Clifford Browder's Blog, page 10

466. Blood

BROWDERBOOKS


For a lively three-star Reedsy Discovery review by Jennie Louwes of New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, go here.  




As always, for my other books, go here.  



                           BLOOD



“Blood!” exclaim Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, uttering their newfound watchword, in anticipation of a midnight foray into a cemetery where they will, in fact, witness a murder. (This, at least, is how it was in a children's theater version of the story that I saw long ago.)
Blood:  The word conjures up all kinds of meanings and associations, some pleasant and some the very opposite.  It can mean heredity.  “Le bon sang ne ment pas” (good blood doesn’t lie) is a saying in French, used by the old nobility to talk up their superiority to commoners (i.e., you and me).  
  Blood is one of the four humors of medieval medicine, a notion that originated with the Greek physician Hippocrates (460-370 B.C.), considered the founder of modern medicine.  The perfect balance of the four — black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood — supposedly guaranteed health.  Furthermore, an excess of any one humor determined a person’s personality.  Black bile made people melancholic (sensitive, artistic); yellow bile made them choleric (full of vitality, but quick to anger); phlegm made them phlegmatic (calm, open to compromise); and blood made them sanguine, meaning joyful and optimistic — a meaning that survives in the word today.  So according to Hippocrates & Co., a bit too much blood isn’t a curse; what’s wrong with being joyful?  If “blood” has a bad press, it’s not his fault.
Growing up, I was told by my parents to eat meat, because meat builds red corpuscles, and red corpuscles make one strong and healthy.  I remember blood swabs recorded in the family doctor’s office, little splats of color smeared on cards year after year with a date.  As I grew up, mine progressed from pink to deeper pink to red.  But not because of red corpuscles, I suspect, for I loathed meat, wouldn’t eat it, was left alone at the lunch table for up to two hours at a time, staring at the cold chunks of meat that, even when warm, repelled me.  My solution: I hid the uneaten bits of meat on a small ledge under the table and later removed them to my knicker pockets and from there to the trash.  But once I forgot to empty my pockets, and my mother, preparing to send my knickers to the laundry, was amazed to find the pockets full of stale chunks of meat.  
Blood is red, and the color red suggests fire and violence, an association reinforced in me more than once, upon seeing a whole building (not my own) engulfed in flames.  Violence often means bloodshed, the taking of life, which in most people inspires a feeling of horror.  One major exception: hunters view the shedding of animals’ blood as normal; it’s simply part of the game.  My father was a hunter, and he explained to me that hunting is an instinct, stronger in some people than in others.  He was a hunter; I was not.  He taught me at age sixteen to shoot a shotgun, but the gun's recoil gave me a shoulder ache, and I had no desire to kill the blackbirds flying overhead, or the rabbits scampering through brush, that were the targets of our shotgun outings.  I didn’t even relish fishing, and winced when my father occasionally caught a fish that then flopped about in panic on the floor of our rowboat, until he bashed it against the side of the boat.  No blood, perhaps, but violence nonetheless.
In the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks were designated “Reds,” and in fact were quite willing to shed blood, to kill, if they deemed it necessary.  And not just the Czar and his family, but even fellow revolutionaries, if they challenged Lenin’s authority.
The French Revolution found a means of executing efficiently en masse: the guillotine.  It shed blood, but ended life with one quick stroke, therefore was deemed, in its way, humane.  But the horror of the revolution’s violence is well summed up in prints showing the executioner holding up the severed head of Louis XVI to a cheering mob.  Scenes such as this inspired Tennyson, very English and very conservative, to deprecate “the red fool fury of the Seine.”  Ironically, the king’s failure to hold the revolution in check at an earlier stage was due to his refusal to have his troops fire on the people; he abhorred bloodshed.


Robespierre's death by Madame
la Guillotine, July 28, 1794.
His death marked the end of the Reign of Terror.
A French engraving, circa 1799.
Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine  (the Church abhors blood) was a tenet of the medieval Christian Church, but that didn’t keep the Inquisition from sentencing heretics to death.  Granted, death by fire — by being burned at the stake — might not involve bloodshed, but the Church avoided the violence of executions by handing its victims over to the secular authorities, who nursed no such hypocritical reservations.  And merry bonfires there were, and well attended, with the victims sometimes crying out, “More fuel, good people, more fuel!” in hopes of speeding up their death.  If the wind was wrong and the fire burned slowly, what was usually a half-hour torment could stretch out to a full two hours.


Chained heretics burned at the stake.
Date and source unknown.
Yes, bloodshed is abhorrent.  The ultimate in horror is attained when a psychopathic killer drinks his victim’s blood.  Yes, such acts have been recorded, and the offender isn’t a fictional creation like Dracula; he’s very real.  (Yes, usually a man.).  But these are individual psychopaths, not typical of society.  And yet, in wartime one may wonder.  Wartime films rarely survive into peacetime.  I recall a film from World War II in which an Australian civilian showed his righteous rage and patriotism by choking a Japanese soldier to death.  I can’t imagine it being shown in peacetime; it would be … yes, abhorrent.
But what if a whole society thinks that its survival depends on drinking human blood?  Such was the Aztec belief.  Only the sacrifice of human blood gave strength to the sun; without it, the sun would be overtaken and destroyed by the pursuing forces of darkness, causing the extinction of the human race.  On prominent display in the National Anthropology Museum of Mexico City is the Aztec Calendar Stone, also known as the Aztec Sun Stone, a heavy circular stone close to 12 feet in diameter and 39 inches thick.  When I saw it there many years ago, I was overwhelmed.  Thinking that maybe, on this very stone, human sacrifices had once been performed, I felt both chilled and fascinated..  This may have been my overwrought imagination at work, but the stone is certainly linked to sacrifice.  In its very center is a god holding a human heart in each of his clawlike hands, his protruding tongue in the shape of a sacrificial knife.


Rob Young
Depending on the state, in this country we allow the death penalty for certain crimes, but in modern times we don’t want blood to be shed.  Too gross, too icky.  So we shun the guillotine and try everything else: the electric chair, which sometimes has the victim twitching in agony; hanging, which sometimes leaves the victim likewise writhing in agony; and the gas chamber, a ”scientific” contraption that also lacks the quick finality of Madame Guillotine.  No matter how you go at it to avoid the shedding of blood, it’s messy, and often downright cruel.  I hadn’t anticipated ending on this note, but here indeed we are.  Messy as they are, the guillotine and the stroke of an ax are mercifully quick and definitive.

Coming soon:  Hot Mama: Goddess, Mother, Virgin, Whore.  Not, in any conventional sense, a hymn to motherhood.


©  2020  Clifford Browder

465. Americanisms

BROWDERBOOKS

For a lively three-star Reedsy Discovery review by Jennie Louwes of New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, go here.  (But it's too late to see her review as a video; that's over.)




As always, for my other books, go here.  



SURVIVAL

The latest development in New York City survival:  Stores are covering their front windows with panels of wood.  I see this up and down Bleecker Street, where all the designer clothing stores are shut.  Why the wood?  In case rioters come by and start throwing rocks at windows.  Riots have plagued the West Village also, though my Eleventh Street block has been quiet.  




New York City police ready for rioters, June 3, 2020.
Janine and Jim Eden

The famous Magnolia Bakery is still open and without wood panels, and announces that it is baking to celebrate 2020 graduates, home, Mom, doctors, nurses, teachers, neighbors, prom, and just about everyone and everything else.  Their gooey goodies are obviously necessary to our well-being and the economy.  

Another unforeseen development:  The city is so quiet, the streets almost empty, and the parks unvisited, that the birds are reclaiming habitat and serenading us with song.  The peak of the spring migration is over, but this is the nesting season, when males sound off to attract a mate and claim turf, and they can be heard now better than when the city emits its usual rumble and roar.  The red-winged blackbird, flaunting its bright red shoulder patches, is livening the cattails with its vibrant konk-la-reee. 



Andy Reago and Chrissy McClarren

The common yellowthroat, a warbler, is repeating witchety witchety witchety in clumps of shrubs and grasses; the wood thrush, its breast boldly spotted, is giving out its haunting three-note call in the brush of the Central Park Ramble; and the long-beaked willet is calling out its name -- will will willet, will will willet -- over the ponds in the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.  These are all old friends of mine; hunting them, I often trekked these habitats.  Welcome back, songsters, and may your music lift our spirits; we could use a lift.


                     AMERICANISMS


These are expressions that mark the speaker as an American, or as someone trying to speak like an American.  Some were uttered by persons of note, and others just came into existence, who knows how or why.  But they all say something not just about the speaker, but also about the speaker’s country, its mindset, its mores, the way it intentionally or unintentionally presents itself to the world.  
By way of contrast, when I was in England long ago, I remember signs saying KEEP  BRITAIN  TIDY.  I cannot imagine such a sign in this country.  America is just too big, too diverse, and too feisty to aspire to tidiness.  Cleanliness, maybe, but tidy never.  
And the Brits want to keep their language tidy, too.  They cringe at Americanisms like “gas” for “petrol,” and “pants” for “trousers,” as well as some of the items listed below.  Their language, they complain, is being “colonised” or even “killed” by Americanisms, though some of the words they disparage are actually English, not American, in origin.  And the “stiff upper lip” so associated with the English is in fact an Americanism.  Language plays tricks on us all.
So here, in no particular order, is my list of Americanisms, with my personal comments thrown in.  I invite readers to make some additional suggestions of their own.
I feel like a million dollars.  A French-born friend of my mother’s used this and other expressions to show how she was completely at home in American English.
Make the world safe for democracy!  A World War I slogan, but the impulse persists, with both desirable and disastrous consequences.
Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable.  Inscription on the base of a bigger-than-life statue of Daniel Webster in Central Park, expressing his views in the famous Webster-Hayne debate of 1830, when Webster, a senator from Massachusetts, debated Senator Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina.  Webster believed in a strong federal government, whereas Hayne upheld state’s rights, including the right to secede from the Union.  Our Civil War (1861-1865), at a cost of over 618,000 lives, settled the issue, though Texas likes to forget this.


Simeon87
Lafayette, we are here.  Attributed to General John J. Pershing, commander of the American forces sent to France in 1917, but actually spoken by a subordinate.  Lafayette had helped us get our independence; now we would help his country in its war with Germany.
Pike’s Peak or bust.  Sign on covered wagons heading west in the 1840s for Colorado and beyond.
I have seen the elephant.  Sign on covered wagons coming back from the West in the 1840s, indicating disillusion with what they had found.  Probably inspired by early circuses and road shows that displayed an elephant.
God’s country.  That beautifully satisfying locale that you once saw and hope to return to, or that exists in your imagination.  Implies a country where people travel a lot and get displaced.  Also, a people who dream of better.  Inevitably, a magnet for hope and heartbreak.  Years ago when I was a graduate student at Columbia, I often had a beer (or two or three) at the West End bar on Broadway.  There, entertaining us with his tales of “making out” — seducing every woman in sight — was an amusing young dude who found in the rest of us the audience that his ego and libido required.  He was from somewhere in the West, and one night, referring to it, said quite seriousky, with a touch of nostalgia, “That’s God’s country.”  His momentary seriousness astonished me, but he soon resumed his tale of penile successes.
There’s a sucker born every minute.  Attributed to Phineas T. Barnum, the nineteenth-century showman and circus impresario, and prince of humbug.  He displayed fake freaks and exotic animals to a seemingly naive public (“suckers”), some of whom knowingly went along for entertainment and the joke.
The business of America is business.  A saying of Calvin Coolidge, U.S. president from 1924 to 1928.  So dull, visionless, and reticent a man that he became legendary.  But let’s face it, America is devoted to capitalism and the work ethic.
Keep your shirt on.  Stay calm, don’t get angry or excited.  Possible explanation: In the nineteenth century clothes were expensive, so many men owned only one or two shirts.
Beats me.  I don’t know, I don’t understand.  Origin unknown.
That gets my goat.  To make someone annoyed or angry.  Origin unknown.
It isn’t over until the fat lady sings.  Don’t presume to know the outcome of an event still in progress.  I always thought it came from vaudeville, but it’s a newbie and relates to  --  of all people -- Richard Wagner.  His interminably long but sporadically brilliant Ring cycle isn’t over until Brünnhilde, often sung by a buxom soprano, has sung her last note.  Probably first used by U.S. sportscaster Ralph Carpenter in a 1976 interview, referring to a tight basketball game or season, though other explanations abound.
Fuhgeddaboudit.  Brooklynese for “forget about it,” meaning it’s unlikely.  Another newbie, attributed to the 1960s TV show “The Honeymooners,” set in Brooklyn.  But I wonder if it didn’t originate much earlier.
Baloney!  Nonsense, claptrap, bunk.  Dates from 1922.  Linked to the bologna, a large smoked meat sausage typically made from leftover scraps of meat.  
He struck out, It’s the ninth inning, A curve ball, Touch base, A whole new ballgame, etc.  From baseball, the most American of sports, and in my opinion, the dullest.
Normalcy.  That’s where Warren G. Harding, U.S. president 1920-1923, wanted us to return, though it should be “normality.”  Since Harding was another of our least brilliant presidents, and surrounded by crooks when in office, I avoid his creation and  insist on “normality.”
Okay.  Totally American, though now understood worldwide.  Long ago, when a friend and I were bargaining for serapes in the open-air market of Oaxaca, Mexico, after a long haggle we failed to get our price and started to walk away.  Faced with the loss of a sale of three serapes, the Mexican vendor, a shrewd little man whose gold fillings twinkled in the sun, rushed after us and said, “Okay.”  There are many stories about the expression’s origins.  Probably came from “orl korrect,” a humorous misspelling of “all correct,” circa 1840.
To go the whole hog.  To go all the way, to do something.  Possible origin: Butchers used to use every part of the animal.  The skin was tanned for leather, and the hooves were pickled.  To go the whole hog was to use every part of the animal.
To face the music.  To accept the consequences of one’s actions.  Possible origin: A disgraced military officer was “drummed out” of his regiment.  Or: An actor going onstage faces the orchestra pit.  Dates from the 1830s.
To keep one’s cool.  To stay calm, not be upset or angry.  This use of “cool” as a noun dates from the 1950s or earlier.  It may be significant that in the 1940s Miles Davis called his music “cool jazz,” to differentiate it from the “hot jazz” that originated in New Orleans in the early 1900s and came North.  (And if you want to start a passionate debate that has no end, just ask the origin and history of the word “jazz.”  There are many answers, some of them deliciously naughty.)
Americanisms that are no longer (thank God) used:“Bone pit” for cemetery.“Tooth carpenter” for dentist.“To give someone the mitten” for “to throw someone [a boyfriend or suitor] over.”To which I'll add another: "gay deceiver" for "skirt chaser," a man who aggressively pursues women.  Our current use of "gay" obviously complicates things.  And as mentioned in Tennessee Williams's play The Glass Menagerie, "gay deceivers" once also  meant padding that young women inserted in their bodice or bra to plump out their figure.  A reminder that language is never static; it is constantly changing.  

Coming soon: "Blood."
©  2020  Clifford Browder

464. Two stories and survival.

BROWDERBOOKS

For a lively three-star Reedsy Discovery video review by Jennie Louwes of New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, go here.  She loves New York and even briefly sings for you.  This is new for me -- a video review.

As always, for my other books, go here.  

And the eternally promised and eternally delayed website?  It's still in the final final final stages of development, and frankly, a pain in the ass.  Which has nothing to do with the final product, once it's finally final.  But getting there ain't half the fun.


Two Stories

                                   Mr. Frankfurter

Long ago a young woman told me two stories, both short.  She worked as secretary for a man named Frankfurter.  One day a serious letter came, addressed to Mr. Hamburger.  I repeat: a serious letter, not a joke.  Her boss was visibly annoyed.  She thought it hilarious, as did I, when she told me.

                                      Group Therapy

She also was doing group therapy: no therapist, just a bunch of people sharing worries and concerns.  One of the men complained bitterly and  repeatedly about his domineering mother.  Finally one member of the group, exasperated, said to him, "Get rid of her."  Then another said, "Yes, get rid of her."  Then the whole group joined together in a chorus, saying repeatedly, "Get rid of her!  Get rid of her!  Get rid of her!"  And right there, in front of all, he vomited.

Survival                                      

It's what we're all doing now in New York, most of us masked and observing social distancing.  My friends are stir-crazy.  Three now have phoned me for a lengthy conversation, faute de mieux.   
Every week or so I order food from LifeThyme, a health-food store on Sixth Avenue, through a service called Mercato.  It's simple: you see online what the store has to offer, click on the desired items, pay by Paypal or a credit card, and select a delivery time, usually on the following day.  Delivery fee and tip are included in the charge.  I know from experience that not all my chosen items will be available, so I order more than I need.  Though I ask them to phone me if some are unavailable, so we can arrange substitutions, often do not.  But the food always comes, delivered up the four steep flights, and I am glad to get it.  So for residents of New York, I highly recommend Mercato.  And if you don't want a health-food store, lots of other stores are also available.

And laundry?  My laundry is open on Tuesdays and Fridays, and it does do pick-up and delivery.  When I had my laundry done a few days ago, they picked it up circa 10 a.m. and delivered it by mid-afternoon -- unbelievably fast!  I suspect that they're not getting much business these days, which is surprising, to say the least.


Janine and Jim Eden

One group of New Yorkers who are happy about the empty streets is motorcyclists, since they have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to speed down thoroughfares free of traffic and all the problems it can pose.  Some of them enjoy it thoroughly, like one on the Westside Highway who praised the beauty of the Hudson River, with views ranging as far as the George Washington Bridge and the Palisades.  Others admit that it's a guilty pleasure, given the suffering of so many, and also keep in mind that injuries from a motorcycle accident would not rank high in the minds of careworn hospital staff busy with the virus.  And a few bikers are doing public service by bringing protective equipment, food, and other supplies to essential workers.

So it goes: masks, six-foot distancing, phone calls for company, food and laundry delivered, and motorcycles on empty streets.  As I said once before, New Yorkers can survive anything, if they have four essentials: courage, faith, hope, and toilet paper.  Especially toilet paper, as was obvious in the frenzied sales of it during the first panicky phase of the lockdown.


Inspired by the virus: a panic sign with toilet paper.
The RedBurn, Fry 1989.
One last note:  The Abingdon Square greenmarket still appears on Saturday morning, and yesterday, in addition to my beloved olive bread, blueberry muffin, and cookies, I got two boxes of strawberries and a pound of fresh-picked Brussels sprouts.  And in the park nearby, a rose bush was in full bloom, assaulting the eye with a blast of bright red blossoms.  The virus can't stop nature.


Coming soon:  Americanisms: expressions that mark the speaker as an American, or as someone trying to talk like us.  And why they make the Brits wince and cringe.  

©  2020  Clifford Browder

463. Free? Kill it!

BROWDERBOOKS

My new nonfiction title, New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, is still featured on Reedsy Discovery.  The first chapter is available there free, but the book has only four upvotes, needs more.  You will earn the author's undying gratitude if you go there and give the book an upvote.  You don't have to buy it or read the sample, just click on Upvote.  You can buy it there, if you wish, or get the ebook or the print version  from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  A good read for people homebound in lockdown.   A tip: If you hurry, you may even get the ebook free -- yes, I said free -- from Amazon.  Don't ask me why.  There's some kind of credit available, though I don't know for how long.

My new website will be up and running soon.  The virus slowed it down, but now it's almost finished.

                     FREE?  KILL IT!


Common advice to authors without a large following: to get your new book known online, offer it free.  So I did.  I offered 100 ebook copies of New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You in a Goodreads giveaway absolutely, totally, and joyously free.  And what did I get?  A batch of lousy reader reviews.  Said one reader: “Don’t waste your time.”  Said another: “Not my cup of tea, I am not the target audience.”  Others were slightly kinder, and one actually praised it in a four-star review.  But the initial overall tone was negative.  Yet this very same book has received a string of positive editorial reviews, “editorial” meaning reviews from professional reviewers, as opposed to casual readers.  So why the divergence?  What gives?

          I don’t mind negative reviews, if I can learn from them, and I learned a useful lesson from these.  With a couple of exceptions, these reviews came from readers who had no special interest in New York and New Yorkers.  So why did they even glance at my book?  Because it was free.  And why were the editorial reviews so positive?  Because those reviewers had an interest in the subject matter that attracted them to the book.  Lesson learned:  Don’t offer free books, except to a targeted audience with an interest in the contents.  Free is okay if offered to that audience, but risks rejection if offered to readers generally.  My motto henceforth:  Free?  Kill it.

Helena Rubinstein
She practiced what she preached.
Even at age 40 or 50, her skin was without a wrinkle.
  Offering something free actually depreciates its value.  Savvy retailers, especially those selling fashion and luxury items, know this and exploit it to the hilt.  Helena Rubinstein (1872-1965) built an international chain of beauty salons whose targeted audience was affluent women concerned with their appearance.  Those women had money and were prepared to spend it, if it gave them what they wanted.  And Helena Rubinstein, whose motto was “beauty is power,” offered them salons where the staff “diagnosed” the patrons’ skin problems and “prescribed” the appropriate treatment.  This gave glamour a scientific look.  Rubinstein was selling the illusion of youth and beauty, and the higher the price of her products and services, the more her customers valued them.  The last thing they wanted was cheap, not to mention free. 

A patron getting treated at Rubinstein's Fifth Avenue spa.

        “There are no ugly women,” Rubinstein insisted, “only lazy ones.”  So beauty was available to all — well, not quite all — at a price.  And in her seven-story flagship New York City spa, the center of her empire, she added a gym, a restaurant, sumptuous displays of modern art, and classrooms offering instruction in facial care.  Eager for this very special experience that her spa promoted, and for the attention that would be given them  by “experts,” women flocked to it and spent half the day there.  So what if it cost a small fortune?  It was worth it; they paid gladly and would soon come back for more.
 (For more on Rubinstein, see chapter 15 of my nonfiction work, Fascinating New Yorkers: Power Freaks, Mobsters, Liberated Women, Creators, Queers and Crazies, available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  Rubinstein was a bit of a power freak, certainly a liberated woman and a creator, but in no way crazy.  Savvy to the crux of her being, she died a billionaire.)
Coming soon:  ???
©  2020  Clifford Browder

462. Publisher, Survival, Website, Reedsy

BROWDERBOOKS

                              PUBLISHER
As some of you know already, I have signed a contract with E.L. Marker, an imprint of WiDo Publishing, to publish Forbidden Brownstones, the fifth title in my Metropolis series of novels set in nineteenth-century New York.  This is a hybrid arrangement whereby the author retains full control, like in self-publishing, but gets assistance from an established press in producing and marketing the book.  More of this as work on the book proceeds.
        SURVIVAL, WEBSITE, REEDSY

Survival:  I am fine.  I go out rarely, mostly to get money from the bank, and food from the supermarket.  I can get food delivered by a health food store, and often do.  The Saturday morning greenmarket in Abingdon Square Park still functions, but with social distancing.  My bread stand marks spots at six-foot intervals for its customers to line up, masked; last Saturday the line was so long that I found myself almost in Jersey.  The streets now are strangely quiet; traffic is rare.  I miss my weekly Sunday lunch out in a restaurant, and I miss seeing my friends, but it can't be helped.  I wish everyone well in this trying time.  We New Yorkers -- in fact, we Americans -- are a tough bunch.  As demonstrated recently, to get us through a crisis, we need just four things:Courage.Patience.Faith.Toilet paper.With these, we can overcome all threats.  But when will this end? Governor Cuomo is relaxing the lockdown upstate, but congested New York will be the last to return to normal, if it ever does.  My planned book release party?  Maybe in late September or early October ... maybe.  At this point, who can be sure of anything?
Website:  I've seen the latest proof, and it is exciting!  It really says New York.  Hopefully, the website will be functioning soon.  Once it is, I'll announce it to all and sundry.
Reedsy:  My new nonfiction title, New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, is now live on Reedsy Discovery, where the first chapter is offered as a sample.    Do go there and give me an Upvote.  Lots of Upvotes will get the book more exposure.
Coming soon:  Who knows?  Maybe something on free, and why I won't ever do it again.
©   2020   Clifford Browder  

461. Dumb: Who Is and Who Isn't

BROWDERBOOKS

The good news:  A good review of New Yorkers by the highly rated Midwest Book Review, which recommends it unreservedly "for community and academic library Contemporary American Biography collections," and the ebook for personal reading.

The bad news:  The only Amazon reader review of the ebook is bad, and Amazon gives this much more attention than the good editorial reviews by professionals.  I don't argue with the reviewer, who has every right to express his views.  But I hate to have this the only review of the ebook.  So HELP!  Puleez give me a review, so this one bad review won't dominate.  Remember:

Your review doesn't have to be long.You don't have to have read the whole book.  Three or four chapters is enough.It doesn't have to be a rave (five stars).  Be honest in your statement.To do a reader review, you have to have bought the book from Amazon.  The cost of the ebook now is $5.99, but if you bought it earlier at $1.99, so much the better; I don't want to strain your budget.  And the first one to do a review may actually get it free, since there's a credit available.  (Don't ask me why.)  If this first bad review is sandwiched in among four or five other less negative reviews, it will be neutralized.  So puleez, go here and scroll down to the customer reviews.
And now, on to Dumb.

             Dumb: Who Is and Who Isn't


Long ago, soon after the end of World War II, while visiting the family of my friend Martin in Speyer, West Germany (as it then was), I met his younger brother Hans.  When I asked Hans what he liked to do, Hans without hesitation gave his answer in a single word: “Diskutieren” (to discuss, debate, argue).  He said this with a look so acute, so charged with meaning, that I have never forgotten it.  Hans, I sensed at once, would be a powerful opponent in a debate: fierce, ruthless, uncompromising.  I didn’t want to argue with him, least of all politics, but the subject did come up.  Of President Roosevelt’s trusting Stalin, our ally against Germany in World War II, Hans said that an American president should have more brains than a three-year-old child.  “Das war nicht so einfach” (That wasn’t so simple) I managed to say in my faulty German, which was too limited to express my thought fully.  What I wanted to say was this:  Roosevelt trusted Stalin.  Dumm!  Stalin trusted Hitler.  Dumm!  Hitler attacked Russia.  Dumm!  All leaders, even (or maybe especially) the greatest, do dumb things.  Remembering this recently, I started thinking about the dumb things we all do, and one thought led to another, and hence my subject: Dumb.
Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill in Teheran, 1943.
So who was smart, and who was dumb?
Let’s start at he top, the leaders I just mentioned.  Roosevelt was as shrewd and savvy a president as we have ever had, and yes, during the war, he trusted Stalin.  Stalin was our ally against Hitler, and without the Russians we could not have won the war.  Churchill said that, to beat Hitler, he would have allied himself with the Devil, and perhaps he did.  By 1945, the last year of the war, Roosevelt was a sick man, and he died on April 12 of that year.  His leadership during the war had been brilliant, but in trusting Stalin to the extent he did, he may have been a bit, yes, dumb.
Stalin, in trusting Hitler, was dumber still.  He had signed a nonagression pact with Hitler in August 1939, which gave Hitler a free hand to attack France in the spring of 1940.  The resulting French collapse gave Hitler the mastery of continental Europe, minus Russia; Britain stood alone.  So what did Stalin do?  He didn’t just trust Hitler, he helped him in the war.  The Germans wanted to send a warship, a raider, into the Pacific without encountering the British blockade.  So Stalin agreed to help the raider fight its way through the frozen ice off the northern coast of European Russia and Siberia, and thus reach the Bering Sea and the Pacific without encountering any British ships.  And the name of the ice-breaker that created a passageway for the raider?  The Stalin.  
       But what was this, by way of dumb, compared to Stalin’s refusal to believe that Hitler was about to attack the Soviet Union in 1941?  A German deserter crossed the border to warn the Russians, but Stalin didn’t believe his story and may even have had the man executed.  One day later, the Germans attacked, with disastrous results for the Russians.  Yes, in this instance Stalin was dumber, far dumber, than Roosevelt.
And Hitler’s attacking Russia was just as dumb.  He had always planned to push to the east to acquire Lebensraum, but never appreciated the vastness of Russia, and the Russian ability to resist.  When winter came and his troops bogged down short of Moscow, they didn’t even have winter uniforms, which were rushed to them belatedly.  Dumber, perhaps, than Stalin.  Once the French surrendered, Hitler admired Napoleon enough to visit his tomb in Paris, but he had never read the grim accounts of Napoleon’s little misadventure in Russia in 1812.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Hitler and Mussolini, 1937.  They both ended badly, both
were often dumb, but both had their brilliant moments, too.
        And history gives us plenty examples of collective dumb.  The Crusades are a good one, but I'll mention instead the medieval English and French attitude toward archery.  In England, every village had archery contests, and all the men took pride in their skill, wanting to be the local Robin Hood.  In France, meanwhile, there was a tax on bowstrings.  So at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, where French knights in heavy armor slogged through thick mud against lightly armed English bowmen, who do you think won?  
        But haven't some world leaders been, not dumb, but brilliant?  Of course.Roosevelt, who saved us psychologically from the Depression, and saw us through World War II.  Bismarck, who tricked the French into declaring war in 1870, when he was prepared for war, and they were not.  (Smart, the opposite of dumb, needn’t imply ethical.)Ben Franklin, a shrewd actor who, as our emissary to the court of Versailles, could also be charming, as witnessed by his friendships (were they only friendships?) with a number of titled ladies. Elizabeth I of England, who teased the princes and monarchs of Europe with the possibility of marrying her, playing one against another, when she had no intention of sacrificing her useful virginity.   And who do I proclaim the dumbest, the absolutely dumbest,  of world leaders?  I'll mention just two and a half.

Kaiser Wilhelm.  Lots of medals, though he
 himself never saw battle as a soldier.
Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany tops the list.  A foolish saber-rattler, and so full of himself as to appear (to my American eyes) utterly ridiculous.  The Archduke Francis Ferdinand, whose assassination in 1914 precipitated World War I.  He went with his wife in an open car to Bosnia, a region known to be full of Serb nationalists eager to destroy the Austrian empire and create an all-Slav state.  And he, as heir to the Austrian throne, was their ideal target.  So if taking that little jaunt, its route announced in advance, wasn’t dumb, what is?And now the half: the Roman emperor Nero, said to have fiddled while Rome burned.  Or is that just a story?  If he did, maybe a little music wasn’t out of place, if there was nothing he could do to save the city.  It may have calmed his nerves.  So he counts as only a half.By way of dumb, none of our presidents comes to mind.  “Stupid and inept” characterizes many of them, but that doesn’t make them dumb. 
Enough of this discussion of dumb at the highest levels.  By sticking to the past, I’ve tried to avoid contentious arguments about who, among the world’s leaders today, are dumb.  I’ll leave that to my readers, and have no doubt that they bristle with opinions.  But let’s, for a moment, get personal.  Have we ourselves, good little citizens that we are, and not among the world’s prime movers, ever done anything dumb?
You bet!  In my teen years I did a host of things that were just plain dumb, but I dismiss these adolescent follies, and everyone else’s as well, for they were inevitable, and part of growing up.  Let’s focus on the dumb of maturity, much less excusable.Just out of college and hoping to snag a Fulbright scholarship to France, I went home for a year: a disastrous choice, since I had little social life, sank into depression, and flirted with suicide.  Getting the Fulbright saved me.  Yet if I hadn’t had that one year off, I wouldn’t have taken a first-year course in classical Greek, a choice I have never regretted.  As Socrates used to say, γνῶθι σεαυτόν.  (Puzzled?  See  below.)When I started writing fiction, I turned out autobiographical novels that were, to put it mildly, awful; the very thought of them makes me blush.  In school from an early age I had loved classes in English and history.  Why did it take me so long to realize that well-researched historical novels were just the thing for me?  Dumb.I used to write my mother letters about my doings, and from the time of my Alaskan adventures on (I worked one summer there in a kitchen), she saved them.  After she died, I got hold of them and destroyed them.  Since I had given her only the surface of my life, they contained nothing to embarrass me.  So why did I do it?  Maybe a perverse joy in a kind of self-destruction, or a bitter urge to leave no trace of myself on earth.  Today, as I write a memoir for a gay history archive to be made available to the public only ten years after my death, those letters would be invaluable.  The surfaces alone of my life would tell me a lot that I’ve forgotten.  But I destroyed those letters.  Dumb.  Really dumb.Today, with everyone going around masked, I, age 91, have yet to do it.  Dumb?  Maybe.  But I go out rarely, observe social distancing, and wash my hands upon returning from errands.  And I have finally ordered some masks.  Maybe only half dumb, like Nero.  And probably having less musical ability than he had, I can't even fiddle.
dave souza
Enough of my dumb doings.  How about you?  Have you ever done things that were just plain flat out dumb?  And do you have the courage to reveal them?  Let me know.  I’d love to mention them in this blog, but I promise not to do so with your name attached.  So tell me.  How have you been dumb?
One last candidate for dumb: my computer, and maybe all computers.  When I mistype a word, mine doesn’t just signal an error, it inserts what it thinks I was trying to say.  So when I look again at the screen, I see words I never dreamed of typing, and sometimes they express the very opposite of what I meant.  If I mistype "please," I get "police."  If I mistype "smart," I get "smattered."  For sheer dumbness, computers beat humans every time.  On this happy note I conclude.
Me and my computer.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.
The computer, not me.  But maybe both.
Photo credit: S. Berkowitz
Socrates’ advice to us all: γνῶθι σεαυτόν = “know thyself.”  Which is far from dumb.
Coming soon:  Maybe something, maybe nothing.  It's not a good time.
©  2020  Clifford Browder

460. Getting Rid of the Unwanted Dead

BROWDERBOOKS

The first proofs of my website will come to me on Tuesday.  I just sent my design team the three reviews that New Yorkers has received to date, so they can incorporate them into the site.  Meanwhile, New Yorkers is still available from Amazon, both print and e-book, a great read for a world in lockdown.  For my other books, go here.



                    GETTING  RID  OF  
              THE  UNWANTED  DEAD:
                   THE  OFFAL  BOAT, 
            THE  FORBIDDEN  ISLAND


The offal boat

In the old days of horsepower, before the internal combustion engine, the city’s transportation was mostly horse-drawn, which meant that the city’s streets were often encumbered with dead horses, not to mention cows, and the pigs that ran about freely, scavenging the streets and thus saving their owners the cost of feed.  So what happened to all those smelly carcasses, so offensive to eye and nostril?  The answer: the offal boat.         Departing a dock at 34th Street in the North (Hudson) River regularly in the 1860s was a small sloop piled high with the carcasses of horses, cows, pigs, dogs, and cats, plus barrels, tubs, tanks, and hogsheads of blood and entrails.  Its destination: a bone-boiling plant up the river that would receive this smelly cargo and use it to produce leather, bone (for buttons, etc.), manure, soap, fat, and other products.  In one week the sloop disposed of 50 horses, 9 cows, 135 small animals, and 3,100 barrels of offal.  The city’s butchers delivered blood and offal from the slaughterhouses; the rest was brought in ten carts by a contractor.  In this way the streets were delivered of an odorous impediment that was actually turned into a variety of useful products.  
         Which prompts me to ask what happens today to all those junked cars and other abandoned contraptions that we would like to make disappear.  Where are they, and what becomes of them?  While hiking on Staten Island I have seen abandoned cars half hidden by creeping vegetation, for Americans treat parklands as dumping grounds.  But what about all the other vehicles?  Will archeologists eons hence discover the remains of vast automobile graveyards and wonder what strange civilization could have produced such a huge array of junk?  Or will all that have crumbled away, leaving only little plastic thingamabobs?  I wonder.



The  Forbidden  Island
And what becomes of humans -- the unclaimed bodies that turn up in every big city?  The answer in New York is that, since 1869, they are taken to Hart Island, a quiet, grassy island only about a mile long and a quarter mile wide in Long Island Sound near City Island in the Bronx.  This now uninhabited island, at various times the site of a lunatic asylum, a sanatorium, a boys' workhouse, and a drug facility, is the city's potter's field, the final resting place of some 800,000 anonymous, indigent, and forgotten persons who are buried in closely packed pine coffins in common graves, three coffins deep for adults, and five for babies.  Some 1500 bodies arrive yearly, about half of them stillbirths and infants who are interred in small pine coffins.  "Baby Morales, age 5 minutes," says the paperwork on one; "Unknown male, white, found floating on the Hudson at 254th Street," says another.  Burials are done quickly and routinely without funeral rites, unless some spontaneous prayer from a gravedigger. 

          Note:  I have often wondered where the phrase "potter's field" comes from.  It is Biblical, saying what the chief priests did with Judas's thirty pieces of silver when, repenting of his betrayal of Jesus, he flung them down on the floor of the temple and went and hanged himself: "And they took counsel, and bought the potter's field, to bury strangers in" (Matthew 27:7).  A field used for extracting potter’s clay was useless for agriculture and so was available for burials.
          And who are those gravediggers?  Inmates from Riker's Island who arrive by boat handcuffed, but then climb down into the trenches to work unmanacled, most of them glad to be away from prison and out in the open air, working in the flat, calm solitude of the island.  They are paid all of fifty cents an hour, as is typical of our prison/industrial complex.  But they are not insensitive.  "Respect, guys, respect!" they caution one another, as they lower the coffins into the graves and then cover them with dirt.

          Hart Island is not open to the general public, most of whom have probably never even heard of it, and trespassers face a stiff fine.  But family members able to  prove their relatives are buried there can arrange visits.  This is no easy task, since one has to navigate numerous city agencies to obtain the necessary information.  The coffins have no individual markings, but each grave corresponds to an entry in a ledger.  If successful, the family members can then arrange to have the remains disinterred and removed for burial elsewhere.  But most of the remains are unclaimed.



Southern entrance to the Pavilion, once a
women's prison, later a drug rehab facility.
Photo courtesy of Ian Ference,
The Kingston Lounge.





















         What is it like on the island?  The few who are allowed to visit have different impressions.  One visitor, seeing the crumbling vestiges of earlier installations, called it a dilapidated ghost town; another found it surprisingly peaceful, surrounded on sunny days by an expanse of scintillating water, and serenaded by the distant clanging buoys of Long Island Sound.  One hopes, for this last resting place of the unknown and forgotten, that the latter impression is more accurate.  But those crumbling vestiges have a haunting beauty that photography reveals: the beauty of abandonment and desolation.  I shall never be able to visit this forbidden island, but everything about it breathes mystery.

  
Second floor of the Pavilion.
Photo courtesy of Ian Ference,
The Kingston Lounge.












Interior of the asylum's hospital.
Photo courtesy of Ian Ference,
The Kingston Lounge.

Unused pine coffins in the hospital.
Photo courtesy of Ian Ference,
The Kingston Lounge.



Source note:  These photos of Hart Island are from Ian Ference’s website, The Kingston Lounge.  I urge viewers to access that website to see haunting photos of other crumbling structures. 

Coming soon:  Dumb.  Who is and who isn't.  FDR, Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, and me.  And maybe you, too.

©  2020  Clifford Browder

459. New York Hodgepodge: Alligators, Copperheads, Velocipedes, and the Spite House

BROWDERBOOKS

Waiting for my design team to create my website, I have gone back to my long-neglected project of doing a memoir that will go into the Gay Center's history archive at my death.  I decided to do a new chapter, The Crazy Sixties, about how I and my friends did our respective bouts of craziness in the 1960s.  I chronicle

how, inspired by Allen Ginsberg's Howl, I threw over the academic atmosphere of Columbia and decamped for North Beach, San Francisco, where the Beatniks hung out;how I befriended a homeless Beat and got robbed by him;how I got picked up by a guy at the top of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill and was invited for daily lunches followed by a romp;how I ushered at a friend's wedding in Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill where the best man was a former trick of his;how I ushered at another wedding at Glens Falls, New York, where the groom, the guy who long before had brought me out, married a gifted woman, while I lusted for his best man, and the groom, befuddled, took my wallet by mistake;how I wrote wild, crazy poetry like I had never done before;how I got high on peyote and saw bearded Hittites, trilobites, Egyptian colossi towering above the Nile, lagoons, mosaics, purple ants, and learned that I could turn clouds green.
It was wild, crazy, foolish, and for the most part, fun.  But I can't publish it now, for I name names and am unsparing.  Meanwhile, here's something that is published and and awaits its readers. 


Paperback and ebook available from Amazon.  And for my other books, click here. 

Now on to alligators and the Spite House.


           NEW  YORK  HODGEPODGE:             ALLIGATORS,  COPPERHEADS,  VELOCIPEDES,  AND  THE  SPITE  HOUSE       


This is a hodgepodge of New York experiences, real and otherwise.  Don’t look for a unifying theme; there isn’t any, except the wonders and horrors, the quirks and surprises of the city. 

New York jokes
         These aren’t meant to amuse you; you’ve probably heard them a dozen or a hundred times.  But they say something about the New York mentality.
·      Tourist:  How do I get to Carnegie Hall?    New Yorker:  Practice, practice, practice.
·      Tourist:  Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?             (No recorded response.)
·   A young man from the provinces arrives in New York, sets his  suitcase down, and announces, “Look out, New York!  I’m here to conquer you!”  Then he looks down: his suitcase is gone.

A New York myth: alligators in the sewers
         Snowbirds returning north from Florida supposedly bring back cute little baby alligators as pets.  Then, as the pets get bigger and bigger, they panic and flush them down the toilet.  Result: Alligators ranging in the sewers.  (But hard confirmation is lacking.)

Wildlife in the city
         Speaking of alligators, there is plenty of confirmed wildlife in the city.  No, I don’t mean roaches, mice, and rats, our ubiquitous fellow residents, or the wood ticks that show up in Jamaica Bay Wildlife Sanctuary and elsewhere in the spring, or even the magnificent peregrine falcons that nest on tall buildings and make precipitous plunges to seize their mammalian prey.  I mean unexpected and surprising creatures, as for instance:
·      The muskrats I’ve seen in Jamaica Bay Wildlife Sanctuary.·      The little brown bat that zipped past me once in the North End of Central Park.·      The red fox once reported in Van Cortland Park, though I myself never saw it.

·      The raccoon I saw high in a tree in Central Park.

Has this guy been in your garbage?
               In addition to the above, coyotes have been seen in the suburbs north of here and in the city as well, on the streets of Harlem, near Columbia University, and in Central Park, though I have yet to spot one.  I thought coyotes were a Western critter, but it seems that there is an Eastern coyote who is common upstate but has adapted to urban settings, since in them he finds all his favorite foods: rabbits, squirrels, cats, small dogs, and garbage.  People often mistake coyotes for dogs.  Coyotes have long, thick fur, a bushy tail usually pointed down, and erect, pointed ears.        Of course I've saved the best till last: copperheads inhabit the Jersey Palisades, just across the river from New York.  They and other creatures lurk in the hollows and crevices under the Giant Stairs, a jumble of huge fallen boulders on the Shore Path of the Palisades, a path that I have often walked, scrambling over the boulders, some of which teeter slightly as you scramble.  A rough forty-five-minute trek through a unique landscape that you wouldn’t expect here in the East.  Copperheads are poisonous, but like most snakes they keep away from humans, so in my noisy scrambles over the Giant Stairs I have never seen one.  Also inhabiting the Palisades are raccoons, red foxes, skunks, chipmunks, shrews, moles, and rabbits – all this, just across from the cement and asphalt density, the traffic and the ruckus, of the city.
A copperhead: beautiful, if seen from a distance.  
Look close and you'll see a black snake as well.  
Tad Arensmeier

Street cries of long ago
         Our streets are noisy with traffic sounds and jackhammer screeches, but street cries of vendors are rare, maybe because they wouldn’t be heard over all that racket.  But the early 1800s were different.  Here are some of the street cries from that period, uttered by wandering vendors, some with carts, some without:
Here’s your beauties of oysters, your fine fat briny oysters!
Butter mil-leck!  Butter mil-leck!
Here’s white sand, choice sand, here’s your lily white sand, here’s your Rockaway beach sand!  (Often strewn on floors of taverns.)
Glass put eeen!  Glass put eeen!
Sweep ho!  From the bottom to the top, without a ladder or a rope!  Sweep ho!  Sweep ho! 

Morburre
        Chimney sweeps were common on the streets of nineteenth-century New York, as in Victorian England.  Usually a master and his young apprentice roamed the streets together, the master calling out his cry to alert the householders in need of his services.  The boy would climb up the chimney with a brush to loosen the soot, and then climb down again to bag and remove it.  If he didn't climb properly, he might get stuck in there and not come out alive.  Only much later did machines replace climbing boys. 

The velocipede craze
         In 1869 a new craze from France suddenly swept New York: the velocipede.  This was a crude forerunner of the bicycle, though at the time everyone thought it the very latest in personal transportation and amusement.  Academies and rinks for teaching and riding the velocipede sprang up all  over the city, and hardy young males flocked to them to master this new skill.  The wheels were of iron and the saddle rigid, which discouraged long excursions, so most of the riding was done in indoor rinks.  Accidents were frequent; the victims could display their wounds in much the same way that today's high school football players show their scars and bruises, heroic mementos of a noble sport.




The Spite House
         Years ago passersby were puzzled by a four-story row house at East 82nd Street and Lexington Avenue that was only five feet wide.  There was of course a story behind it.
         In 1882 a clothier named Hyman Sarner who owned several lots on East 82nd Street decided to build an apartment house on his property, which extended almost to Lexington Avenue.  Along Lexington Avenue was a narrow strip of land, valueless, he thought, unless joined to the land he already owned, so he set out to acquire it.
         Learning that the land belonged to one Joseph Richardson, he offered the gentleman a thousand dollars for the land.  But Richardson demanded five thousand, which Sarner thought outrageous.  When Sarner refused, Richardson called him a tightwad and showed him to the door.  So Sarner built his four-story apartment house anyway, with side windows looking out on Lexington Avenue.  
         Now came Richardson’s revenge: he would build a narrow four-story building on his strip of land smack against Sarner’s building, thus cutting off the view from Sarner’s windows.  A building only five feet wide?  His wife and daughter thought he was crazy, but Richardson’s spite was not to be denied; he would live there himself – obesity was not his problem – and rent to skinny tenants. 
         Within a year the house was built, cutting off the view and light from Sarner’s windows.  There were two suites to a floor, each with three rooms and a bath, and stairs between floors so narrow that only one person could use them at a time.  To pass each other in the halls, one person had to duck into one of the rooms so as to let the other one pass.  Richardson and his wife moved into a ground-floor suite and, amazingly, found narrow tenants who moved in with narrow furniture.  

Look close: the Spite House is in the
foreground, slightly lower than the
building with awnings next to it.
         The house quickly became a local legend, inspiring articles and jokes.  But when a journalist of pronounced rotundity came to interview Richardson and was told that the owner was up on the roof overseeing workmen doing repairs, he started up the stairs and at once got perilously stuck; alas, the more he wiggled to get free, the more he got wedged in.  A tenant from the ground floor tried to help by pushing from below, and a tenant from above who wanted to reach the street began pushing in the opposite direction.  Mauled simultaneously from above and below, the journalist finally got the two tenants to desist, then took off his outer clothes and wiggled free, and so proceeded up to the roof in his underwear to conduct an airy  interview.  
         Don’t go to Lexington and East 82nd Street to see this anomaly; it and Sarner’s adjoining building were torn down in 1915 – long after Richardson had died – to make room for a much larger apartment building that could accommodate tenants of whatever proportions.


Coming soon: Getting Rid of the Unwanted Dead. 


©  2020  Clifford Browder

458. Five Worst Poems in the English Language

BROWDERBOOKS

My new nonfiction title, New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, is a good read for a society in lockdown.  And since my mail is being delivered again, and a friend has reported receiving a copy in the mail, it seems likely that anyone wanting a print copy can hope to get it without too much delay.  

A fun book with some grim moments, it's all about New Yorkers and their city.  Chapter 32 on catastrophes seems especially relevant today.  It describes the cholera epidemic of 1832, and the snowstorm of 1888, following which New Yorkers with snowshoes were walking over the tops of trees.  Unless, of course, you'd rather read about booze, weird fun (and I do mean weird), graffiti, the Mystic Rose, and my affair with a Broadway chorus boy.  Paperback and ebook available from Amazon.  For my other books, click here.



                   Five Worst Poems               in the English Language

This is a purely personal choice.  I have excluded minor poets, even though one in particular, otherwise obscure, is promoted online as the very worst poet in the language.  No, I am considering only famous poets, names known to anyone seriously interested in English-language literature.  I am also disregarding the online rants of those who in college were force-fed poetry and have yet to get over it; I want to maintain a degree of objectivity.  So here they are: my choice of the five worst poems in the English language.
No. 1.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha.
An 1855 epic poem in trochaic tetrameter based on Native American legends,  It tells the story of the warrior Hiawatha and his love for the maiden Minnehaha.  Though criticized from the start by critics, the poem was — for quite a while —  popular with the public, for in those days educated people actually did read poetry, and long poems at that.  


This 1910 illustration suggests mystery,
adventure, something almost cosmic.
 But then one encounters the poem.
So what’s my gripe?  Everything.
The length: impossible.  It takes the average reader over two hours to read it, though few would even attempt it today.The meter.  Longfellow was innovative in his choice of meters, but this one, trochaic tetrameter, strikes me as obsessively repetitious — la dee da da, la dee da da — and, finally, just plain ludicrous.The names: “Hiawatha” is okay, but “Minnehaha” invites ha ha, and as for “Gitche Gumee,” it attains the peak of the ridiculous.
To make my point, I need only cite the opening lines:
By the shores of Gitche Gumee, by the shining Big-Sea-Water, Stood the wigwam of Nokomis, daughter of the Moon, Nokomis. Dark behind it rose the forest, rose the black and gloomy pine-trees, Rose the firs with cones upon them; bright before it beat the water, Beat the clear and sunny water, beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.
Would you really want to spend over two hours with this stuff?  Neither would I.  Case closed.

No. 2.  Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad.”
Nineteenth-century poets embraced the Arthurian legend with enthusiasm, sometimes hugged it to death.  Tennyson, an excellent poet in many ways, in this poem strains our credibility today.  The opening lines:
My good blade carves the casques of men,   My tough lance thrusteth sure,My strength is as the strength of ten,   Because my heart is pure.
Pure?  Hmm.  Not that he’s indifferent to the ladies, far from it.  But:
How sweet are looks that ladies bend   On whom their favours fall!For them I battle till the end,   To save from shame and thrall:But all my heart is drawn above,   My knees are bow'd in crypt and shrine:I never felt the kiss of lov   Nor maiden's hand in mine.More bounteous aspects on me beam,   Me mightier transports move and thrill;So keep I fair thro' faith and prayer   A virgin heart in work and will.
A virgin knight?  Okay, but for me that means a bore, a cipher, and a creep.  Granted, the Arthurian legends had to come up with someone other than Lancelot, the greatest of knightly heroes, since the Big L had done naughty things with Arthur’s Guinevere.  But to afflict us with Galahad, the purest biped ever known, and not the least bit conflicted, is going it a bit.  Our post-Freudian mindset just can’t take it.  No wonder my college prof teaching Victorian lit told us he didn’t have the heart — or was it the courage? — to assign the poem to us.  Case closed.


W.E.F. Britten, illustration for Tennyson's poem.

No. 3.  William Wordsworth’s “To the Spade of a Friend (an Agriculturist).”
Never heard of it?  Neither had I, till I found it online.  Of all the Romantics, I rate Wordsworth — the earlier, pre-Laureate Wordsworth — the highest.  But even the best poets have moments of insipid inspiration, as witnessed here.  The poem, Wordsworth adds beneath the title, was “composed while we were labouring together in his pleasure-ground.”  He then begins:
SPADE! with which Wilkinson hath tilled his lands,And shaped these pleasant walks by Emont's side,Thou art a tool of honour in my hands;I press thee, through the yielding soil, with pride.
He goes on to praise his friend, the spade’s owner, but can’t let go of the spade.
Who shall inherit Thee when death has laidLow in the darksome cell thine own dear lord?That man will have a trophy, humble Spade!A trophy nobler than a conqueror's sword. 
His fetish continues in the last stanza, with mention of the spade’s new owner.
His thrift thy uselessness will never scorn;An 'heir-loom' in his cottage wilt thou be:-- High will he hang thee up, well pleased to adornHis rustic chimney with the last of Thee! 
I’ve read of heroes’ swords and armor, and poets’ harps and lyres, being hung up in honor, but never a spade.  Wordsworth did often embrace the ordinary and humble, thus avoiding the exoticism of so many nineteenth-century bards, but for me, this is taking it into the realm of the ludicrous.  Frankly, it’s just plain silly.  Case closed. 

No. 4.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Lewti, or the Circassian Love-Chant.”
This poem was first published in 1798.  To render its flavor, here are the opening lines:
At midnight by the stream I roved,To forget the form I loved.Image of Lewti! from my mindDepart; for Lewti is not kind.
The Moon was high, the moonlight gleam And the shadow of a starHeaved upon Tamaha's stream;But the rock shone brighter far,The rock half sheltered from my viewBy pendent boughs of tressy yew.—      So shines my Lewti's forehead fair,Gleaming through her sable hair,Image of Lewti! from my mindDepart; for Lewti is not kind.
So what to we learn?  A lover laments his unrequited love and tries to forget that “Lewti is not kind.”  A rather pedestrian way to put it; I would expect fire and rage and tumult, not this low-keyed complaint.  And what’s with “Circassian”?  My online dictionary informs me that the Circassians are mainly a group of Sunni Muslims of the northwestern Caucasus.  But Coleridge did not have access to online dictionaries, and I suspect that he used the word for its exotic effect, its evocation of the mysteriously remote.  Such effects he achieved brilliantly in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the fragment “Kubla Khan,” but alas, not so brilliantly here.  And the name “Lewti,” which he evidently invented, bothers me as well.  Especially in these lines:
And so with many a hope I seekAnd with such joy I find my Lewti;And even so my pale wan cheekDrinks in as deep a flush of beauty!      Nay, treacherous image! leave my mind,If Lewti never will be kind.
Well, he managed to rhyme “beauty” with “Lewti,” and that’s better than “bootie” or “snooty,” but the word itself — “Lewti” — bothers me.  It’s just one more reason why I consider this poem concocted, steeped in an annoying exoticism, not rooted in personal experience.  Which brings me no joy, for Coleridge was capable of so much better.  Case, alas, closed.

No. 5.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Excelsior.”
Yes, for my finale, with regret I must return to our American bard.  Troubled as I am to pick on him so unreservedly, I can’t do otherwise, for this poem compels me to include it.  Here’s the first stanza:
The shades of night were falling fast, As through an Alpine village passed A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice, A banner with the strange device,       Excelsior! 
So is this young man hawking excelsior, an industrial product made of wood slivers and used in packaging and taxidermy?  And hawking it in, of all places, the Alps?  No, excelsior is surely used here in its Latin sense (yes, it comes from Latin), meaning “higher, always upward.”  In this sense, in fact, it appears on the New York State seal.  So what is this guy up to?  The poem tells us, sort of …
"Try not the Pass!" the old man said; "Dark lowers the tempest overhead, The roaring torrent is deep and wide!" And loud that clarion voice replied,       Excelsior! 
"Oh stay," the maiden said, "and rest Thy weary head upon this breast! " A tear stood in his bright blue eye, But still he answered, with a sigh,       Excelsior! 
By now it should be clear that our hero is no ordinary mountain climber; frankly, he’s a nut.  Which reminds me of some of the daredevil climbers in my previous post, “Mountains: They Entice, Delight, Kill.”  And sure enough, when the monks of St. Bernard send out their hound at daybreak:
A traveller, by the faithful hound, Half-buried in the snow was found, Still grasping in his hand of ice That banner with the strange device,       Excelsior! 
There in the twilight cold and gray, Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay, And from the sky, serene and far, A voice fell like a falling star,       Excelsior! 
So there he is, frozen dead, but sanctified by some celestial voice.  Sorry, it just doesn’t cut.  The damn fool got what he deserved, and maybe what he wanted.  But believe me, the frozen dead aren’t “beautiful,” and they can’t help humanity in any way. 

An 1852 illustration.

Coincidentally, in response to my post on mountains, a friend told me of an acquaintance of his, a poet who was writing a book about volcanoes.  Climbing up a volcano on a remote Japanese island, he wanted to get to the top, but a volunteer at the climbing hut urged him not to, as it was too late in the day.  A risk-taker, he went on anyway, but was never seen again.  He must have fallen into the volcano, but his body was never found.  Even so, was he in some ways a hero?  Hardly.  Everyone in any way involved with him in the U.S. and Japan was thrown into crisis, the island also, and the volunteer in the climbing hut broke down in tears, convinced he should have done more to prevent the accident.  And the climber left behind a wife and child.  So much for “Excelsior!”  Case closed.


                                 *         *         *
So there they are: my five worst poems in the English language.  All from the nineteenth century, as it happens.  Back then exoticism and medievalism raged in literary circles on both sides of the Atlantic, the results being sometimes charming, and sometimes deplorable.  And these five poets — no, only four — could at times be deplorable.  Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Tennyson redeem themselves with their other work, but in Longfellow’s case, I’m not so sure.  Today, who reads him?  Poor guy, he’s about as hot as an icicle, as endearing as a dead fish.


Coming soon:  New York Hodgepodge: Alligators, Copperheads, Velocipedes, and the Spite House


©  2020  Clifford Browder

456. Mountains

BROWDERBOOKS


You think we've got it bad with the coronavirus?  How about a cholera outbreak so bad that Hudson River steamboats, refusing to dock in the city, dropped New York-bound passengers off somewhere in Westchester County, making them trudge back to the city as best they could?  Or a snowstorm that dropped so much snow on the city that the next morning, when New Yorkers went out in snowshoes, they walked over the tops of trees?  This was in March, but the last snow, now blackened, didn't melt until July.  

      All this, the cholera of 1832 and the Great White Blizzard of 1888, is told in chapter 32 of my new nonfiction title, New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, which is now available as a paperback at Amazon.  It celebrates New Yorkers and their wild, crazy, noisy, and profoundly creative city.  A fun book, but with a few grim moments.

      New Yorkers has received its first review, a five-star editorial review for Readers' Favorite Reviews by K.C. Finn, who says: "Author Clifford Browder has crafted a loving and modern master work on the Big Apple, one which is both an entertaining read in itself and an essential piece of informative travel guide work.... I’d highly recommend New Yorkers to any reader seeking an accomplished written snapshot of such a complex and wonderful city."    For the full review, see post #455.

      More reviews are expected.  To my surprise, the book has even had a sale in England.

      My Goodreads giveaway, offering 100 ebooks of New Yorkers, ends tonight at midnight; there's still time to enter it.  So far, 427 people have signed up.

      I am now in the process of building a website; more of this anon.  For my other books, go here.


      The post that follows is the first of a series that I plan to do on natural features that I somehow relate to: Mountains, Forests, Rivers, maybe Prairies or Fields.  But first, Mountains.

MOUNTAINS:       THEY  ENTICE,  DELIGHT,  KILL
I’m a city boy and happily so, but I have had my experience of mountains.  Not towering snow-capped peaks like Everest, or fiery, lava-spewing craters like Pele on the island of Hawaii, which I chronicled in post #380, “When Grandma Burns Your House Down.”  (More of her later.).  And not where I grew up in Illinois, which has no mountains.  My first mountain was Old Baldy, visible in the 1940s from the campus of my college, Pomona, in the orange groves of southern California.  With a height of 10,000 feet  and sometimes snow-capped, it is the tallest peak of the San Gabriel Mountains, which are located in Los Angeles County not far from  the City of the Angeles.  It was not a threat and could be reached easily by car, since a paved road went much of the way up the slope.  I remember some friends of mine returning from Old Baldy with heaps of snow packed tight on the sides of the car, snow being a novelty in southern California.
Hardly an experience of mountains, you may assert.  True enough.  But my next mountain was Mount Canigou in the Pyrenees, 9,000 feet, and being young and adventurous, in July 1952 I climbed to the very top.  It was a good trail, but it took two hours or more and was a challenge.  Finally I reached the chalet near the top, too tired and hungry to continue.  I bunked down with other hikers in a communal shelter, slept fairly well, and when I got up in the morning, looked out the window at a fiery red dawn sky, the most magnificent that I have ever seen.  Hurrying through breakfast, I rushed out and found the sky now a splendid snowy white.  It took only fifteen minutes to reach the rocky summit, but by then the white was gone, replaced by a cloudless summer sky, beautiful, but not extraordinary.  On the summit also were hikers who identified themselves as Catalan, not Spanish.  Going back down the mountain took a mere forty-five minutes, but my leg muscles felt just a bit rubbery, well exercised.  So ended my one real mountain climb, from the bottom to the top and down again.  I will never forget the red dawn sky, followed by milky white.

Mount Canigou.  No snow when I was there.
WSX
Once I settled down in New York City, I was far from any mountains, but an hour’s bus ride took me far upstate to Harriman Park.  Hiking there, I have climbed many so-called mountains, but they are really just wooded ridges.  But one, Parker Cabin Mountain, following a slow ascent to the top, gave me the thrill of a steep descent that I wouldn’t attempt now for anything.  But following the descent came a reward: in August, blueberries to be picked by the hundreds; I returned with my backpack full.
So my experience of mountains has involved energy, marvelous views, and fun.  But mountains can be dangerous.  Almost every summer one hears of some teen-age boys who climb up to some ledge and then, looking back down, are frozen in fear.  Only then do they fully appreciate the perilous nature of their climb.  Trapped overnight on the ledge in light summer clothing, they suffer from exposure, for even in summer, mountain nights are cold.  One heartbreaking account told how rescuers, arriving by helicopter the next day, found one boy dead and his buddy dying.  “Please don’t let me die,” he pleaded, but he was gone before they could get him off the mountain.  Yes, mountains can be dangerous; one must approach them with caution and respect.
The very notion of mountains as a place for entertainment and fun is a modern one.  Until recent times mountains were viewed as places of peril, not beauty.  They were viewed from below, and with daily life more challenging by far than today, people felt no need to seek more hardship and danger by climbing them.  They were for the gods, and no place for ordinary mortals.  Mount Olympus was the home of the gods of ancient Greece, and Mount Helicon the home of the Muses.  And in Jewish and Christian tradition, when God wanted to give Moses the tablets with the Ten Commandments, he summoned him up to Mount Sinai.  So mountains can be seen as sacred and worthy of reverence, as they are in many mythologies and belief systems, including those of the native peoples of North America.
Moses coming down from Mount Sinai. Gustave Doré, 1866.
And mountains can be seen as sublime.  In ancient times the notion of the sublime — greatness that surpasses mere beauty and defies measurement or imitation — was examined by the philosopher Longinus in his 1st-century A.D. work On the Sublime.  Rediscovered in the Renaissance, his ideas influenced modern thinkers, who described the sublime as fear-inspiring and tinged with horror, an experience that they encountered when crossing the Alps.  Romantic poets and artists embraced the concept, and Wordsworth expressed it in the Prelude in a dramatic description of his crossing the Simplon Pass. 
                       The immeasurable heightOf woods decaying, never to be decayed,The stationary blasts of waterfalls,And in the narrow rent, at every turn,Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,Black drizzling crags that spake by the waysideAs if a voice were in them, the sick sightAnd giddy prospect of the raving stream,The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light —Were all the workings of one mind, the featuresOf the same face, blossoms upon one tree,Characters of the Great Apocalypse,The types and symbols of Eternity,Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.

      Far better than any abstract definition, this passage conveys the very nature of the sublime.  And Romantic artists and poets, wanting more than just beauty, embraced it.
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.
Oil on canvas, circa 1817.
Few of us today tell of experiencing what Wordsworth experienced in the Alps.  We don’t fear mountains; we go to them for climbing and skiing, for adventure and fun.  Cable cars take tourists and skiers up to high elevations, where the skiers can ski gracefully — or not so gracefully — down snowy slopes, casting long shadows on the snow.  And the tourists oooh and aaah at the sights.  And the tourists take photos of one another, or selfies, against a mountainous backdrop: proof that they were actually there, albeit without much effort.  We have made mountains into our theater, our playpen.

Alpine skier
Tourists on Qigu Salt Mountain, Taiwan.
bangdoll

However we go at them, we can’t leave them alone.  Our need of thrills and adventure takes us — some of us — even further.  Recently I viewed on YouTube a fascinating Australian video on how people react to mountains.  The video shows climbers crawling up vertical cliffs, the mere sight of which almost gives me vertigo.  It shows a climber hurtling headlong, head over heels in space, his life depending on a single long strand of rope that may save his life, but cannot keep him from finally hitting a snowy surface headfirst.  Closeups show a bruised and bloody face, and bleeding fingers from clutching at the jagged face of a cliff.  And men carrying a stretcher down a mountainside with the body of a climber who didn’t survive his adventure.  All this because we never feel more alive than when we know that, at any minute, we can die.  All this because some of us yearn to be the first, the very first, to see or do something extraordinary, yearn to strike a victorious pose at the very top of mountain, as if to say, “You’re tough, but I conquered you, I won.”
John Singer Sargent,
drawing from Switzerland sketchbook, 1869.
Illusion.  The video also shows jagged barren peaks where no living thing exists, snowy summits against an orange sunset, peaks towering above a vast, fluffy skyscape of clouds.  We yearn for the sublime and find it in mountains, but the mountains are indifferent to us, don’t need us, existed long before life evolved, and will still be there when, eons from now, the last trace of life is exterminated.  
Dominicus Johannes Beugsma
Nowhere is their indifference, their contempt for us, more visible than when they explode and send fiery flows of lava down their slopes.  One thinks immediately of Vesuvius and how it destroyed the delightful seaside resort and moneyed escape-from-the-city retreat that was Pompeii.  Found buried there in volcanic ash were remains of fleeing humans trying to outrun the mountain’s fury, just as, on snowy slopes, remains have been found of sprinting humans trying to outrun an avalanche.
 Advancing lava of a Hawaiian volcano, 2003.
How to deal with such a situation is discussed in my post #380, “When Grandma Burns Your House Down.”  The grandma involved is Pele (pronounced PEH-leh), the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes and fire, the woman who devours the earth.  She is thought to live in the volcanic crater of Mount Kilauea on the island of Hawaii.  When the volcano erupts, it causes earthquakes, releases lethal gases, and sends streams of lava down her slopes to engulf forests and homes in fire.  
Unable to cope otherwise, native Hawaiians revere Madame Pele, view with admiration and awe her fiery eruptions, honor her as the creator of their island, and try to appease her with offerings of crystals, money, incense, and food.  But she can also appear in human form, so if you see her hitchhiking, offer her a ride.  And since she loves the stuff, offer her some gin.  When the volcano erupts, threatening once again to send down lava to destroy their homes, they say, “Ah, Pele is coming down to play,” and prepare to run for their lives.  Because, like her descendants, she likes a little mischief.
Mount Everest in the Himalayas, the king of all mountains, 2006.
Closed to climbers now on its side by Nepal because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Luca Galuzzi

So we have two ways to deal with mountains today.  One is to go to them for amusement and thrills, or to try to conquer them, which takes courage.  The alternative: see them as your ancestor, your loving but capricious grandmother, and revere her and make nice with her, no matter what she does, which shows wisdom.  Courage or wisdom: both are commendable.  But from my snug cozy New York apartment, far from volcanoes and their fiery spew, I choose wisdom. 
Coming soon:  "Fashion Dirties, Fashion Kills."  A look at fast fashion, the world of knockoffs, with a sober warning about your cotton T-shirts and blue jeans.
©  2020  Clifford Browder