REVIEW

When I told my wife I was reviewng a book titled The Dimaggios, she asked me, “There was more than one?”   There were, in fact three – the brothers Joe, Dom and Vince, all big-league ballplayers of varying skill-levels and fame. 

But it’s the  subtitle that’s the problem, identifying the book as a document in the long literary history of this country’s animating vision, of which baseball, of course, played a part. The DiMaggio parents, Italian immigrants who worked hard to give their children a better life in San Francisco than they could have in Sicily, had a version of the American Dream in their minds that corresponded to the classic narrative that has shaped the fiction of Horatio Alger, Nathanael West, John Updike, F. Scott Fitzgerald,  and Arthur Miller.  The problem is that none of  these three brothers was Jay Gatsby (though perhaps Vince, who ended up selling Fuller brushes door to door, was a kind of Willy Loman.)  Dom, the one with the brains, always underrated and in Joe’s shadow as a ballplayer though he was voted American League MVP in 1947, at least found a successful career in business.  And Joe, after Marilyn Monroe’s death, became even more reclusive, bitter and paranoid than he had always been.   None of them was a hero, least of all Joe, who “just wanted  “an excuse to get out of the house.”

The fact that Joe was lionized by the press and the fans was the product of America’s conflation of athletic skills and character.  Undoubtedly, the cult that surrounded him was enormous: Paul Simon’s lyric “Where have you gone, Joe DiMggio? / A nation turns its lonely eyes to you” testifies both to the size of the myth and to the absence of the man, and Joe reveled in his fame, using it as a screen to keep everyone else out.  He was from the start vain, not very bright, suspicious to the point of paranoia – a loner who seldom spoke to his teammates, and ended up estranged from both brothers.  Here’s what he told Gay Talese in 1966:  “There are . . . personal things that I refuse to talk about.  And even if you asked my brothers, they would be unable to tell you about them because they do not know.”  Clavin quotes Charlie Silvera, a Yankee teammate, as saying that Dom and Joe, “each is his own way was a great guy and a great ballplayer.”  But Clavin makes it abundantly clear that Joe was anything but a great guy.  Vince was the affable one; Joe was, as Gay Talese put it, “a kind of male Garbo,”

Telling the story of these three lives involved, for Clavin, a prodigious amount of research;  he seem to have read every book, every article, every news story written by, for and about the brothers, their family, and about baseball itself in the 30’s and 40’s – he stops just short of including box scores.  And this is a problem: he doesn’t really tell a story.  The DiMaggios is something of a cut-and-paste job, an immense amount of data arranged in chronological order, but with no overarching idea to serve (not those in the subtitle, at any rate). Too much space is taken up by meaningless factoids (a friend of Joe’s, serving in Korea, was promoted to sergeant; Ted Williams had fun learning how to fly; Lefty O’Doul, died on “the anniversary of the American attack on Pearl Harbor.”)  And it isn’t only facts that Clavin’s research turns up, but opinions as well:  whenever things get pulled together in a meaningful way, it’s Roger Kahn or David Halberstam who’s doing the pulling.  Clavin seems to have interviewed several members of the DiMaggio family and scene, but the only one he quotes extensively is Vince’s daughter, Joanne DiMaggio Weber.  And she’s good for an anecdote every few pages. But as a family member, she’s not necessarily a reliable witness (though I believe her when she says that her favorite baby sitter was Phil Rizzuto.)  The “as told to” autobiographies produced by each of the brothers are, as Clavin rightly calls them, formulaic, self-serving and unreliable.

But there have been many biographies of Joe, one of the best being Richard Ben Cramer’s Joe Dimaggio:  The Hero’s Life, an excellent and juicy book that probes into all the sordid, interesting crannies of “the hero’s” stunted personality.  Where Clavin tells us that after his divorce, Joe “wasn’t looking for another wife, just companionship,” Cramer reveals that between and after his marriages, virtually the only women he met were prostitutes, one of whom still marvels at Joltin’ Joe’s physical attributes:  he was “bigger than Milton Berle,” she said, Uncle Miltie representing the phallic paradigm of the 40’s and 50’s. This is juicy stuff, and it’s what’s missing from Clavin’s version.  It’s not that The DiMaggios is sanitized, just that it’s plodding and literal, lacking narrative style and telling details.  The brothers’ personality quirks are mentioned regularly but Vince’s affability, Dom’s shyness and Joe’s sullen grudge-holding get lost among endless reiterations of what happened in Cleveland, in New York, in Boston on summer afternoons 70 years ago, when Joe went 3 for 4 and won a game that won a pennant that led to yet another World Series. In 1950, “The gutty Red Sox did not fold. On July 18, their 12-9 win over the Tigers at Fenway Park brought them to .500 at 39-39.  In the next 59 games they went 47-12.”  There must be baseball fanatics who will lap up all these stats and replays, but for most of us, a little more than a little of that is much too much.

When the book gets interesting, predictably, is when Joe meets Marilyn.  Clavin observes that they slept together on their first date, though I think it would be bigger news if they hadn’t; “dating” doesn’t seem like what these two were up to.  Yet Clavin, in defiance of all evidence that their marriage was a liasion between two damaged, narcissistic, sex-addicted celebrities, tells us that their wedding was “a fairy-tale event for gossip lovers,” attended by none of Joe’s family.  The marriage lasted less than a year.  “He had loved her deeply.  He always would,” writes Clavin. But Joe really was incapable of love, and didn’t want a homemaker and child-rearer for a wife; he’d tried that once before and gotten burned. Neither had any idea who the other really was.  Returning from a promotional tour of Japan, Marilyn told her husband, by now retired, “You never heard such cheering.”  He replied, “Yes, I have.”  The people closest to him probably shared Toots Shor’s opinion of her: “Joe, what can you expect when you marry a whore?”

The last few chapters of The DiMaggios are painful, as the brothers’ relationship deteriorates and one after another, they sicken and die.  Joe seems in his later years to have fallen under the spell of a sleazy lawyer named Morris Engelberg who made him money on the memorabilia circuit impersonating, as it were, Joe Dimaggio, and who, as Joe lay on his deathbed, may have pulled his World Series ring off his finger and then tried to pull the plug on his ventilator.  The kid who just wanted to get out of the house ended up hoarding money and, except for a moocher, alone.  If this is the American Dream, it’s a sad one.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Nancy and I were in Paris last week with the kids and grandkids.  I had been looking forward to seeing them, but Paris?  Not especially.  I've hardly spent any time at all there, and when I have, it was either freezing January or broiling July.  I have trouble understanding the machine-gun bursts of spoken Parisian French, and a good part of this trip would be spent with my son-in-law's many relatives, in suburban Houilles, where I anticipated mind-numbing language difficulties.  I had no interest in doing the tourist things; my most vivid memory from previous visits is lines longer than Disney World's.  And this, at least is still true; here's the Louvre on a weekday morning:

Of course, the food would be great, at least in restaurants, though we'd need a second mortgage to eat out.   And to top it all, the long-range forecast for that week was cool and rainy -- and so it was, except for one perfect, sunny afternoon when the two of us went to Roland Garros for the second day of the French Open, buying grounds-only passes from a scalper for a mere 300 euros.  That's euros, not dollars.

But something strange and wonderful occurred:  I fell in love with the city.  We were in Houilles twice, and the famille Bellenoue all came into town once, and I mean all --

and the more time I spent with them, the more charmed I was.  Most of the conversation was indeed in  French, but they took pains to speak slowly and distinctly, and they were amusant and interessant, and they cooked us a wonderful day-long meal, and it was the first time we'd ever met any French people who weren't waiters or cab drivers or hotel clerks (except for a girl named Jeanne, in Cassis, when I was 19, but that's another story).

The other thing that made the week special was that instead of staying in a hotel (which really would have required a second mortgage), we rented an apartment.  It had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, the latter feature not typical of the city's housing.  It was in the 1st, just up the street from the Jardin des Tuileries, which had a nice playground for the kids, and though it was on the Wrong Bank (the Right; we'd have preferred the Left), it was perfectly situated to bring everyplace we wanted to go within walking distance -- the Musee d'Orsay, le Marais, St. Germain, Sainte Chapelle, restaurants that Benoit and Danielle could ferret out, where we ate the best meals of 2013, for less than $100 (that's dollars, not euros) a couple.  We walked our feet off, miles and miles, past the famous landmarks and into neighborhoods I'd never heard of, and I loved every step of the way.

And the Right Bank ain't so stodgy after all.   Look at these pictures:  the first was taken from the window of our NY apartment, on the Upper East Side, a very desirable location, and probably New York's equivalent of the Rive Droit:

What we see, across the street, is an undistinguished church and a gutted building containing, from left to right, a newsstand, a shoemaker, a frozen yogurt place, a farm stand, and of course, across Lex, a Starbucks.  Here's what the Marche Rue Ste. Honore´ looked like from the terrace of our Paris apartment:

The store with the green awning sells every kind of oyster you've ever heard of.  On the  corner, elegant young Parisians are converging on the mecca of a small bistro; across the street, more chic citoyens are congregating at a little bar that every evening trundles out a bunch of barrels and puts checkered tablecloths over them.  Bicycles and scooters predominate; the parked cars seldom move, so the street is quiet enough to catch snatches of conversation floating up.  

And all this has been here all my life.  It was never a problem falling in love with London, and our friends Jeff and Linda, who live in Rome, plugged us into that wonderland, but now, only now, do I get what Balzac and Proust and Woody Allen have been proclaiming.  Might have to make this reunion an annual affaire. 

A TALE OF TWO (UNIVER)SITIES

What an odd academic career I've had!  My first full-time job after grad school lasted thirty years -- at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York, from which I retired, at the rank of full professor, in 1998.

I did so not because I wanted to stop teaching, but because I wanted to teach fewer courses to better students closer to home, which in practice meant become an Adjunct Professor at NYU.  The salary was minuscule, but I was very happy there, principally because I was spared the scut work of teaching composition courses, which made up the bulk of everyone's schedule at BC.  Instead, and inexplicably, I got to teach Shakespeare seminars because no one on NYU's permanent faculty was interested in doing so.

This year, NYU let me go.  They had hired two Shakespeareans, making me expendable, and were trying to rid their midsts of adjuncts, which is in a way commendable; too many departments nationwide depend too heavily on underpaid, overworked (and perhaps unqualified) part-timers to relieve the superstar profs of the tedious business of teaching undergraduates, grading papers, holding conferences.   The fact that I felt violated and desolated when I got the news that I was being let go (by email!) was beside the point.  I had fallen into the trap of thinking that, though my job description was "adjunct," my years as a professor put me on more or less equal footing with the permanent department.  Hadn't I published almost as much as some of them had?  Didn't I win NYU's Outstanding Teaching Award (seldom, if ever, awarded to adjuncts) in 2005?  Hadn't I been assured by several chairpersons that I was a valued member of the department?

But that was then.  My friends and supporters at NYU have retired, or transferred to the Abu Dhabi campus, or taken other jobs, and, as Willy Loman said to his boss, sealing his own fate, "They don't know me any more."

Not ready to leave the classroom, I got myself another job -- back at Brooklyn College.  Home is where, when you have to go back there, they have to take you in.  I'll be teaching a Core course next fall, and Shakespeare in the spring -- but I have no idea to whom.  I loved NYU's students, and a lot of them loved me back.  I don't know what I'll find at BC.  Probably enough bright kids to sustain a classroom discussion, but certainly a much higher proportion of what are termed "students in difficulty" -- clueless, unprepared, bored, desperate -- who will need a lot of special attention.  But will we be friends?  Many of my former NYUers -- hi Kea, Carol, Oz, Sarah, Heidi and Loidee -- are still my buds.  Only one of my BCers is -- hi, Ruth --  and she followed me to NYU to do graduate work and became my TA there.

Then there are the practical matters.  NYU is only 20 minutes away on the 6 train from my New York apartment. .  BC is about an hour away on the 5 train.  NYU is in the East Village, than which no neighborhood is more fun; BC is in Midwood, off Flatbush, which becomes quite dreary that far out.  NYU has Washington Square Park, which on warm, sunny days like yesterday is New York theater at its finest:

On the other hand, BC has a beautiful campus, one of New York's finest examples of Georgian Revival architecture, with its own little park, including a koi pond, that soothes the soul:

So maybe, in terms of environment, it's a wash.  I just don't know, and won't until September.  Isn't all change good?  On the other hand, is this a change, or just deja vu all over again?  I'll let you know in six months.

TO MOOC OR NOT TO MOOC?

 A STUDENT MOOCING

As everyone who reads a newspaper or a blog knows by now, Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, has put an end to perhaps the most valuable perk in Silicon Valley, permission to work from home.   That model seemed to make perfect sense in an internet company; doesn’t it simply fulfill the core promise of the internet itself, that interaction on line can be as rewarding and effective as face-to-face contact?  Mayer’s reasoning was interesting:  she admitted that working from home was more productive than shlepping into the office and hanging out by the water cooler, but, she said, it was less innovative.  For innovation, you need that water cooler, or cafeteria, or couches in hallways, or any place that encourages 24-year-old whiz kids to excite each other with new ideas, to improve and refine and think of new uses for the company’s products.

That’s not a new idea; Steve Jobs, when he designed Apple’s new headquarters, made sure that even going to the bathroom routed you past watering holes and gathering spots.  I don’t remember Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Jobs, mentioning any real or expected decline in productivity, so we don’t know whether that would have been a successful trade-off for the Magus of McIntosh.    But, in a Times’s op-ed page last week titled “In Defense of Telecommuting,” a sociology professor from UT-Austin commented that the powers-that-be at our large research universities, “among the most successful engines of innovation in our economy,” never have to artificially enforce face-time between faculty members.  “To give one small example,” she wrote, “two of my colleagues, at Cornell University, a demographer and geographer, recently came up with the idea for a study to improve the retention of women working in science while chatting during their children’s after-school swim lessons.” 

Ah, yes.  But what works at Cornell (my undergraduate school) might not work at NYU (my current employer).  Ithaca, NY, is at best a medium-sized town, with a somewhat limited palette of restaurants, cultural and sporting events, and pools that offer children’s swim lessons; in my day, and I imagine now, wherever faculty happened to find themselves off-campus, other faculty would have found their own ways there.  Ithaca, Boulder, Ann Arbor, Austin, and State College, PA, are, to varying degrees, almost suffocatingly insular places, but Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Philadelphia (think Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley and Penn) are geographically and culturally polyglot and diverse.  If I’m not eating in the vicinity of Astor Place, I almost never run into my colleagues or my students.  The same was even more true of  Brooklyn College, where I taught from 1967 to 1998:  it was, and is, a commuter school, and though there are a cafeteria and lounges, they’re almost empty; faculty and students  met in the classroom for 75 minutes, and then either retreated to their offices, if they had them, went home.

All this connects to the Next Big Thing in education – MOOCs, the clumsy acronym for Massive Open Online Courses, in which a superstar professor lectures to thousands of enrolled students worldwide, who will eventually take online exams and receive course credit without ever having set foot on the campus (which might itself be virtual).

Why not take this to its extreme:  just have the students read a book and pass quizzes on it.  No, say the innovators of this potentially huge money-maker, that would defeat the principle of collegiality.  After each lecture, the students will have the opportunity to interact with their teacher, advancing ideas and asking questions.

Are they kidding?  Picture the virtual classroom as if it were a real place the size of, say, Madison Square Garden -- 20,000 students, 7,000 of them with hands in the air.  I’ve taught lecture courses at NYU with as many as 120 students in them, and I didn’t field questions and queries after I was done speaking; I had three TAs, each of whom met two sections of 20 students once a week, to do that.  How many TAs will a big-time MOOC require?  Where will they come from?  Mine were graduate students studying for Ph.Ds in English, but in a virtual university, they’ll be on-line too.  So, at least in one model, there’s no face-to-face contact at all.

Is that so bad?  How would Baxter Hathaway’s creative writing class at Cornell all those years back have suffered if each of us students had submitted our stories and poems online and discussed them via teleconference (which hadn’t yet been invented)?  Here’s how:  I’d never have met my fellow student Tom Pynchon, never have had coffee with him after class, never have picked one of the most subtle, original and powerful minds I’ve ever encountered.  College – at least a humanities college – isn’t a place where you’re trained to regurgitate factoids.  It’s a place where you find your cohort, the people who shape your character and outlook and become your friends.  There are no friendships in the MOOC landscape.  

And there may be perils, having to do with isolation and distraction and social infantilization and possibly even worse things.  “Officer, I know I ran that red light at 60, but I was tweeting my BritLit final.” 
 

SETH MACFARLANE'S NIGHT OUT

                           Did Jennifer Lawrence trip, or is she mourning the death of humor?

"We saw your boobs!”*  “The only guy who really got inside Lincoln’s head was John Wilkes Booth.”  “It’ll be sixteen years before Quvenzhane Wallis is too old for Clooney.” Other targets included Jews, Latinos, gays and rape victims.  With these and other tasteless and misgynistic bon mots did Seth MacFarlane regale the billion or so people watching the Oscar presentations the other night, prompting a backlash in both directions:  The Onion tried to get into the spirit of the evening by saying of Ms. Wallis, “that Quvenzhane Wallis is kind of a c**t, right?” But most people who have offered commentary, in the press or on the social media, expressed indignation, even outrage, at the whole unseemly spectacle.  Perhaps the most eloquent criticism was the look of disgust on Charlize Theron’s face when MacFarlane exulted in having glimpsed her breasts onscreen. (It’s possible, however, that this moment was pre-recorded, which interestingly complicates Theron’s take on the joke.)  It’s kind of surprising that when Jennifer Lawrence tripped over her dress on the way to the podium, there weren’t at least isolated peals of mirth.

            I have a particular interest in this cultural moment because, as it happens, I’m teaching a course at NYU this semester in bad taste and misogyny.  That’s not how it’s labelled, of course; its title is “English Literature in the Earlier 17^th Century,” but as it happens, the years between the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 and the Puritan takeover of the country in 1642 saw the birth and flowering of an esthetic of bad taste and contempt for women, a kind of wholesale reaction against the decorum of conventional thought and image that had governed the world of letters until then.

            Consider this epigram by Sir John Suckling, who, in his short lifetime served as James I’s secretary of state, invented the civilized game of cribbage, and was a trusted advisor to James’ son and successor Charles I:

            Love is the fart

            Of every heart.

            It pains a man when ‘tis kept close

            And others doth offend, when ‘tis let loose.

            The first fart joke of the early modern era!  Aside from the literary merits of this ditty (at best it’s clever, though it tops any of MacFarlane’s sallies hands down), it served as an announcement that a new kind of joke was permissible.  The body and all its various sounds, sights, smells, and secretions was no longer off-limits to poets – particularly the female body.  Where the previous generation of sonneteers (Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Phillip Sidney, Shakespeare) dwelt on their mistresses’ golden hair, alabaster foreheads and coral lips, John Donne wrote avidly of his mistress undressing before him, saluting “the hairy diadem which on you doth grow” and begging her to “License my roving hands, and let them go / Before, behind, between, above, below.”   But women were just disposable toys to the misogynistic Donne, who will “swear / No where / Lives a woman true and fair.”  In his poem “The Indifferent,”  he views female constancy as a vice, asking those few women who still practice such abberant behavior, “Will it not serve your turn to do as did your mothers?”  Low blow!  In one of what he problematically called his “Holy Sonnets,” Donne (who was not only a priest but Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral), entertains a fantasy of being raped by God:  “O’erthrow me, and bend / Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new. . . . for I, / Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.”  Suversive enough for ya?

            In the light of this rather short-lived fad (when the Puritans seized control, decorum returned, sharpened to a razor’s edge that resulted in the beheading of Charles I), the gross-out humor of our own time, and its vast appeal, may be more explicable. Perhaps it started with Bill Osco’s 1980 film Gross Out, whose premise was that a woman threatens to withold her children’s inheritance unless they produce a movie so disgusting it makes her vomit. It caught on. To millions, it’s funny to watch Cameron Diaz rub semen into her hair in There’s Something About Mary.  The food fights and fart jokes of Animal House are hilarious not only to frat boys but to much wider audiences as well. Judd Apatow’s This is 40 is a gross-out movie for the mildly middle-aged.  Beavis and Butthead speak for themselves.

The precondition for the esthetic of bad taste, I think, is an ironic outlook on life – the outlook of Seinfeld’s cast, of Chris Rock, of the Farrelly Brothers.  Irony turns everything on its head, so that a joke, or a movie, or a routine such as MacFarlane’s can be so bad it’s good, outrageousness for its own sake is worthwhile, airing in public what used to be private is nothing but liberating.  The more literate apologists for all this cite the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “grotesque body” – the body we all have and used to deny or attempt to ignore, a hairy, squelchy bag of flesh enclosing sacs of urine, feces, semen, mucus, pus and snot.  Such, seen from the reductive, grossly physical point of view, is your body and mine, John Belushi’s and Elizabeth Bennet’s.  Even George Orwell, though he never grossed anybody out, provided a rationale in his essay “The Art of Donald McGill” for pictorial obscenity:  “It is the voice of the belly protesting agains the soul,” he wrote. 

So was Seth MacFarlane’s the voice of the belly?  Perhaps he’d like to put himself in the august company of Rabelais and Donne.  But it’s one thing to smash the icons of a repressive, prudish society in the name of freedom, and another to pick on nine-year-olds.  In truth, are there any icons left?  Lincoln, maybe.  But except for one (big) Oscar, Spielberg’s reverent epic was largely ignored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

*This has already inspired a parody titled "We Saw Your Junk," at http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/02/we-saw-your-junk-a-boob-song-parody.html

RUN IN CIRCLES, SCREAM AND SHOUT

I love signage.  Those of you (all three of you) who have remained my constant readers throughout the years know that I've written on signs and their sign(ificance) a lot -- there was the article in the East Hampton Star, titled "The Semiotics of Springs," that almost got my house firebombed twenty years ago, just because it traced the ongoing conflict between townies and weekenders to the unconscious ways in which they marked their territories.  I wrote on the unintelligibility of NYC parking signs on this blog a couple of years ago, and now they're being reworded (obviously Bloomberg is a fan).  And later, I took the town of Southampton to task for displaying mammoth billboards depicting a cop in combat stance aiming a pistol-like radar detector at motorists, which I found less than subtle.

But the above falls into the category of mere whimsy.  The device is attached to the wall of the room in NYU's Skirball Center where they give flu shots, though I'm sure it's used many other purposes than that, none of them obvious but perhaps known causes of panic -- doctoral orals?  Job interviews?  Theatrical auditions?

What, exactly, might the sign mean?

1) If you're in a panic, activate this alarm (and a doctor will come and give you a thorazine shot?).

2) If you're not in a panic but there's panic around you, and you want to put a stop to it, activate this alarm (and paramedics will rush in and slap everyone's face, the way they do in the movies to people having hysterics?).

3) If you want to cause a panic, activate this alarm (and snakes will start slithering out of the heating ducts?).

The most interesting thing is that none of these could conceivably be the real answer, yet I can't imagine what it is.   "Panic," in this or any context, would seem to be a bad thing, but is "alarm" a good thing?  An antidote to panic, not a synonym for it?  The sign itself is obviously home-made, stuck above the switch that it fails to identify, and urge to pull that switch, just to see what would transpire, was hard to fight down -- though I wouldn't say it alarmed me.

THE ARABIAN GOLF

This is a photograph of a typical hole at the Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego, where the Farmer's Insurance Open was played in January.

And this is a photograph of a typical hole on the Abu Dhabi Golf Club, where the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship was played a week earlier.

Notice any difference?

Abu Dhabi, which is perhaps the richest country in the world per capita, wants a seat at the golf table, and is prepared to spend whatever it takes.  Apparently, they paid Tiger Woods and Rory McElroy, ranked second and first in the world, over a million dollars apiece to buzz in on their private jets and participate in the tournament. (Both of them played miserably and weren't around for the last two days of the four-day event.)

But the Emirates don't get golf.  One of the most appealing things about that much-maligned sport is the beauty of the courses themselves, oases of green and gold, mountains and pastures, lakes and rivers and oceans.  Golf courses are the formal gardens of the modern era; if you were a landscape architect, wouldn't you want someone to give you 300 acres of virgin land and a blank check?  In the United States, in the UK, in Spain, in Australia and New Zealand, there are stunning courses, many of them with seaside vistas that are so gorgeous it's impossible to keep your mind on the little white ball.   This is the 17th hole at Pebble Beach, on the Monterrey Peninsula of northern California:

You can see pods of migrating whales from the course itself.  The Abu Dhabi course is right on the Persian Gulf, but you'd never know it, at least from the TV coverage.  All you can see is advertising (and those signs, by the way, interfere with play, as you might imagine).


So why does AD, dripping with money, visually pollute what could be a major attraction?  Because money is what they know about and what everything in the Emirates comes down to, from the tallest building in the world to the so-called "souks" where, instead of interesting examples local artisanship (as in, say, Morocco) you're confronted with shlock.  The first thing you see in the biggest souk in Dubai (which is even more commercialized than Abu Dhabi, despite or because it's poorer) is rack after rack of T-shirts:

I spent a week in Abu Dhabi last year, courtesy of NYU's new humanities college there, and I was both fascinated and repelled by the place. Their path to Westernization seems to be the fastest of any country in the world; where fifty years ago there was nothing but desert, there's a city -- if a city is a place with enormous skyscrapers all built at the same time, and no neighborhoods.  Golf may not be the most important feature of a country's cultural life, but it's a handy barometer of the extent to which a society's values bypass esthetics and art in favor of money.

SPACE -- THE FINAL FRONTIER

This font is Courier.  I've left two spaces after the period.  This font is Times. I've left one space after the period.  

Who cares?

Farhat Mamjoo, that’s who.

My friend Amanda Gibson posted a fascinating Slate piece on FB earlier today – fascinating, at least to her, to me, and to an apparently enormous cohort of grammar fanatics who feel passionately about a conflict so apparently trivial that it will probably bore you to tears or make you laugh out loud.

Ready for this?  When typing, should you leave one or two blank spaces after a period at the end of a sentence.

I kid you not.  You can read the piece – “Space Invaders” by Farhat Manjoo -- at http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html

There’s a generational divide here:  many of us who learned to type on typewriters rather than keyboards were taught to leave two spaces, which several of the authorities quoted find deeply offensive because it’s, well, a waste of space, and also esthetically unpleasing. 

There was once, Manjoo admits, a good reason for this practice:  before they disappeared, typewriters evolved from using monospaced fonts to proportional ones.  If a font is monospaced, each character – whether an ‘l’ or a ‘w’ – takes up the same amount of space.  Proportional fonts allocate more space to wider letters, less to narrower ones.  In the earlier mode, the spacing in sentences looked a little weird.  (You can check this out for yourself by typing a few sentences in the font called Courier, which is disproportional. I’d do it here, but Google won’t let me.)  Two spaces after the period made it clearer that the kind of full stop represented by the end of a sentence had occurred.

What galls me about Manjoo, who says what galls him about the two-spacers is “their certainty that they’re right,” is his certainty that he’s right.   He should know that there is no right and wrong when it comes to usage.  There was no such thing as English grammar until the 18^th century, and it’s been changing ever since, like all living languages.  It’s no more “right” to use one space than it is to leave out or put in the final comma in a series (like “red, white, and blue”). The one-space rule “is one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork,” says Manjoo.  Canonical rules were made to be broken; they’re silly and arbitrary. Another “canonical rule” is that you’re supposed to put colons and semicolons outside of quotation marks, but commas and periods inside.  Why?  Who in God’s name cares? (Manjoo, probably.)

Manjoo cites as his authority typographers – the people who turn typed manuscripts into type for printing.  But in these days of self-publishing, typographers are a dying breed, made increasingly irrelevant by the practice of self-publishing.  And they certainly aren’t the arbiters of usage that they and Manjoo think they are.  All they have a right to do is come before us like some Dickensian child, and in a small voice humbly and politely request that we drop the two-space rule –which was their idea in the first place! So, the convention has changed?  It’s still just a convention, an arbitrary way of doing something that could as easily have been done differently.

If you want to get overexcited over writing conventions, I have a few more worthwhile ones to consider.  I get emails from my NYU students in which nothing is capitalized, commas are non-existent, and emoticons appear.  Want to talk about esthetically offensive?  Here’s what I think about that:  : (

GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS

GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS

What alarms me most about the rhetoric of the NRA-worshipping far right when it comes to guns is their taxonomy:  everyone is either a "good guy" or a "bad guy," and it follows, as Wayne LaPierre put it, "The only thing that stops a bad buy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."  

But where does Osakarose of San Antonio fit in?  She wrote, "The whole point of being a registered owner is: #1 to own the gun legally and be trained in its use, #2 to protect myself and my property from criminals.  I do not want them to know I own a gun; I want it to come as a complete surprise to them when they break into my home and I blow them away."

Rose, do you sit up all night in your darkened living room, locked and loaded, waiting for the doorknob to turn?  Is it protection you want, or the thrill of shooting to kill?  Are you, in short, a good guy or a bad guy?  Isn't a good guy a gun owner who hasn't committed a crime with his gun -- until he ambushes someone (maybe a family member who forgot his keys), or feels threatened by an innocent passerby in states that permit an armed, violent response, or experiences an ungovernable fit of road rage while wearing a Sig Sauer on his hip -- in which case, doesn't he cross that boundary and become a bad guy?  

SHAKESPEARE AND MORE SHAKESPEARE

How remiss I have been!  Why should anyone bother reading my blog if I’m not going to write it?  But I’ve been very busy, and at last have something to write about.  I’ve been working as dramaturg on two – count them, two – plays over the past month:  the Green Theater Collective’s production of The Tempest and Shakespeare@Hitfest’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

GTC is a tiny group dedicated to performing Shakespeare in minimalist fashion with as smalll an ecological footprint as possible .   Only six actors (here are two of them)

performing in an orchard, without a stage, lighting, or costumes, doubling and tripling roles, cutting the play to 90 minutes.  Their director is the incredibly talented Sarah Hankins, and it was a privilege to sit wih her and the cast and discuss the play, contributing whatever I could.  Its run is only six shows, in two venues, and this is the only aspect of the project I wish were different.  They’re like an itinerant bunch acting company in the 16^th century, putting on plays for whoever will watch, solving production problems on the spot, improvising when they have to, and this is, for me, echt Shakespeare – the real thing.

By contrast, Sh@hitfest's Midsummer is a full-dress, 17-actor juggernaut which will run for most of August in Bridgehampton, staged in the athletic fields behind the high school.  I’ve worked with the director, Josh Perl, several times, but only when he was acting (Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, all at the John Drew Theater in East Hampton); this is a whole new relationship.  A dramaturg has variously been defined as "the director’s bitch" and "a powerlesss smart person," and in this case, it’s more the latter; Josh and I often disagree on what the text says or means, or whether the actors should make that their primary focus, and so far my batting average is fairly low.  Sarah Hankins revered me and hung on my every word. I know Josh really likes me and appreciates me but he’s more about staging than about academics.  But the play is taking shape; there’s a lot of talent in the cast.  Here are some rehearsal pix:

Josh Perl expounding to the cast

The dramaturg keeping an eye on things

One pleasant surprise is that one of my former NYU students, and a prize student at that, Kea Trevett, is not only playing Helena, probably the largest and certainly the funniest role in the play, but is living with me and Nancy for the summer. 

She keeps thanking us for our hospitality, but having her around is pure pleasure.  She takes up next to no space (in any dimension) – deals with her own needs (she’s a vegetarian), leaves the kitchen spotless.  My favorite part of the day is when she and I get home from rehearsals and have a nightcap with Nancy, and we do a debriefing.  She's so smart and funny!   Too bad she's as ugly as a bear.  (Well, that's how Helena describes herself in the play, anyway.)

Nancy and I have adopted her as a second daughter, whether she likes it or not, and it will be lonely out here when she leaves, though three weeks later the real thing -- Daughter #1 + family arrive -- for an extended stay.

Opening night is August 2^nd.  If anyone reading this would like to see the play, we’ll be there.  Details at http://mndhitfest.blogspot.com/.

BETTER HER THAN ME

By chance, I came across an amazing video clip on YouTube this morning,* and it brought back a vivid first-hand memory, dating back to 1986, to which my fervent response was, and is: Better Nancy Reagan than me.

 That was actually my second thought as I watched the First Lady's chair tip backward off the dais in the East Room, depositing her in the flowerpots. My first thought was that something incomparably more awful had happened. After all, the President was there as well, delivering some graceful concluding remarks to the two hundred of us privileged to hear Vladimir Horowitz's White House recital; his presence, along with the Secret Service, the Marine Guards, the press, inevitably lends a kind of supercharge to the aura of any room he inhabits. So that sudden flurry, the chair toppling, the involuntary gasp from the crowd, the people rushing forward all conjured up a sense of waking nightmare, even fifteen years before 9/11: can something awful be happening? Here? Now?

But the next instant, Mrs. Reagan had bounced up unhurt, and she and the President were quipping away as if they'd rehearsed the whole thing. "Honey, I told you, to do it only if I'm not getting any laughs," he said, and got a big laugh. And smiling, unflustered, unwrinkled, not breathing hard, not flushed, without a stammer, Nancy tossed off a bon mot of her own -- "I guess I livened things up" -- and resumed her seat (her chair having been moved, in the interim, a good two feet from the treacherous edge of the platform). Horowitz locked his left arm around her waist and kept it there until the President had finished his speech, and then, smiling and chatting, the Reagans and the Horowitzes trooped nonchalantly out of the room, leaving the rest of us to buzz.

 "I saw it coming," said my wife. "She had on a tight skirt, and she was tugging it down, and the chair was inching backwards at every tug." And that became the Official Version, as reported by The Washington Post and The New York Times the next day. But everyone else had his or her own version, some little detail that non one else had noticed, some explanation, some point of view. It was like Rashomon; no one of us could quite take in the totality of the event we'd just witnessed. It was a leveling experience, though; it restored the democratic balance between the celebrity musicians and politicians, who'd never seen anything like it in all their visits to the White House, and the nobodies (like us) who had lucked into an invitation and were there for the first time. Now, everybody had something to talk about, and if you had had a better sight line than a symphony conductor or a newsweekly publisher, he wanted to know what your angle was.

 Nancy (Horwich) and I were there because fate had kindly arranged, forty years earlier, that my family and the Horowitzes should become friends. We've had the good fortune to hear him play many times -- once, several years ago, in Washington, when we came down the morning of the recital and went home as soon as it was over. Could anything could be more special than listening to the greatest living pianist? What would those musicophiles (mostly Russians) who froze all night waiting for a ticket, whose tears streamed down their faces as he played, answer? But such is the human capacity to become inured to blessings that this time, it was the Presidential overtones that set our hearts to beating a little faster.

 In some ways, we felt very privileged: just telling the cab driver, "The White House, please -- Visitors' entrance," gave me a charge, though as it turned out, he couldn't find the Visitors' entrance, having been misdirected by a D.C. cop, and we had to walk a quarter of a mile from where we were let off. Next time we'll get a limo, we told each other. But sweeping past the crowds of tourists toward the portico, the heart-stopping moment when the guard holding the Guest List couldn't seem to find our names, showing the requisite identification (our social security numbers having been provided weeks before), all reminded us that this was a special day, a time to soak up the memories and impressions for our daughter and our friends in New York.

Going through White House security (at least in those days) was just a politer version of going through airport security these days. The identification, the metal detector, the handbag search reminded us that this wasn't a routine social or cultural occasion in any way. If I had a sense of being a witness to history on a very small scale, I had a complementary sense that my role was to remain invisible, on my best behavior, while history unfolded. One doesn't go wandering around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, thumbing through books and opening closet doors; if you have to the go the bathroom, a Marine major escorts you. Remember being an adolescent, worrying about developing a pimple before the dance, about buying the wrong corsage, or saying the wrong thing, or not being able to say anything at all? My wife was nervous too; an hour before, in the hotel room, trying on and discarding innumerable pairs of pantyhose, she was worried she'd faint if she didn't eat something. Not since my wedding, when I was sure that during the ceremony my knees would lock, pitching me forward onto the rabbi's feet, have I fretted so about keeping countenance. What if I started coughing while Horowitz were playing? Belched? Sneezed on George Schultz’s tie? None of these things was likely, but I could imagine it, everyone slowly turning around and looking at me with an expression of incredulity on their faces.

 That was just the expression on the face of the Leader of the Free World when his wife did her back flip into the geraniums. The kind of thing that would surely mortify you if it ever really happened actually did happen -- in the middle of the President's speech -- and to the President's wife! But that, of course, made all the difference. If I'd fallen off my chair, I doubt whether the Chief Executive and I would have shrugged the incident off together with a little exchange of impromptu humor. Nancy Reagan belonged up there; she was in her own home, surrounded by her own guests (though I imagine she'd not met a third of them), and her aplomb undoubtedly stemmed, in part, from her sense of security: if I want to steal the stage from my husband by taking a pratfall while he maunders on, by God, I'll do it! And of course, all those years of social training, of discipline, of learning how to carry off difficult moments with tact, diplomacy, just the right gesture or remark -- they had prepared her superbly for a really juicy example of what the Reader's Digest would probably have called My Most Embarrassing Moment. If it had been me, I'd never have appeared in public again; five minutes later, at the reception, she was laughing about it as if she actually found it funny! I loved her at that moment. By a process of Darwinian selection, the one person in the room who could survive accident, or practical joke, or trick of fate, and actually triumph over it, was the person it happened to. Confirmed atheist though I am, I thought, there is a God. Better -- much, much better -- Mrs. Reagan than me.

 *Check out the video yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bA8rb3yka4

STUDENT BLOOPERS

All teachers prize and collect them, and share them avidly with colleagues and . . . friends, but only discerning friends. One of the defining features of this form of humor is that the blooper is not readily accessible to the public at large; bloopers tend to be snobbish inside jokes, depending for at least part of their effect on self-congratulation: they’re funnier if you know what the student was trying to say or should have been saying. At the least, inside knowledge of literary texts is the sauce that brings out the flavor of the bloop.

Consider this sentence, written only last week by a student in my Shakespeare Colloquium: “One of the most important moments in the play comes in Act 5, when the Prince exclaims, ‘This is I, Hamlet the Great Dane!’” Everyone knows that can’t be what the Prince actually exclaims, but if you know the original line, you can see how the process of authorial recollection got thrown off the track. The line is “This is I, Hamlet the Dane,” meaning the de facto king of Denmark and the personfication of the national zeitgeist. Hamlet is a Dane, and a Great one at that, it’s just that in this one case, the adjective and the noun collide in a priceless way.

Another of my favorites, from a Survey of Western Drama course at Brooklyn College some years back, was, “Oedipus fell through his tragic floor.” Unless one has a cursory acquaintance with the Aristotelian concept of hamartia, (mis)translated as “tragic flaw,” this makes little sense but does conjure up a graphic image. But what makes it delicious is that, if you've ever heard Brooklynese, you know that when I said the word “flaw” in class, this kid heard the more homely and common “floor.” What did he think I meant? That the stage at the Festival of Dionysus in 5th-century B.C.E. Athens was honeycombed with devices like the one pictured above, which gave way unexpectedly at the pressure of a heroic foot?

The breakdown of oral communication in the classroom -- and outside it -- is notoriously responsible for the generation of nonsense, which usually comes to light only when the lapse is preserved in writing. One of my freshmen once described himself and his girlfriend as “shits that pass in the night.” Floating human waste caught in a cross-current during the hours of darkness? Or pure nonsense, like “Gladly the cross-eyed bear.”

A more predictable confusion occurred when yet another Brooklyn student wrote, “I saw the chipmunk emerge from his burro, look around, and disappear.” Circling the word “burro,” with a sense of misgiving but unable to help myself, I wrote in the margin, “You don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground.” The writer immediately complained to my department chair that I had verbally abused him. The bureaucrat thought it was pretty funny, but patiently explained to him what I had meant. The student was not mollified.

TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME

Many baseball fans I know would rather watch games on TV, especially now that DVR makes it possible to pre-record the contest and fast-forward through commercials, pitching changes, conferences on the mound, mid-game interviews, minor celebrity sightings and the like.

And I confess that this is my usual modus operandi, especially in April, when I often have to get through televised Knicks games as well. I can, if I set my mind to it, knock off both a baseball and a basketball game in under three hours, if I hew ruthlessly to the principle that everything extraneous to the play itself -- not only Cialis ads but also everything that smacks of human interest and sports rumination -- must be ruthlessly expunged.

But the other night, Nancy and I were at Yankee Stadium to see the Bombers come from behind and thwack the Twins 8-3. And yes, there were things we sacrificed for the en plein air experience: the dubious benefit of announcer commentary and explanation, for one.

But here’s what we gained:

First, a perfect night. When I was teaching at Brooklyn College, a freshman handed in a paper that began, “It was a day such as poets write of: not too hot, not too cold.” It’s become a family joke: “It was a burger such as poets write of: not too rare, not too well-done.” But in the case of last Tuesday evening, Alexander Pope or some other champion of the moderate and picuresque might have been inspired to comment in verse on the clemency of the climate.

Second, a streaker – a nice retro touch, and one that TV viewers always miss because of YES Network's policy not to encourage such behavior. Granted that the guy was wearing trousers, which means he had no balls (that we could see), but he put on a nice, if brief, display of broken-field running before being brought down at second base by a fat old cop with surprising speed.

Third, for me, a nice sausage on a bun with peppers (admittedly, it was preceded by two $8 hot dogs, purchased at different stands, of such inferior quality that I discarded each after one bite) and, for Nancy, her favorite slum-food: a corn dog.

Fourth, the fans, including the two cuties pictured above who repeatedly photographed themselves against the backdrop of the field, but also, and more so, the lovely group of smart, knowlegeable, nerdy Jewish high-school kids we found ourselves sitting amidst. The boy on my right respectfully quizzed me on my vast experience as a sports fan: had I ever seen Mantle and how good would he have been if he’d stayed healthy? (The best ever.) Who was my favorite all-time Yankee pitcher? (Whitey Ford.) Did I prefer the new Stadium to the Old? (In some ways.) And he produced a fascinating hypothesis: during the sixth inning, the Yankees had the bases loaded: Gardiner on first, Granderson on second, Nunez on third. Wasn’t it possible, my young friend asked, that never in the annals of the game had three runners of equal or superior speed been on base at the same time? What team, in my long memory, might have produced their equal? And I couldn’t think of one; perhaps we were watching an arcane quantum of baseball history, live and in person. (To provide a nice sense of closure, Swisher drove them all in with a ringing double to right.) When we left, the kid respectfully shook my hand and told me what a pleasure it had been to talk with me. Such a nice bright boy, such a high probability that someday he’ll be the next Grantland Rice or serve as Commissioner of Baseball.

ABU DHABI

In January, I returned from a week’s trip to Cuba and blogged about it – chiefly its architecture, which constituted a rich and detailed record of the island’s history over the past hundred years. The opulent, Europeanized villas; the splended Catholic churches; the public squares; the narrow warren of alleyways of Old Havana all gave way, starting in 1959, under the avalanche of Communism. The villas were given to the People, who couldn’t take care of them, and most of them crumbled into splendid, decaying old piles. The churches have slowly been colonized by Senterria, the local form of Yoruba folk religion. The Castro regime built blocks of depressing Soviet-style flats and monumental, faceless public buildings. But Old Havana remains what it was, and forms the core of a lively, West-friendly fun-loving culture that refuses to die.

Two weeks ago, I got back from a visit to a country so different from Cuba as to represent its diametrical opposite: Abu Dhabi, the wealthiest of the United Arab Emirates. And again, architecture has a story to tell. Abu Dhabi, unlike Cuba, has virtually no history; fifty years ago it was desert. And the indigenous culture, if it can be called that, is Bedouin, and therefore, by definition, fleeting and insubstantial, for the Bedouins were rootless wanderers.

Where Cuba is a very poor country, Abu Dhabi, which owes its existence to its enormous oil reserves, is rolling in wealth. A (somewhat oversimplified) profile of an Emirati is someone who has little or no education (why bother, when there’s no vocational motive?), doesn’t work (ditto), is waited upon by servants who have immigrated from other countries (and who live outside the city in what are called – I kid you not – labor camps). The typical family car is a Porsche Cayenne.

And the architecture? Monumentality knows no bounds in Abu Dhabi (it’s even more striking in neighboring Dubai). Ego-driven oil-rich sheikhs have, with no master plan or guiding purpose, created a city of enormous glass towers – apartment buildings, office buildings, hotels – quite indifferent to the fact that their occupancy rate is ridiculously low. There is no dominant style, unless whimsical fancy may be said to be a governing esthetic. Consider, for example, the towers pictured below, which are fairly typical:

Bizarre? Tasteless? Look at the decor of the Grand Mosque. The exterior is impressive enough. . . .

But the interior is tacky; it looks as if it had been furnished by a a policeman's wife in Nassau County. Who came up with this chandelier?

Here's the opposite number of that chandelier in the extraordinarily beautiful Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca:

The physical setting of Abu Dhabi -- on the Gulf of Arabia, facing west toward Iran -- is stunning. But the Emiratis don't mix with tourists or expats; theirs is a closed community, but an untethered one: not truly Arab but not Western either. They've taken the worst of our culture, its obsession with material goods, and broken away from the best of Arab culture, its subtlety, intellectual accomplishments, and style. As of now, there's no "there" there.