. End of Act I.

The next morning, the question of identity is insistently played up again as Sam angrily and repeatedly asks the strangers, “Who are you?” The lady from Dubuque, who calls herself Elizabeth, purports to be Jo’s mother, here to be with her daughter in her final hours, but this is transparently a fiction. Elizabeth is Death the comforter. Oscar, as played by Peter Francis James, is a tall, lithe, very light-complected black man whose crisp wit and smiling combativeness serve as a foil to the dark, almost leaden repartee that makes up most of the dialogue. Jo is indeed eased into quietly expiring; Sam is left in anguished limbo.

What transports the play is the acting, with Laila Robins, as Jo, all too lifelike in her dying.

****

The next day (4/12), we went to the Museum of Modern Art in its redesigned, rebuilt quarters, which we hadn’t seen before. I’m not sure why at the time of its opening feelings were so mixed about the new interior; it’s not striking in any way except that MoMA looks much larger than it was. And considering the hordes of people bumping up against each other in the central halls, on the stairs and escalators, and in the different exhibition areas, extra space is in fact needed. But it’s a challenge to take a contemplative view of art amid a Times Square bustle.

As I was standing in front of a painting by Kasimir Malevich called Painterly Realism: Boy with Knapsack, a gamin of a girl—pencil-thin legs in skin-tight jeans, pink fluffy vest, frizzy auburn hair—pointed at it and exclaimed, to no one in particular, “J’aime ce tableau!” 

Even though MoMA remains a wonderful repository of art from the first half of the twentieth century, what it currently has on exhibit thins dramatically from midcentury onward. Among the missing were de Kooning and Diebenkorn, which made MoMA seem a mausoleum of an avant-garde receding into the hoary past.

What we (or at least I) most liked about MoMA was looking in or out at architectural spaces and shapes. I had never before paid much attention to what surrounds the museum.

****

The evening of the 12th, we traveled south to Bleecker St. to visit a place in some respects the opposite in spirit to MoMA: Le Poisson Rouge. For the last several years, I’ve repeatedly read in the NY Times amazing accounts of musical performances at LPR, which opened in 2008. Almost nothing appears to be out of bounds here: classical (from far in the past to the very present), indy rock, hip-hop, folk, jazz, hybrid genres . . . The stage can’t accommodate a large number of performers, so nothing orchestral will likely be presented.

You go down a flight of stairs into a dark, intimate space with lighting bathing the stage in softly psychedelic red and blue. People can sit right by the edge of the stage at picnic tables with eight chairs apiece. There are smaller tables in the middle of the space, and a softly lit bar runs the length of the back wall. Besides traditional bar eats, the menu offers fusion cuisine. I had chicken satay with an excellent peanut sauce and shared MM’s large plate of nachos and melted cheese with several dips. The serving of food and drinks went on through the whole performance—with hardly any audible clatter or clink.

The evening was a celebration of the composer David del Tredici’s seventy-fifth birthday. I had chosen to buy tickets for this occasion only as a way of experiencing Le Poisson Rouge, having not heard any of del Tredici’s music and knowing basically that he was daring enough to be a writer of tonal music at a time (the 1970s) when serious composers were determined serialists. The pieces were the “Felix Variations,” played by del Tredici’s nephew Felix on trombone; del Tredici’s Second String Quartet; and his “Field Manual,” a cycle of songs performed by a soprano and a baritone backed by a compact group of six instrumentalists. The lyrics to the songs were poems by Edward Field, who along with the composer was gleefully on hand. At least a couple of the songs underscored one other thing I knew about del Tredici: that as a gay man he’s no shrinking violet. One could surmise that a fair number of the audience members were gay; del Tredici’s companion was a tall young man sporting a spiked dog collar to which a leash was attached.

Though the music was engaging, each piece could have made a stronger impression at a shorter length. The performers clearly enjoyed themselves—even the violinist of the Orion Quartet who twice couldn’t suppress a burst of coughing as he fiddled. The soprano, Courtenay Budd, had a clarion voice, and the percussionist, who drummed, tapped, pushed, pressed, triggered, buffeted, plunked, malleted, stroked, fingered, fumbled, and percussed a dozen different devices, was nothing less than a prestidigitator.

****

On Friday the 13th, we first walked down Madison to visit the Morgan Library. The best of what was on exhibit was a collection of art and artifacts portraying animals, from Roman times to the near present. Nothing stuffy about this stuff, especially the sketches and book illustrations of bears and elephants, rabbits and frogs, fish and fowl. Another exhibit area was devoted to Dutch prints and etchings from the age of Rembrandt; a bit stuffy, that. And the third exhibition had on display drawings by Dan Flavin, a sculptor specializing in colored fluorescent light; two puzzled viewers concluded that the sketches must have meant a lot to the artist.

We ate lunch in the library’s atrium café and were entertained by members of our species.

Then we traveled up Madison to the Whitney to see its Biennial 2012 show, which had been enthusiastically reviewed in both the Times and the New Yorker. The whole of the museum was given over to specially selected art of the last eight to ten years, much of it multimedia in nature. Little of it, though, seemed inspired. Big on concept, short on execution. Back when, Marcel Duchamp may have been coy about sophisticated art jokes, but even his sleek urinal suggests he cared about the materials he worked with. At the Whitney, it was hard to suppose that the physical substance of their art means much to the chosen biennalists: the message was the medium.

Marcel Breuer’s bunker-like design of the Whitney feels sadly tired forty-some years after I first encountered it. As a college freshman assigned to write on the experience of visiting the Guggenheim and the Whitney, I thought Breuer’s building made art transcendent whereas Wright’s made art secondary to what housed it. I had especially liked the Whitney’s wedge-shaped windows as a discreet way of opening the museum to the outer world and making the city part of the art. On the occasion of the Biennial 2012, I still enjoyed the framed glimpses outside and took to making pictures of the surrounding buildings. In one room, though, a guard stopped me, warning me that, as I pointed the camera outside, I couldn't photograph inside.

For dinner on the 13th, we walked from the hotel to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central. The noneater of seafood settled for a roasted half chicken and the endless fascination of watching people eat, drink, and be merry. The other member of our party was easily persuaded to try a platter of four kinds of oysters, with three of each. She was wholly absorbed in the comparative exercise and liked the largest best.

****

On Saturday the 14th, a brilliant, mild day, we visited another place developed in the years since I had last been in Manhattan: the High Line. Stretching from Gansevoort St. to 30th St. along the West Side, the High Line is a park built on an elevated spur where the New York Central Railroad long ago ran.

Transforming a railway path high above street level into a carefully landscaped and cultivated setting for plants and a slightly winding walkway has to have been an inspired feat. On the day we were there, ambling crowds made it a bit congested, but the mood was as bright as the sky. The park provided another perspective on Manhattan’s architectural facets, with a view of curious angles and twists that from the street would no doubt have gone unnoticed.

****

That evening, we went to the only fine-dining restaurant on our itinerary: Degustation, located on E. 5th St. It’s a tiny place that serves “small plates.” Most, if not all, of the seating is at a counter that surrounds the pocket-size area for cooking and finishing the dishes. You can see almost every step that goes into preparing what you are about to eat. Good theater. For us, though, the problem was that we were on our way to an actual theater and couldn’t linger for the full pleasure of dining there. MM had a filet of what dim memory tells me was sea trout; I had a delectable salad of several kinds of greens, the ingredients of which tasted as if just picked, followed by a tender morsel of boneless lamb chop surrounded by “spring vegetables.” We shared a rich crème brûlée-style dessert. Too soon, we had to rush on. A place to return to.

At the Classic Stage Company on 13th Street, we were in another compact space, about as small a professional theater as I’ve ever been in. The show was a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring actors we—who lead sheltered lives—had never heard of, including Bebe Neuwirth and Christina Ricci (known to practically everyone I’ve spoken to since). Surrounding the ground-level performance area were maybe eight rows of seats at stage right and stage left. We sat in the fourth row of the central seating area, with perhaps ten rows behind us. There was no stage set, just a tall, inward-leaning backdrop of paneled mirrors, black fibrous leaflike things strewn across the floor (perhaps to suggest leaves underfoot in a forest), and simple folding chairs. The eclectic costuming ranged from contemporary clothing to Shakespearean-era outfits. For an hour and a half, the action went apace without a break and held the audience’s rapt attention. At one point, when Oberon and Puck sit back to watch the victims of their tricks engage in a sort of play within the play, a stagehand opens from behind one of the mirror-panels and hands the King of the Fairies and his henchman drink cups with straws and boxes of popcorn. At another moment, when Puck is lulling the lovelorn couples whose lives he has mystified, he points to a member of the audience in the first row of stage left and asks her to carefully reach under her seat to pull out an instrument case, remove from it a ukulele, and walk over to him to hand him the uke. It was done with aplomb--and no suggestion of having been staged. The action reaches such an air of closure as Oberon and Titania poetically reflect on what has occurred that when the lights went up, we assumed the performance was over. Several people left, and we were about to do so ourselves when we heard the stage manager say to people near the entrance that the show would resume in five minutes. Of course, we hadn’t yet seen the famous play within the play, the Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, which the mechanicals pull off with artfully staged clumsy earnestness and good humor. Even though the second act (which was actually Act V) came across as largely an epilogue, the performance as a whole was satisfying. Shakespeare was alive in Lower Manhattan.

****

The last day of our visit, 4/15, we spent a good part of the time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The most special of the exhibits there was made up of relics from the earliest recorded period of Egyptian art: wonderful scraps of animal shapes and female figurations. After we had an excellent pair of salads in one of the cafés (exemplifying how often we had eaten well in the city throughout the week), we moved on to an underpublicized and undervisited part of the showcase: the Met’s own collection of art from the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Some fine pieces by de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Twombley, Liechtenstein, and Kiefer. And beyond the 1900s, marvelous miniatures by Amy Jennings (too small to be photographed with my point-and-shoot) and a stunning wall-size portrait by Jenny Saville.

Giacometti, Le chat

Twombley, from Untitled (1950s)

Kirchner, miniature Franzi

Warhol, miniature Mao

Saville, Still

****
We won't let years slip by before another visit to Manhattan.

Agenbite of inwit

The phrase has stuck in my mind since my freshman year of college, when an English instructor urged me to read James Joyce's Ulysses separately from the class I was in. It was a mysterious experience to enter into a word world unlike any I had encountered before. A fair amount of the text was, to my all too literal mind, inexplicable. Even so, the welter of arcane, yet insinuating locutions pulled me along. I could get the drift without a gloss.

Joyce, via Stephen Dedalus tells us, "Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience." And I could see it. The conscience turned in on itself, caught in a mirror realm of its most hectoring regrets that nothing can draw it away from, its thirst for peace of mind unslaked.

According to Weldon Thornton's Allusions in Ulysses, the phrase comes from the title of a medieval moral treatise translated from French into English of the mid-1300s. Ayenbite of Inwyt (Remorse of Conscience) became more incisive, though, when Joyce changed the first y to g and the other one to i.

To an impressionable eighteen-year-old, Ulysses opened up a cosmic vista of language, with infinite possibilities for distilling in words complex ideas and feelings. In the carnival of consciousness that unfolds in Dublin on June 16, 1904, remorse of conscience is just one element among a myriad. Transmuted into "agenbite of inwit," it contributes to what buoys Joyce's dense, heavy book: a lightness of spirit.

I've heard that the gargoyles on churches of the Middle Ages may have been meant to mock, and so drive away, angry or malign thoughts.

The Conversation

Again and again, "the conversation" is talked about on TV, on the radio, and in the papers. The subject matter could be anything, from ebooks to the vagaries of the weather. "When publishers and booksellers meet, the conversation is shadowed by ebooks." "Last summer, tornadoes tore through the conversation in the Midwest."

But it's uncanny how much "the conversation" has seeped into Republican Party politics.

On the eve of the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, a political blogger for the New York Times noted that Rick Santorum's endorsement by influential evangelicals "might tilt the conversation toward social issues." Two sentences later, the blogger said that "the Bain conversation" had seriously diverted attention from the Ron Paul campaign.

Last December, a Times reporter recounted how the Republican freshmen in the House of Representatives had "dominated the spending conversation" from the time they arrived.

During the grim farce that the struggle over the national debt ceiling became, John Boehner repeatedly called for an "adult conversation" about balancing the budget, stipulating that any increase in taxes would be "off the table." (Some things, evidently, can't be discussed by adults.)

What is a conversation? A somewhat informal, even genteel exchange of views?

When so many people compulsively communicate via social media, maybe brief bursts of cheery talk via Facebook and Twitter become the measure of what can be usefully said. This becomes the buzz, the conversation.

And if you want to neutralize an opposing political position, you might want to portray it as "just another point of view." Something to chat about.

A conversation, as rendered by Mary Mendell.

Stop, Hey What’s That Sound . . .

The varying reactions to the first two posts make me realize that I benefit from being prompted to reconsider my preconceptions and tics. So now perhaps I should think anew about a word that has always had a grating effect on me: feedback.

I can more or less date when I first experienced full-bore audio feedback: either in the spring of 1968 at the Fillmore East in Manhattan's East Village or in the summer of that year at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. Maybe a deliberate auditory slash by the guitarist Jeff Beck or an inadvertent ripping reverb from a member of the band Jethro Tull. A jolt, not a thrill.

The Oxford English Dictionary points to the earliest printed use of the term “feedback” in an issue of Wireless Age published in 1920: “An inductive feed-back in relation to the secondary system generates local oscillations.” Feedback as an electrical process is nothing to argue about. And the idea of biofeedback appeals to me, whether or not it really works.

What sticks in my craw, though, is a usage that the OED dates to 1971, from a publication called Frendz: “We began to get a fairly good feedback from most people who know about it and it looked as though the concerts would be good scenes.” (No indication of what the first “it” refers to.) While there’s a positive tone to “feedback” here, it makes people sound like components in psychological engineering à la B. F. Skinner. A person responds or reacts to an event, a phenomenon, a stimulus. But something mechanical becomes integrated into a feedback loop.

I may have a mistaken idea of the dehumanizing overtone of “feedback.” Even so, there is something pernicious about the way the word is deployed in management-speak. When I hear someone say that an employee or a vendor needs to be given “feedback,” I wince. The import is clear: so-and-so has to be told he’s screwed up—and had better shape up. I don’t quarrel with being candid about a failure to do something correctly. “Feedback,” however, has an impersonal, quasi-scientific ring to it that I find off-key. It’s as if the issuer of the criticism were Hal of 2001: A Space Odyssey, blandly rational and incontrovertible, and the recipient the Keir Dullea character, who can have no reasoned response, at least from Hal's point of view. It may be feedback of a sort, but it’s a short-circuited loop.

The more I think about "feedback" as a human activity, the less I think of it.

When the artist Cy Twombly died this past year, the obituaries said he never much cared what people thought of his work. He did as he pleased--and parlayed that attitude into a successful career.

Ya Got an Issue?

In the fall of 2000, when I was taking a yoga class, the teacher said something that made me sit up (when I wasn’t supposed to) and had me wondering. In regard to a yoga pose that involved a severe flexing of the knee, she admitted that she had “knee issues.” To the best of my knowledge, that was the first time I heard the term “issues” used in this way.

To my ears—and so to my understanding of the term—the use of “issues” as a substitute for “problems” is very nearly preposterous. In what way is the word “problem” pejorative? Do we need an anodyne way of expressing the idea of anxiety and pain as something other than . . . anxiety and pain?

Toward the end of the entry “issue” in the Oxford English Dictionary, there is this:

Draft additions June 2003

In pl. orig. and chiefly U.S. Emotional or psychological difficulties (freq. with modifying word); points of emotional conflict.

1982    N.Y. Times 8 Dec. c10/6   The more difficult aspect can come after alcohol is removed. Then it becomes how do you deal with the emotions and intimacy issues that were largely dealt with previously through alcohol?

1991    Longevity Jan. 70/1 At the root of anniversary syndrome are unresolved issues about the loved one stemming from the past.

1998    Community Care 20 Aug. 46/5 (advt.) Educational programme and 24-hour placement support for emotionally damaged children and young people. Reparative work with attachment issues.

In the American Heritage Dictionary, there is toward the end of the entry “issue” this:

5. Informal A personal problem or emotional disorder: The teacher discussed the child's issues with his parents.

In Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary, we find this at definition 6:

(2) : CONCERN, PROBLEM  *I have issues with his behavior*

Note that these are all marginal definitions in the most authoritative dictionaries we have. I would bet that most people who talk about “issues” think they are being bluntly sincere. So now just why has it become the vogue way of saying you have a problem to say you have an “issue”? I'd welcome comments. Do you have a problem with my saying that "issue" is being used as a strangely namby-pamby veil for what is really meant?

Every entry in this blog will end with an illustration, whether or not it's illustrative. Joseph Beuys didn't have problems with tossing whatever into his box of detritus (he definitely wouldn't have thought of it as an issue):

Brief Prolegomenon

Say no more.

–Monty Python (Eric Idle)

At the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein says, “What we cannot talk about, we must pass over in silence.” (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.)

To the very small extent that I can comment on Wittgenstein’s ideas in the Tractatus, I believe his basic point is that statements about the truth of the world have to be as clear and concrete as possible. What we put in words—when we are talking in philosophical terms about the nature of reality—should be tantamount to a sharply drawn picture.

Much of what we experience inevitably eludes direct expression, which leads us to use, whether we’re conscious of it or not, figurative language and nonverbal speech (i.e., graphic art and music). As a patron of the Austrian writer Georg Trakl, Wittgenstein offered this assessment: "I do not understand [his poems]; but their tone pleases me. It is the tone of true genius." Silence takes many forms.

I’ll call a halt to deep thoughts right here.

What Can B Sd will be devoted to quirks of speech and usage that strike me as mystifying, trite, misleading, or happily apt (or maybe not so happily). Btw, the title would be What Can Be Said, except that someone else has already captured that domain name. But perhaps it was serendipitous to have to shed a few vowels . . .


By way of summing up, here is a detail from a Robert Rauschenberg painting: