David Mulroy, Why Did We Revert to Tribalism?

David Mulroy, The War Against Grammar (2003), pp. 17-19

The tendency of modern teachers to disparage the importance of literal meanings reinforces and is reinforced by the low status of grammar, since the rules of grammar play an indispensable role in establishing the literal meanings of statements. Grammar and literal meanings have both become pariahs, and this fact lies at the root of several troubling tendencies.

To a teacher in the humanities, the most obvious of these tendencies pertains to reading comprehension. We increasingly encounter students who can speculate about the "hidden meanings" of literary texts but miss their literal sense. To gauge the extent of this problem, I recently asked members of one of my large mythology classes to produce brief paraphrases of the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence:

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

I was looking for a restatement of the proposition expressed in the main clause, that respect for public opinion makes it necessary for parties who are abandoning an established union to explain why they are doing so. It was disconcerting that of sixty-one students who tried to paraphrase the sentence, none seemed to recognize its source. Some thought that it had to do with ending a romance. I estimated that twenty-five comprehended the gist of the sentence. In making this assessment, I tried to be fair, taking into account the fact that the students were writing extemporaneously. I counted as correct any paper that seemed to get the essential idea even when it was expressed somewhat incoherently. For example:

When people decide to fight/separate among countries, cities, themselves, they should say why they are fighting.

In life, people dissolve political bands that connect them with another, in order to join earth and its powers, by following Nature's and God's path, should declare why they separate.

Yet, even without nitpicking, a majority of students seemed to miss the idea altogether. For example:

In people's lives, things may happen that would cause them to no longer want to be part of a certain government of which they are part. These things would give them reason enough to become their own ruling body.

Most disturbing, however, were a large number of students who responded to the assignment with misguided enthusiasm. It should be noticed that in many cases the students' difficulty in comprehension evidently does not arise from a deficient vocabulary.

When dealing with events in life, one should drop preconceived knowngs and assume that everything that happens, happens for a reason, and basically life goes on.

I believe it is saying that as a group of people everyone is equal, but when it comes to laws of nature, only the strong will survive.

Cut your earthly bonds and wear the mantle of Nature and God. Wield the power and declare justly your ascension from man's law. Then shall all bow before your might.

Every human encounter is special and is an important piece of an intertwined quilt. Every man and god's creatures should have the respect and the dignity they deserve.

I think it means that people should look at their own morals. They should follow the laws of Nature and Nature's God, but also in their own way follow their own morals.

As life proceeds down to the very moment through which we perceive our existence as, indeed, separate entities of perception, transformation is key to our understanding of the necessity of change, and its living role, within all of us, in relation to time.

People must have true facts to back up their thoughts on a god if they are different from the thoughts of the majority.

If doesn't matter where you came from. In the end we are all human beings. Humans are at the top of the food chain, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't respect nature. Because we have one earth, learn to preserve it.

And, finally:

I can't paraphrase this sentence because I'm not sure what point is being prevailed. Politics? Nature?

I was taken aback by how poorly the students had done on this test and repeated it twice with essentially the same results. Most recently, in November 2002, I offered the paraphrase exercise as an opportunity for "extra credit" on a mythology test. Sixty-four students of 118 attempted it. Thirty-three seemed to have grasped the essential thought. Among the others were some more vivid examples of interpretation by free association. For example:

Mankind is in a state of separation. There will come a time when all will be forgotten, and man will be one with mother earth.

When man loses all political structure and is reverted back to tribal and instinctive nature, man should figure out what happened, so it won't happen again.

These responses seem to me to exemplify a kind of higher illiteracy. The students who suffer from this are proficient in spoken English and can express their own thoughts in writing adequately. They lack the tools, however, for the precise interpretation of the meaning of complex statements. This kind of illiteracy boils down to an ignorance of grammar. If a student interprets the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence as an exhortation to "preserve the earth," then how can you demostrate the error? There is no way to do so that does not involve grammatical analysis: the subject of the main clause is "respect to the opinions of mankind," the main verb is "requires," and so forth.

H.J. DeBurgh, "Half-Hours with the Classics"

H.J. DeBurgh
HALF-HOURS
WITH THE CLASSICS

Ah, those hours when by-gone sages
Led our thoughts through Learning's ways,
When the wit of sunnier ages
Called once more to Earth the days
When rang from Athens' vine-hung lanes
Thy wild, wild laugh, Aristophanes!

Pensive through the land of Lotus,
Sauntered we by Nilus' side;
Garrulous old Herodotus
Still our mentor, still our guide,
Prating of the mystic bliss
Of Isis and of Osiris.

As the learn'd ones trooped before us,
All the wise of Hellas' land,
Down from mythic Pythagoras,
To the hemlock drinker grand.
Dark the hour that closed the gates
Of gloomy Dis on thee, Socrates.

Ah, those hours of tend'rest study,
When Electra's poet told
Of Love's cheek once warm and ruddy,
Pale with grief, with death chill cold!
Sobbing low like summer tides
Flow thy verses, Euripides!

High our hearts beat when Cicero
Shook the Capitolian dome;
How we shuddered, watching Nero
'Mid the glare of blazing Rome!
How those records still affright us
On thy gloomy page, Tacitus!

Back to youth I seem to glide, as
I recall those by-gone scenes,
When we conned o'er Thucydides,
Or recited Demosthenes.

L'Envoi

Ancient Sages, pardon these
Somewhat doubtful quantities

Deborah Cameron on thats and whiches

Linguist Arnold Zwicky's delightful Language Log post on the brouhahas over whiches and thats, Five more thoughts on the That Rule, reminded me that I had the following piece from Deborah Cameron lurking on my hard drive.

Deborah Cameron, Verbal Hygiene (Routledge: 1995), 50ff.

A friend of mine once worked as a copy editor for a major publisher in New York. The project she worked on was a large encyclopedia, and her job was to edit a large number of contributions from all over the world in accordance with the rules laid down in the Chicago Manual of Style.

Among these rules is one that concerns the use of that or which in relative clauses. That is prescribed in those cases where the clause is 'restrictive', e.g 'the book that Nigel gave me was no good', while which is used in 'nonrestrictive' clauses, e.g 'the book, which Nigel gave me, was no good'.

The difference between the two sentences above is one of those subtleties beloved of language mavens everywhere. In the first sentence, the relative clause that Nigel gave me 'restricts' the reference of the book, making clear that I am talking specifically about the particular book that Nigel gave me, as distinct from all the other books I possess. In the second sentence the information that Nigel gave me the book in question is still present, but it simply adds incidental information rather than being necessary for the identification of one out of a whole class of possible referents.

English speakers normally put which in non-restrictive clauses, but they quite often fail to observe the part of the rule that prescribes that in restrictive clauses: many native speakers find it equally acceptable to use either 'the book that Nigel gave me' or 'the book which Nigel gave me' (as well as a version with no relative pronoun, 'the book Nigel gave me'). It is not that such people perceive no difference between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses; it is rather that, for them, the distinction is carried by the commas that mark off the non-restrictive clause (or the prosody, in the unlikely event of someone uttering this sentence), and not by the choice of pronoun. Nevertheless, the Chicago Manual of Syle insists on that rather than which in restrictive relative clauses. Copy editors therefore spend a good deal of time correcting which to that in writers' copy.

British readers unacquainted with the Chicago Manual of Syle may well have followed this discussion with a degree of bewilderment. The rule about that and which is not insisted on in Britain as it is in the US; though some authorities (such as Fowler and The Times guide) do recommend it, it is not an absolute prescription. Bewilderment mixed with irritation was certainly the reaction of many British contributors to the encyclopedia my friend was editing. She sent them proofs with the whiches changed to thats; they promptly returned them with the thats changed back to whiches. My friend referred the matter to her boss, the 'copy chief', for an authoritative ruling on the entire pronoun question. After due deliberation he handed down his decision. Britons could write which if they wanted, but Americans must go by the book and write that.

This incident is absurd, and it was recounted to me as an absurdity. Nevertheless, it reveals a number of interesting things. First, it reveals that editorial practices need have nothing to do with communicational efficiency. Although the use of which in restrictive clauses may strike educated Americans as inelegant, one can scarcely imagine it interfering with their comprehension of the text. Second, it is notable that the copy chief did not try to resolve the that versus which problem by an appeal to rational principles. His solution implicitly acknowledged that no principled argument could be advanced in support of either alternative. Third, the outcome reveals that the much-vaunted principle of consistency can be ignored in certain circumstances. The copy chief did not say, as one might have expected, that while the rule might be arbitrary, it must be observed by all. On the contrary, he ended up allowing the encyclopedia as a whole to exhibit the very inconsistency the rule was supposed to eliminate. The chief did not however go so far as to give individual authors freedom of choice on the relative pronoun issue. The overall inconsistency of usage had to be structured by national affiliation — one rule for British writers, another for US writers (inevitably disputes arose later about how to categorize Australian and Canadian contributors). The underlying concern, then, was not that the text should be either clear or consistent: it was that people should follow rules. Indeed we might read the whole affair as a kind of demarcation dispute in which members of one 'guild', the American copy editors, agreed to respect the differing craft practices of their colleagues across the Atlantic, while continuing to uphold the authority of such practices in themselves.

Arguably, however, it was not only the need to preserve editorial authority that led to the bizarre outcome of the relative pronoun controversy; it is also relevant to consider the working culture of the copy editors. Editors are not just automata, mindlessly applying the rules. What looks like excessive zeal on their part may in fact be a mixture of self-interest and subversion, as practised by alienated workers everywhere.

My friend and most of her fellow toilers on the encyclopedia fell short of Elsie Myers Stainton's ideal: they were not caring fusspots but graduate students working for doctoral degrees. Casual editorial work suited their need for flexibility at reasonable rates of pay, and they suited the publisher's need for a smart and highly literate workforce which would nevertheless be relatively cheap and disposable. They were hired to work on a specific project, and liable to be laid off when it was finished. While they worked they were paid by the hour. This particular group may well have represented an extreme of casualization and at times disaffection, but freelance arrangements of a roughly comparable kind are common in the editing trade, and these conditions affect the way the job is done.

For example, it was in the encyclopedia editors' interests to prolong work rather than hurrying to finish it. They lost money — and ultimately their jobs — if they worked too quickly. On the other hand, as casual workers they were easy to fire if they were thought to be shirking or 'padding their hours'. The best way to cope with these conditions was to edit copy with extreme thoroughness, both to display conscientiousness and to maximize the hours for which they would be paid. In their attempts to meet these criteria, they adopted the maxim of 'not just passing copy'. Whatever could be queried would be. This group of editors took particular pleasure in generating an obscure query that would need referring up to the copy chief. This was at once a good delaying tactic, proof of keenness and an outlet for underused creativity.

From an editor's perspective, then, hyperstandardization has its advantages: it makes a thorough editing job a relatively long job, a source of financial as well as professional satisfaction. l am not, in fact, the only linguist to have harboured this sort of suspicion. A review of a (British) monograph in the (US) scholarly journal Language ends with the following remark:

[The author] and presumably the [publisher's] copy editor make no attempt to observe the infamous that/which distinction in restrictive relative clauses. For this relief, much thanks, and why can't American publishers give up on this device, whose sole virtue (speaking as the husband of a copy editor) is to give copy editors more billable hours?

(Aronoff 1992: 610)

That billable hours are not the sole reason for editorial practices is strikingly borne out by the fact I noted earlier: that some copy editors continue to enact the role of 'fusspot' even when their employers are begging them not to (the employer who told me this did pay by the hour, but there was a limit beyond which editors had to fuss at their own expense). Even among the encyclopedia casuals, for whom editing was a pin-money job and not a lifetime vocation, it was obvious there was professional pride at stake as well as dollars and cents. The working conditions and culture of editors are defined by a combination of economic and professional considerations, and these are both factors in explaining, if not the phenomenon of hyperstandardization itself, then at least how and why it is enacted so zealously in everyday working practice.

Russell Baker on the essence of the essay

Russell Baker, Growing Up, New York: 1982: 186ff.

The notion of becoming a writer had flickered off and on in my head since the Belleville days, but it wasn't until my third year in high school that the possibility took hold. Until then I'd been bored by everything associated with English courses. I found English grammar dull and baffling. I hated the assignments to turn out "compositions," and went at them like heavy labor, turning out leaden, lackluster paragraphs that were agonies for teachers to read and for me to write. The classics thrust on me to read seemed deadening as chloroform.

When our class was assigned to Mr. Fleagle for third-year English I anticipated another grim year in that dreariest of subjects. Mr. Fleagle was notorious among City students for dullness and inability to inspire. He was said to be stuffy, dull, and hopelessly out of date. To me he looked to be sixty or seventy and prim to a fault. He wore primly severe eyeglasses, his wavy hair was primly cut and primly combed. He wore prim vested suits with neckties blocked primly against the collar buttons of his primly starched white shirts. He had a primly pointed jaw, a primly straight nose, and a prim manner of speaking that was so correct, so gentlemanly, that he seemed a comic antique.

I anticipated a listless, unfruitful year with Mr. Fleagle and for a long time was not disappointed. We read "Macbeth." Mr. Fleagle loved "Macbeth" and wanted us to love it too, but he lacked the gift of infecting others with his own passion. He tried to convey the murderous ferocity of Lady Macbeth one day by reading aloud the passage that concludes:

. . . I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me.
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums . . . .

The idea of prim Mr. Fleagle plucking his nipple from boneless gums was too much for the class. We burst into gasps of irrepressible snickering. Mr. Fleagle stopped.

"There is nothing funny, boys, about giving suck to a babe. It is the — the very essence of motherhood, don't you see."

He constantly sprinkled his sentences with "don't you see." It wasn't a question but an exclamation of mild surprise at our ignorance. "Your pronoun needs an antecedent, don't you see," he would say, very primly. "The purpose of the Porter's sccene, boys, is to provide comic relief from the horror, don't you see."

Late in the year we tackled the informal essay. "The essay, don't you see, is the ..." My mind went numb. Of all forms of writing, none seemed so boring as the essay. Naturally we would have to write informal essays. Mr. Fleagle distributed a homework sheet offering us a choice of topics. None was quite so simpleminded as "What I Did on My Summer Vacation," but most seemed to be almost as dull. I took the list home and dawdled until the night before the essay was due. Sprawled on the sofa, I finally faced up to the grim task, took the list out of my notebook, and scanned it. The topic on which my eye stopped was "The Art of Eating Spaghetti."

This title produced an extraordinary sequence of mental images. Surging up out of the depths of memory came a vivid recollection of a night in Belleville when all of us were seated around the supper table -- Uncle Allen, my mother, Uncle Charlie, Doris, Uncle Hal — and Aunt Pat served spaghetti for supper. Spaghetti was an exotic treat in those days. Neither Doris nor I had ever eaten spaghetti, and none of the adults had enough experience to be good at it. All the good humor of Uncle Allen's house reawoke in my mind as I recalled the laughing arguments we had that night about the socially respectable method for moving spaghetti from plate to mouth.

Suddenly I wanted to write about that, about the warmth and good feeling of it, but I wanted to put it down simply for my own joy, not for Mr. Fleagle. It was a moment I wanted to recapture and hold for myself. I wanted to relive the pleasure of an evening at New Street. To write it as I wanted, however, would violate all the rules of formal composition I'd learned in school, and Mr. Fleagle would surely give it a failing grade. Never mind. I would write something else for Mr. Fleagle after I had written this thing for myself.

When I finished it the night was half gone and there was no time left to compose a proper, respectable essay for Mr. Fleagle. There was no choice next morning but to turn in my private reminiscence of Belleville. Two days passed before Mr. Fleagle returned the graded papers, and he returned everyone's but mine. I was bracing myself for a command to report to Mr. Fleagle immediately after school for discipline when I saw him lift up my paper from his desk and rap for the class's attention.

"Now, boys," he said, "I want to read you an essay. This is titled 'The Art of Eating Spaghetti.' "

And he started to read. My words! He was reading MY WORDS out loud to the entire class. What's more, the entire class was listening. Listening attentively. Then somebody laughed, then the entire class was laughing, and not in contempt and ridicule, but with openhearted enjoyment. Even Mr. Fleagle stopped two or three times to repress a small prim smile.

I did my best to avoid showing pleasure, but what I was feeling was pure ecstasy at this startling demonstration that my words had the power to make people laugh. In the eleventh grade, at the eleventh hour as it were, I had discovered a calling. It was the happiest moment of my entire school career. When Mr. Fleagle finished he put the final seal on my happiness by saying, "Now that, boys, is an essay, don't you see. It's — don't you see — it's of the very essence of the essay, don't you see. Congratulations, Mr. Baker."

For the first time, light shone on a possibility. It wasn't a very heartening possibility, to be sure. Writing couldn't lead to a job after high school, and it was hardly honest work, but Mr. Fleagle had opened a door for me. After that I ranked Mr. Fleagle among the finest teachers in the school.

Hungry for Love

Late September 1998

The spouse can read me like a book. What I'm reading clues him in directly to my moods.

A fairly sure sign of depression: the romance novel at my bedside. Not the bloated bodice-rippers — I'm as fond of ogling Fabio as any well-vitamined woman, but fat historicals take too darn long for quick and ready satisfaction. Give me the Harlequins, the Silhouettes, the Loveswepts, 189 pages of easily digested, formulaic puff plot, with a cheerily sugary happy ending on top.

My favorite recipe for romance novelettes has changed over the years, of course. No, although I was born in the '50s, I was never captivated by the imperiled Pauline, swept off her feet or the railroad track. Back in my early 20s, when my mother first introduced me to the genre, I fell for heroines with a purpose whose talents stunned rich and noble swains into submission.

Here's a book I gobbled up with passion before I signed myself away to the spouse 19 1/2 years ago: Hungry for Love, by — I blush to tell — Barbara Cartland. A wastrel brother who gambles his family into deep debt doesn't get young Araminta down! She is determined to win back the enormous sum lost in cards to the sneering hero, by using her amazing powers of cookery! She can put the famous chef Careme to shame!

I had no taste for the wonders this pretty young thing could produce — pigeons stuffed with foie gras, chestnuts and olives; young mutton with cockles and herrings; kidneys cooked in vintage champagne; or filets of sole folded over a sauce made of ortolans and quails. But I wanted to be mistress of such manifest gifts, magic to turn men's hearts into quivering jelly.

Two decades older, I have no such hopes — I am what I am, alas. And, on the rare occasion I need heavy cheering up, I seek out a different romantic formula. Our heroine isn't supremely talented, perhaps, but she's loyal, long-suffering and self-sacrificing, not to mention grossly misjudged. The snarling hero treats her with open contempt despite his hopeless lust. When he learns, to his horror, what a swine he's been, he crawls back abjectly, begging forgiveness.

But I have yet to find the perfect formula romance. The once-savage beast is now thoroughly domesticated, a "Captive of Love" in the kitchen! He takes on all the labors of cooking and cleaning, creating a paradise for his precious mistress. Now that's a recipe for happy dreams.

***********************************
With all this talk of foie gras and ortolans, perhaps you are already salivating, in the foolish hope that I'll trot out an elegant, eye-popping creation. Get real.

Maybe as the season slips toward the big holidays, I'll become more feeling, more generous, more ambitious. Maybe then I'll drag out the pastry bag for decoration and the fancy little cutters for true flair, and bring forth a dish guaranteed to send socks into the next county or two. Heck! Let's go past the Arkansas state line! No, let's try another direction, right into Tennessee. But not now, my friends.

Right now, I'm lucky just to make it through each day; applause is not an option. All you get is a lowly casserole to help you welcome the beginning of fall. Julia Child I ain't.

LENTIL-PASTA DELIGHT
3/4 cup green/brown lentils, picked over and washed
salt
1 1/3 cups smallish pasta shells (or corkscrew pasta, or elbow macaroni, or whatever)
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 medium onions, chopped
2 big carrots, sliced fairly thin
2 stalks of celery, sliced
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 teaspoon dried oregano
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1/4 cup chopped parsley
freshly ground black pepper
8 ounces of feta cheese, crumbled or grated
1/3 cup bread crumbs

1. Put lentils in a pot with water to cover generously. Bring to boil, then simmer for about 40 minutes, or until tender. Near the end of cooking, season with a half-teaspoon of salt. Drain fairly well, but save liquid in case needed.
2. Meanwhile, bring lots of water to boil in a big pasta pot. Add a tablespoon of salt and the pasta. Cook until just tender, but not very — the cooking will continue in the oven. Drain, and combine with lentils.
3. Meanwhile, heat olive oil in a big pot or skillet and toss in veggies and garlic. Coat nicely with oil, then cover and simmer until fairly tender, 10 minutes or so. Uncover, add oregano, and heat for about a minute. Stir in tomato paste, parsley and several grindings of pepper. If needed, add some lentil stock.
4. Add veggies to pasta and lentils, and stir in half of the feta. Taste and correct seasoning, then place in a 9-by-13-inch glass baking dish. Cover with the other half of the feta, and sprinkle with bread crumbs.
5. Put dish in a preheated 400-degree oven, and bake about 30 minutes.

Note: I'm very proud of myself. Every time I put a bunch of parsely through the food processor, I duly freeze the excess, and I duly throw it out a year later, when I find it again in the back of the freezer, a sickly pale yellow and encrusted with ice crystals. But this time, I remembered my flat pouch of parsley and put it to use before it was too late! We shall overcome.

When the dust clears

11/29/98

Why envy youth? It's a time of excruciating self-consciousness and pathological need for approval. Luckily such sensitivity fades with age.

True, getting on in years is nothing to crow about: My own shallow soul has gained no depth; my blossoming wrinkles aren't a badge of anything worthy. But aging has done me one big favor. As I've careened through life, I've grown increasingly free from fear of what others think.

Considering some of the things I have to live down, it's just as well to shed my sense of shame. I've given the world some horrific headlines. Four years ago, at the end of a particularly grueling shift for a massive Sunday News-Leader, I was hit with a cheery story on choirs of children near Christmas time. My frazzled brain groped for something glittering – like "star dust" – to describe their glow, but fastened, disastrously, on "angel dust." It got into print, and no one was amused.

It stuns uptight newspups now when I freely recount this and other tales of disgrace. They would just die of embarrassment. You should see how their ears prick up when Alison speaks! What new indignity will she confess? But at 44, I bask in the scandal.

In one area, however, I'm still a victim of repression, ever sensitive to the cuisine snobs who skewer us with their sneers. Many of my generation consider cooking flops as moral failures.

I grew up to the strains of "Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy boy, Billy boy?" Cooking was the crown of womanhood, the way to earn and keep one's man. Later, when a woman's place and duties spread out beyond the home, pressures to cook well grew perversely more acute. For all my adult life, the perfect dish, the authentic spice, the original twist have been objects of worship among the culinary cognoscenti, and their religion has left deep marks on the middle-class cook. No wonder Shame is such a hot topic among the psycho-babblers.

Dirty Shame has dogged me down, from my first wretched dinner party, with its fancy soup from a can, cheap "caviar," and pie in a once-frozen 8-inch shell, to my last one, an almost studied exercise in self-humiliation.

I may someday outgrow my kitchen angst, only because each time I try something ambitious, I see more clearly that I'll never win acclaim. As long as my guests don't gag and collapse, there's some satisfaction.

Anyway, I find solace among the young adults I know. They howl at other embarrassments but will gratefully eat almost anything.

********************************

I've been able to loosen shame's hold over the years, but I was born into original guilt – I'm given to hair shirts and self-flagellation when I think I've caused pain or inconvenience to others, even people I don't particularly like.

And I'm not consistent, allowing new openings for pain. I can scoff at and flout worries about nutrition on some days, but on others I'm haunted by my heedlessness and its dangers.

I took a perfectly luscious-looking recipe from a Junior League cookbook and did the right thing: I increased its protein substantially and at the same time slashed its fat content.

But I feel guilty about being good, too. I'm sure the recipe is heavenly with the original ingredients, and I hate to deprive you of heaven, so if you must be bad, omit the olive oil, eggs and ricotta, and use instead 1 whole stick of the butter (1/2 cup) and a pint (2 cups) of sour cream, and bake for 20-30 minutes. Maybe for company ...

SPINACH AND ARTICHOKE CASSEROLE

3/4 cup chopped green onions, tops included
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 teaspoon dried basil (or 2 tablespoons fresh basil, chopped)
2 10-ounce packages frozen chopped spinach, lightly cooked (thaw in microwave without extra water, then zap for about a minute more) and drained (or 2 pounds fresh chopped spinach)
2 14-ounce cans artichoke hearts, rinsed and drained (or 2 10-ounce packages frozen artichoke hearts, cooked and drained) – cut into halves or quarters (you want them recognizable)
3 eggs
2 cups ricotta cheese (a 15-ounce tub will do)
3/4 teaspoon salt (more to taste)
freshly ground pepper
1/8 teaspoon cayenne
1/2 cup grated Swiss or mozzarella
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan

1. Saute onions in oil and butter until almost tender (add fresh spinach here, and cook until wilted); add basil and cook about a minute. Stir in frozen spinach, and then artichoke hearts. Cut off heat, and let stand.
2. In a large bowl, beat eggs, and stir in ricotta, salt, pepper, cayenne and Swiss or mozarella. Fold veggies into cheese-egg mixture. 3. Put veggies into an oiled or buttered or sprayed 9-by-13-inch glass dish; top with Parmesan, and put into a preheated 350-degree oven. Bake about 30 minutes.

By the way, I don't belong to the Junior League. I don't think the group would have me, but, as the old joke goes, I couldn't respect any club that would.

M.F.K. Fisher on soup

M.F.K. Fisher, With Bold Knife and Fork, 1968, pp. 43ff.

Any half-decent approach to maturity in the use of words is as mysterious as that of sex initiation into a Congolese tribe, but slower. Of course I can only judge at first hand by the former, but books tell me that it is apparently much easier to learn marital protocol in a jungle clearing southwest of Lambarene than it is to accept reasons for some of the sounds we use in communications.

My first hint of puzzlement ahead came long before I could spell or read, when I felt bothered, irked, perhaps slightly wounded by the rhyme scheme of:

I love little Pussy! Her coat is so warm!
And if I don't hurt her, she'll do me no harm.

Since then, I have listened to several kinds of accents tackle this, and never have they coped with the basic problem.

About a decade later in my semantic — or, at least, phonetic — education, after I had survived the hazards of "Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear" and suchlike hymns I could sing without reading, I met a professionally mad Basque, really a nice, mild Spanish aristocrat raised in Paris, who shocked me almost silly by prattling persuasively at my first grown-up dinner party about the pity of wasting the word "iodine" on a foul medicament."Correctly pronounced," he cried, "it would grace any lovely woman! If I should ever have a daughter, I would call her Yo-deen!"

I have never recovered from this part of the initiation, and I still transfer common sounds into real or imaginary languages, even subconsciously. Once, in a repaired attic room in Aix-en-Provence, I awoke to the Matins from St. Jean-de-Malte, which rang a few dozen feet from me, and I was saying aloud, "Avocado . . . ah-vo-caa-doh." It was beautiful. I was making progress. (It lasts, so that now deep bells sound very softly when I see the fruit or taste it.) My teachers were leading me from the jungle. Sometimes what they showed me was clear, as with Yo-deen, but why the Matins in the cool morning sounded avocado "ah-vo-caa-doh" to me I do not yet understand.

One of the last teachers was an Algerian with a bright eye and ear. "What," he asked me with a subtle air of impudent challenge, for he was politically wary and liked to ascribe this wariness to cultural gaps (mine, not his), "is a beautiful sentence to you — a perfect phrase?" Without any thought, I answered, "Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup." We were astounded, both of us, if for different reasons. We talked about it, and I have often pondered it since then. Basically, it can be left alone, like a fragment of Etruscan pottery, and the Algerian had no real need to point out to me, as he did very skillfully, how dull it would be in translation. (Italian and Spanish sounded better than French.)

Of course it was the Mock Turtle, singing for Alice when she was in Wonderland, who gave me the phrase. The peevish Gryphon had maliciously suggested the subject to the poor creature who represented soup itself in those Victorian days, and it was a kind of melancholy wail, a musical moan, he managed to produce. But it still sounds in my ears, "more and more faintly . . . carried on the breeze":

Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two p
Ennyworth only of beautiful soup?
..............................................................
Soo-oop of the e-e-evening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

In the soup

10/25/98

The spouse doesn't like to leave me on my own. Will I, in the blinding fog of my brilliant musings, wander off in front of savage trucks? Eeek. Splat.

Maybe he's right to worry. But he's not stupid: He got the heck out of Dodge (aka Austin, Texas) a week ago Thursday, heading east fast before the rains swooped down. And he's been tormenting and twitting me ever since with tales of weather that's lovely, or at least bearable, first in scenic Springfield, and now in Boonville and Chapel Hill, N.C. Here, I'm afraid, the fog was thicker than sea — er, sorry, pea soup.

But why should I care? If I may badmouth marriage a bit, there's too much compromise involved, too much giving in just to keep the peace. I can deal with the weather without a helpmeet, and the bachelorette's life has its compensations. Not that I'd like to be on the prowl again — good heavens, I'd have to dye my hair and buy clothes! I'd have to keep my house in some state of presentableness. Eeek, indeed.

But whenever the old boy pegs out for a short spell, I do get a little wild. No, I don't paint the town a pale pink, which is all the effort I could muster at my age and decrepitude. Instead, I take power at home. With the culinary tyrant out of the house, I can do what I want in the kitchen.

In my usual assault on marital propriety, Brussels sprouts and lima beans cram the freezer; I'll even eat the things for breakfast with the protein booster of an egg or two. But this time, the foul weather spurred me to a far more dramatic cock-snoot at our menu rules. I made split-pea soup from scratch, and I loved it. It's not a pretty sight, I'm sure, when a middle-aged woman gulps down great bowls of the green stuff, full of glee and devoid of the table manners she cleaves to when other humans crowd her space.

Who's to know? No one saw but the cats.

Oh, yes, the cats. Here's a downside to the single life -- I'm the only one around to feed those demanding yet finicky little beasts, or clean up after them.

And worst is the coffee situation. Now that I have to brew my own in the morning, it hardly seems worth getting out of bed. I wish the spouse were home where he belongs.
*************
SPLIT-PEA SOUP

1 cup green split peas, rinsed
4 cups water plus more as needed
1 bay leaf
1/4 cup long-grain brown rice, raw
---
3 tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil
2 medium onions, chopped (about 2 cups)
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
---
1/2 cup of chopped parsley
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1. Bring peas to boil in the 4 cups of water; add raw rice and bay leaf, and simmer, covered, over low heat for 45 minutes to an hour. Fish out bay leaves.
2. In the meantime, heat oil and sautee onions and garlic until onions are tender; add spices and heat for another couple of minutes.
3. Mix in with split peas and rice, and add water, or vegetable stock, if needed for proper soup consistency. Dump in the parsley, and add salt and pepper to taste. Reheat before serving.

Invasion

Late June 1998

Ah, the glory of nature, the grandeur of the great outdoors! The gentle breezes caressing the cheek, the sunlight dancing on dewy petals, the soothing buzzing of the busy bees — or are those yellow jackets? — the peaceful labors of the industrious ant — Hey, they've taken over the picnic basket. Yes, Nature's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Even in the days when I consorted with flower children, I regarded the notion of going back to nature with suspicion. What about poison ivy? Creepy little bugs, buzzy divebombers that hit and run, putrid pools of infested water? Ick. Now, the notion is unthinkable: Where would I plug in my computer and modem in the woods?

A few years ago I tried hypnosis, seeking relief from the terrors of the workplace, specifically the horror of writing those awkward captions to the photos you see in your newspaper. How to get all the names in, say something suitable, and all in two lines? — and be sure you've got the right photo! The stress was hacking away at me like a woodpecker at a tree. As I lay on the therapist's plaid couch, he tried to take me to a happy place, away from glowing and glowering computer screens, gruff managers, frazzled editors, ragged reporters and cruel page designers. Where does he put me? In the bosom of nature, sitting under a strong, solid, sheltering tree on a mild spring day.

I was miserable. How could I be happy and content and freed from caption anxiety when heaven knew what tiny, gruesome faces were lurking in the folds of the bark, planning their evil assault on my tender flesh? What if I were sitting, unawares, on a mound of fire ants? And though light winds are nice, my flyaway hair was tickling my face, and my nose itched horribly. How could I concentrate under these conditions? Not the best-spent money of my career. The next time, the therapist conjured up a clean living room (miraculous!), with a cat or two to give me a sense of communion with the earth. My fear of captions was never completely cured, but at least I have a vision of a happier place.

The Fourth of July is bearing down on us with compulsory picnics, Firefall and the like, fiendishly planned for the first wretchedly hot week of summer. You won't catch me out in the wild. Think of all the effort it takes to do a respectable picnic — packing food so it won't ooze out on the car seat or spread alluring smells; fighting the throng for a decent spot and dealing with those inevitable, unwanted guests.

Here in Texas I have quite enough nature right inside. The outdoors is so oppressively hot and rainless and miserable that the ants have no interest in staying at home with Mother Nature. So they've all moved in with us, lured by the dripping faucets and the whir of the air conditioning. No corner of the house is safe, but the kitchen is most under siege. It makes mealtime a real challenge.

You know, we might just have that picnic after all: It's safer outside.

******************************

I suspect the ants who have invaded our house aren't real ants, but scheming aliens who want to demoralize me thoroughly and gain a firm foothold for their planetary takeover by altering the course of cookery.

Face it, they aren't normal ants. Sure, they pretend to be, hanging around the usual places, where water and food await. But these ants are evil. They even go after dry goods, and dry cat food. It's. The spouse has taken to spraying his favorite chair with "Off!"

Most suspicious, however, is the way they've taken to massing in the far corner of my little "study" upstairs. The "ants" must know how shamelessly I waste my time in here, pretending to write such high prose as this, but in truth wandering aimlessly over the Web and engaging in bizarre little squabbles in high-volume e-mail lists.

The aliens, meanwhile, let me know that they're onto me, and that THEY know how to work. Their industriousness is beginning to drive me batty.

So I retreated to a happy place and time, a day or two before I got married. The fiance and I and a very few very close relatives piled into a couple of cars and had a picnic at Austin's glorious Zilker Park. My mother had worked madly to make a divine repast. I was still smoking cigarettes. I could forget we were outside.

One of the desserts my mother made was a Grand Marnier Cake, from "The Picnic Gourmet" (1975/1977), a lovely book by Joan Hemingway (a granddaughter of Ernest) and Connie Maricich. We didn't let any vile critters make off with that masterpiece.

GRAND MARNIER CAKE
Cake:
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
3 large eggs, separated
1 tablespoon Grand Marnier
2 cups sifted unbleached flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/4 cups sour cream
grated rind of one orange
1 cup chopped walnuts
Topping:
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup orange juice
1/3 cup Grand Marnier
slivered almonds

1. In a big bowl, cream butter and sugar until smooth and pale. Beat in yolks one at a time; add 1 tablespoon of Grand Marnier.
2. Whisk or sift together the flour, baking powder and baking soda, and add to batter in three parts, alternating with sour cream; beat each time until smooth. Stir in orange rind and walnuts.
3. In a clean, dry bowl with clean, dry beaters, beat egg whites until stiff but not dry. Fold gently into batter.
4. Pour batter into well-greased Bundt pan, and place in a preheated 350-degree oven. Bake for about 50 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool before removing from pan.
5. Mix together topping ingredients, and have some slivered almonds ready. If you're actually taking this cake to a picnic, carry the cake in its pan, wrapped in foil, and bring the topping in a little plastic container.
6. At serving time, pour the topping over the cake and sprinkle with almonds.

A tortuous road

I've never gotten along particularly well with U.S. literature. I don't know why it is. A defect in my character? Bad early teaching? This little essay, at least, has saved a poem by Robert Frost for me. Now I can find it amusing.

From “Satire: That Blasted Art,” edited by John R. Clark and Anna Lydia Motto (New York: 1973), pp. 17-18.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two woods diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Indisputably a charter member in that dubious class, “Best-Loved Poems of the American People,” Frost’s Road work has been constantly anthologized — and consistently misunderstood. American Romantic lyrics in the nineteenth century often trumpet noises about affirmative individualism, after the manner of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and kin to the many road-of-life poems popularized by Longfellow. After a first reading, the reader might feel that Frost’s creation positively deserves consignment to this genre: His poem is exalted, often enough, as a chest-thumping (if slightly sentimental) affirmation of unique individualism electing the private footpath — a footpath by the bye that turns out to be the audience’s popular superhighway. However, more careful scrutiny of the poem wil reveal it to be, instead, a powerful parodic defection from that tradition which applauds singularity, rather than being its avatar.

The poem’s last line raises our first question. It has an assurance about it that might at first put us off; but it is markedly foggy and ambiguous. What difference has been made? we might well ask. We might also recollect similar fuzzy endings in other romantic lyrics. Is Robert Frost victor or victim in this romantic tradition?

Additional readings of the poem should leave no doubt about Frost’s ironic intention and control. For the elemental question is, when all is said, whether the speaker ever did take the less-traveled road. Another perusal of the middle stanzas provides the answer: no. Comically enough, that other road is embarrassingly similar to its mate. For, although the one “perhaps” had a better claim to being less traveled, yet
... as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.

This is no medieval romance — where all forks in the road are as morally distinct as a pikestaff. (Knights always turn to the right — that road promising to be the highroad. The left, usually through foul and dark woods, is always “sinister.”) And, as a matter of fact, Frost’s very title calls attention not to the road selected, but to this other “equal” pathway that never was negotiated!

As a stroke, Frost’s poem assumes new meanings that transcend any easy morality or happy romantic bliss. His poem acutely studies the psychology of the chooser. Hypothetically, he realizes that, in the distant future, he wil have “modified,” “shaped” the story of his life. In such a sentimental world, he will be forcefully motivated to tell his future audience (and to believe it himself!) that his choice long ago had been deliberate and meaningful — when of course it was not. Frost’s poem, then, by approaching conventional patterns and themes only to violate them, achieves a level of insight into man’s nature that the soft, cheery sentimental poetry of inner-directed men seldom attains. The poem is significant just because it does flirt with conventions, play with themes, and tease our fond traditions. It is a slight poem, surely, a small lyric sung in playful numbers, but that does not prevent its satiric gaming from helping it achieve a high order of perception.
-------------------------
17. Cf. the conclusion of Wordsworth’s “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways”: “But she is in her grave, and, oh,/ The difference to me!” For rather bold assertions of one’s control over one’s destiny, see Clough’s “Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth,” Henley’s “Invictus,” Arnold’s “Prospice.”

18. The Latin for “left” is in fact sinister.

Such a tool, take 2

Jan. 4, 1998

I looked to be in deep trouble. Maybe.

An hour or so after a raging torrent of chopping, grating, mixing, sauteeing, beating, crumbing, and reeling and squealing, I actually thought of cleaning up a little, and saw circumstantial evidence of disaster. There on the counter a set of mixing spoons was no longer a set — they lay scattered drunkenly where I’d left them last, now liberated from the metal ring that had kept them in line.

Decay and collapse I can deal with — I’m 43, after all; I live with it daily. But the quarter teaspoon, I found, was gone, gone, gone. And that raised an awful possibility: What if the measuring spoon had taken an unceremonious dive into my labor-intensive creation? Surely not!

Yet the spoon was nowhere. Not between counter and fridge, or on the floor under the cabinets. And not mixed up in or behind the jumble of spice jars — I actually undertook the superhuman effort of straightening up that stretch of counter, but no spoon surfaced to give me peace of mind. I expanded my search area to the whole kitchen, but I came up emptyhanded. Gone.

I had some decisions, some careful calculations to make. Do I tell the spouse about the chance of mischance? Watch him sear me with a painful look of amused contempt? Or just feed him the dish and pray for divine mercy? I put off the decision, only to hear the spouse, in a burst of good feeling, invite my sister-in-law to share in our feast.

Now this was getting serious. It’s one thing to prove oneself a total idiot in front of one’s life partner, or even to endanger his or her life through foolishness. Happens all the time. I read a news story recently about a romantic Russian fellow who put a ring into his love’s champagne; she choked on it and died. Oh, well.

My sister-in-law was another matter. I like her a lot. And what if she sued me — if she were in any shape to sue? Or worse, what if she laughed at me?

In my defense, let me note that the spoon in question is a full 3-3/4 inches long, and one would expect it to announce its presence on a fork; a glutton shameless enough to stuff a hunk of fork food that massive into his or her mouth deserves shame at least. Anyway, that dish ate up a lot of my time. Granted, the darn thing shouldn’t have taken me three hours, but it did. And it wasn’t cheap.

I didn’t have fun at that meal. I couldn’t concentrate on anything but the food moving from the spouse’s and the sister-in-law’s plates to their respective mouths. I must have been a little jumpy. “What? Me? Looking at? Oh, nothing!”

I’d imagined all sorts of horrors: the clash of cheap aluminum and expensive tooth enamel; gagging and gasping and keeling over; or, worst of all, the sister-in-law’s wry remark, “How clever, Alison: a casserole with its own little serving spoon baked in.” Didn’t happen. And I didn’t confess — until now.

A couple of days afterward, when the creation was safely gobbled up, I slyly brought the subject around to the case of the missing spoon. “That?” the spouse said. “I took it to use in the cat medicine.”

You’d think a man would understand the concept of tools of the trade. How unprincipled can you get?

Such a tool

Dec. 28, 1997

The freshman English assignment contained any number of topics: the nature of friendship; the sources of peace, inner or international; I don’t remember too particularly, but I do remember that the suggestions were distressingly heavy, alarmingly cosmic. Luckily for me, there was an out: You could pick your own topic as long as it was a source of deep personal passion.

I gave that essay passion; boy, did I! And with a scintillating thesis, if I do say so — tea serves up a transcendently sensual experience only if the beverage is slurped piping hot. The professor didn’t understand, alas — I think he dismissed my genius with the word trivial — and in another assignment, he wasn’t too fond of my rather risque description of stapler as sex symbol, either. Philistine!

My obsession with scalding tea shriveled, I admit, and I don’t have the foggiest notion now how I, at 17, could fill a page in its praise. But some kitchen ardors go deeper. Only a few years later, when I first began cooking in earnest (if fecklessly), I decided that someday, goldarnit, I would compose a paean to the most divine, most meaningful piece of cooking equipment I’ve known. I speak, of course, of the rubber spatula. Not just any rubber spatula — get real! — we’re talking sturdy, wooden-stemmed and heat-resistant here; no wimpy, bendy (cq), achy-breaky, weaselly little implement, Nosiree, but rather a tool at once macho and diplomatic, one that can put muscle and finesse behind hard-core stirring and scraping and folding and generally putting two and two together.

I’d always attributed this affection and affinity for rubber spatulas to a persevering (and sometimes perverse) distaste for waste. Give me a bowl, and I will spatulate (cq) it clean. I will also bring out my backup spatula and a butter knife to run to ground any dribs and drabs — to get the goods to the last drop.

But love is never so simple, never so noble, is it? My life has been battered and buffeted by bizarre impulses, urges that seem idealistic but, upon closer examination, prove to spring from reconsidered pleasure and ruminated pain.

I was making brownies recently, and, most uncharacteristically, I wasn’t in the mood to bow and scrape. And so, when the pan was in the oven, I faced a bowl and — wow — a spatula still coated with chocolaty glory. I didn’t use my fingers to move brownie batter from spatula to mouth, I’m afraid. No — I got down and dirty and licked that darn thing, and, in a flash of clarity, I understood everything!

I was a young girl again, back in the kitchen with Mother, and we were making cakes and cookies and icings and all the important things women produced to keep our men in our thrall. While the males were doing their silly, manly, useless things with power tools and sporting gear, we were cooped up in the kitchen, second-class citizens but superior creatures. For we who have charge of the wanton beaters and luscious spoons and spatulas have the ultimate privilege of licking and lip-smacking.

***********************************************

I have a confession to make: I was unfaithful. But you’ve gotta understand — those of us in midlife are sometimes carried away by fascination with what’s younger, sleeker, newer. I tried to be good, but when I read about the spoon spatula, my sense of loyalty started to shake and quiver. I held out; I wrote the discussion of the traditional rubber spatula without having strayed. But on Christmas Eve, I dragged the spouse out to a housewares shop and plunked down good money for two of these curvaceous little honeys. And I was smitten.

Dardis does Hemingway

The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer (rev. ed. 1991), an excellent book by Tom Dardis, who died in 2001, tells of booze's pernicious effects on four writers' talents. I've always been torn over Hemingway — obviously not my kind of prose. I offer a few passages from Dardis on Hemingway's decline; the meat of the literary judgment comes at the end.

pp. 162-63:

In those Paris years the day's drinking for Hemingway did not begin until his self-imposed quota of words had been achieved; keeping alcohol and writing apart seemed easy enough, and Hemingway appeared to have a special talent for drinking, despite occasional signs that all was not as benign as it might appear. . . .

His writing flowed miraculously in the late twenties with a power comparable only to that of Faulkner at the same time. Besides The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway published a series of short stories that continue to command our admiration . . . .

pp. 188-89:

The characters in The Sun Also Rises were heavy drinkers, especially Brett and Jake, but they appear abstemious compared with Cantwell [Across the River and into the Sea], to whom Hemingway has attributed his own vast capacity. He tells us about each and every drink the Colonel consumes, starting with his arrival in Venice in the late afternoon.

Cantwell begins with a gin and Campari before moving on to the bar at the Gritti Palace Hotel, where he drinks three very dry double martinis. When he leaves the bar for his room, his waiter gratuitously serves him a gin and Campari, which the Colonel regards as "an unwanted drink," but he finishes it nevertheless, as he tells himself that "it is bad for him." It's then time to meet Renata at Harry's New York Bar, where he lowers three Montgomerys, explaining to her that they are extra-dry martinis made with a ratio of fifteen parts of gin to one of vermouth. Now the couple return to the Gritti Palace to order their dinner and the wines to drink with it. They begin with a bottle of Capri Bianca, proceed to two bottles of Valpolicella, followed by a bottle of champagne, Roederer brut '42. They like the Roederer well enough to order another bottle but have to settle for Perrier-Jouet, which brings their meal to a close.

When they leave the hotel for their lovemaking in the gondola, they take along another bottle of the Valpolicella. At the end of his evening, the Colonel has a nightcap from still another bottle of Valpolicella, which the waiter has thoughtfully left in his room. Over a period of six or seven hours Cantwell has consumed between twenty-four and twenty-eight ounces of alcohol in the gin drinks and a dozen or so in the various wines. It all adds up to more than a quart, which would render most of us insensible. Although the Colonel is described as terminally ill with a cardiac condition, he is nevertheless capable of performing the sexual act in the gondola with Renata at least twice and arising the next morning "at first light" with no aftereffects.

There is something of "cloud cuckoo land" in the ritualistic manner the characters muse over the name-brand drinks they order, but Hemingway was seemingly oblivious to reality here because this was the way he then drank in order to maintain himself comfortably in daily existence . . . .

191-192

At fifty Hemingway had unquestionably become that which he had always scorned: a rummy, or a man who cannot go without a maintenance drink for more than an hour or so without extreme discomfort. As his son Patrick remarked, the moment his father was deprived of alcohol he became badly depressed; he now required at least a quart per day.

Conforming to the adage that you cannot underestimate the taste of the American public, Across the River and into the Trees sold extremely well despite a critical reception that was mostly hostile. His next book, coming just two years later, was The Old Man and the Sea, which succeeded in winning him the Nobel Prize. Telling people that the novella is a trite, sentimental tale often produces an effect similar to informing children that there is no Santa Claus and that they will get no Christmas presents. If is a self-conscious work brimming over with Christ and crucifixion symbols; it is fatally marred by its whimsical, folksy talk about the Indians of Cleveland and the Great DiMaggio. Hemingway had set down a far superior tale about indomitability in "The Undefeated" in 1927, a story written without sentimentality but with the care of a writer in perfect control of his material. What should be hard and taut about The Old Man and the Sea is instead soft and self-indulgent.

Nevertheless, the little book took the world by storm and has become a fixture in the curriculum of American schools because it is short and contains "symbols" that the teacher can unveil for the student; it is currently the American student's major contact with Hemingway. The fantastic triumph of the book included its being hailed by people of taste such as Bernard Berenson and Cyril Connolly, who compared it to Flaubert's "A Simple Heart." This sudden swing in opinion about his work made his oft-repeated question "How do you like it now, gentlemen?" take on new meaning.

Like nearly all of Faulkner's later work, The Old Man and the Sea is based directly upon observations from the distant past: Hemingway had written an embryonic version of his tale about Santiage and his giant marlin for the pages of Esquire in 1936. "Invention from knowledge," as he liked to call his method of writing, was his uncanny ability to create situations, places and people entirely from what he had seen. But that talent was now in abeyance, and the occasionally self-parodic image of Papa Hemingway was in full command. By the time Across the River and The Old Man and the Sea had appeared, Hemingway had lost the "magic," the thing he justly praised in the best of Fitzgerald and Faulkner. By the early 1950s his writing had become as marred as Faulkner's was by this time. In the midst of a book in which he had invested a great deal of emotional capital, he indulged in literary vendettas against people like Sinclair Lewis, whom he pilloried in Across the River. There was now a kind of boozy sentimentality running through his work, visible on many of the pages of The Old Man and the Sea. It is fair to say that with a single magnificent exception to come, everything he published after 1940 partakes of this increasingly prosaic quality.

More Kingsley Amis

I had to look "berks" up, sad to say, when I first came across this nice bit from Amis's usage manual (for more info, see "Kingsley Amis on Womanese").

Berks and Wankers
Not every reader will immediately understand these two terms as I use them, but most people, most users of English, habitually distinguish between two types of person whose linguistic habits they deplore if not abhor. For my present purpose these habits exclude the way people say their vowel sounds, not because these are unimportant but because they are hard to notate and at least as hard to write about.

Berks are careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one's own. They speak in a slipshod way with dropped Hs, intruded glottal stops and many mistakes in grammar. Left to them the English language would die of impurity, like late Latin.

Wankers are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one's own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs. Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin.

In cold fact, most speakers, like most writers left to themselves, try to pursue a course between the slipshod and the punctilious, however they might describe the extremes they try to avoid, and this is healthy for them and the language.

Kingsley Amis on Womanese

Kingsley Amis's manual on English is a perverse delight—even for women.
See Kingsley Amis, The King's English (1997), pp. 244-45:

Womanese
It has long been noticed, by members of both sexes in their different ways, that men and women speak discrete languages, or more precisely they speak closely related variants of a single language. Each variant is well enough understood across the sexual divide, but attempts to treat the two as one are as unproductive as any other chimera about the essential sameness of men and women. The word *reasonable*, to take a familiar case, changes meaning with the sex of its user. So a wife might say of her husband that it was not reasonable of him to expect her to be reasonable on some stated occasion and be understood, not as one making a mildly cynical, moderately impartial, worldly-wise remark on a difference between the two sexes, but as putting forward a serious, valid complaint about typical male insensitivity -- putting it to another female, naturally.

No doubt I have already come too far to be safe. I had better take refuge behind the rock-hard factual observation that, unlike most men, women are always getting set phrases wrong. This propensity of theirs was noted at least as far back as the works of Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), if not much further in the character of Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan's _The Rivals_ of 1775, whose nice derangement of epitaphs may have struck many auditors as not close enough for discomfort but never, surely, as being put into the mouth or a character of the wrong sex. It is worth noting not only as required but also as accurate that Mrs. Malaprop's mistakes are nearly enough on target to be, like so many of this type, inners rather than outers or hopeless misses. You can always guess at once at what she nearly said.

My ignorance of foreign languages is far too deep for me even to conjecture what female behaviour there might be. The novels and stories of Peter DeVries, however, from _Tunnel of Love_ (1954) onwards, make it clear that such divergences or variations (or whatever one is to call them) of self-expression thrive in the land of the free. There and only there, possibly, could a wife have said to a husband in reference to some third party, 'No, you're wrong, he's not a profound character, at least only on the surface. Deep down he's shallow.' This is perhaps not exactly a malapropism but that it is a specimen of womanese will be doubted by no normal male who has talked to a normal female for more than five minutes. Such a one will, if he is any good, have seen that examples of womanese and of how men respond to them capture a pair of truths about the sexes in a way that no discourse in run-of-the-mill English could.

So to our own time and place. I fill out this pioneering study by reproducing a string of such cases as listed in a novel of 1995. Note the wide range of styles ventured into. All phrases quoted are warranted truthful instances of womanese, presented flat. *Vicious snowball. Quicksand wit. Up gum street. Beyond contempt. On its death legs. Hubbub of activity. When it came down to the crunch. Greaseboat. He lost his top* and *she blew her rag*. And *I was talking aloud* -- once, just once, but once.

It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction, though I have never seen their imperfect grasp of their native language as one more piece of evidence.

Chomp

From December 1997

Sometimes, fork food just won’t cut it. For big hungers, the only way to eat is hand to mouth.

No wonder pizza is such a beloved and perennial victim, changing here and there to reflect the evolution or devolution of tastes, but not altering its essence: a semitough shell of baked dough beneath or around soft but stringy protein, tender, fat-kissed lumps of crunchy stuff and oozy, red, dripping sauce. For full satisfaction, the jaws must open wide, then clamp down, and the teeth must wrestle and gnaw and gnash.

The chewing isn’t incidental. In “Beyond Prozac,” author Michael Norden, M.D., discusses the calming effects of certain types of muscle movement, which raise levels of the brain chemical serotonin; “The most effective motions are repetitive ones, especially chewing and licking.”

Norden notes the strong stress-reducing properties of gum chewing. It is a phenomenon I can well attest to — I once had an amazing proportion of the News-Leader’s newsroom completely in my thrall.

It started out innocently enough: One Halloween, I wandered in with a big bag of bloodshot-eyeball gum and left it out beside my work station for any and all takers. There were a lot of takers, so I repeated the exercise. Soon, I had to convert to Super Bubble, lip-distending logs of sugar-laden chewiness. No matter; suddenly, all these people liked ME. I had a growing circle of addicts. I would occasionally try to kick my habit and come in empty-bagged, but the wild-eyed desperation among panting, stressed-out newshounds wore me down — heck, what could I do? My popularity took a nose dive when I didn’t come across with the goods.

Thankfully, my colleagues’ dentists stepped in and saved us all.

But I digress. Consider how often crusty bread goes along for the ride when pasta is on the menu. That used to strike me as odd — why should one starchy food require another to give the diner a sense of satisfaction? But pasta, even al dente, doesn’t give the jaw enough of a workout; not enough can be crammed at once, at least in polite or semipolite company, to sate the savage mouth. Wanna check it out? Break out some microwave lasagna. Eat part of it with a fork. Then put another part between two slices of toasted or properly chewy bread. Bite in. See?

The hands are almost as essential as the chomping. Let’s try another experiment, this time with pizza. Consume one piece with the aid of a fork and knife, then slam a second slice shamelessly into the gaping maw. I rest my case.

But bite off more than you can chew, and you’ve killed the fine feral joy. An overstuffed sandwich means human shame, as globs of food pitch and spray and plop onto the plate (if you’re lucky). Worse, it probably means forks, to dispose of the evidence. Sheesh. Get a grip.

Menus and meaning

July 1998

Books are often the best dinner companions, but there's nothing like reading menus to add drama to the meal. True, for plot and character development, menus are naturally and inevitably inferior to books, but menus, even the worst of them, still have their theatrics.

Sometimes it's farce. Think of a meal where the curtain opens on cocktail weiners and chipped beef wrapped lasciviously around processed cheese: the height of low humor, indeed.

Then there's tragicomedy: food with pretensions but no elegance. A risotto made with instant rice. Canned French peas nestling on canned artichoke bottoms. Want to wallow in tragicomic cuisine? For an almost indescribable casserole of mixed feelings, fling open a spiral-bound community cookbook from 25 years ago. The horror. EEEEEEeeee! Har har!

Sadly, the tragedies are often the menus of your own making. Hubris overtakes you, and you take on too much, try too hard, then watch your audience wallow in pity, fear and loathing.

Darn it, there are so many rules, so many places to fail. Menu making is a desperate balancing act, where light must complement heavy, sour find its match in sweet, color find contrast, and never, no, never repeat yourself. And if the food you manage to produce chances to be edible, will the cook eat it? I've always worked myself out of an appetite when I cook — too much nibbling, perhaps -- and so I sit there at the dinner table with motionless fork. Funny how the guests start to notice, and start to look at their forks, and then peer suspiciously at the food I lavished my love on. What does she know that we don't?

But my favorite solution for menu angst is a change of scene — I hie myself to a restaurant. Now there's a menu for you. You sit back and read thrilling prose about food you haven't sweated over — or onto. In this heat, every kitchen task feels "Like Water for Chocolate."

The problem with restaurant menus is the lack of connected plot. They leave you to wander off. wondering what "Artichoke Alamo" is really like. And once you've made your choice, diner's remorse sets in.

Anything I buy I'll wish were something else, and the seasoning won't taste right and the color will be off. And it turns out not to have artichokes. So I'll stare at other plates around the room, plates plopped in front of complete strangers, out of longing or curiosity. Sometimes I can't resist asking, "How is the 'Curried Tofu with Yams'? Doesn't that need some hot sauce?"

After a few outings like that, the spouse prefers to head for the border, to bring home dinner from Taco Bell. And, over a bean tostada or two, I dip into Dante's "Inferno" — the perfect companion to the Texas heat.
********************************

For all my complaints about the difficulty of composing a menu, I can't stand cookbooks that tell me what to serve.

It's not that I mind suggestions. But some cookbook authors think they're doing the reader a favor by dividing the work up into a series of menus, instead of putting forth recipes by category or ingredient. I CAN'T WORK UNDER THESE CONDITIONS. I wish I could give myself up to the fantasy of each meal, but perversity and rebellion seize me. Nobody, just nobody is going to tell ME what to do. And so I suffer, alone and helpless, each time I try to put together my own set of complementary dishes.

David Lodge: Morris Zapp lectures

From David Lodge, _Small World_, 1984

In the event, not many people did like Morris Zapp's lecture, and several members of the audience walked out before he had finished. Rupert Sutcliffe, obliged as chairman to sit facing the audience, assumed an aspect of glacial impassivity, but by imperceptible degrees the corners of his mouth turned down at more and more acute angles and his spectacles slid further and further down his nose as the discourse proceeded. Morris Zapp delivered it striding up and down the platform with his notes in one hand and a fat cigar in the other. "You see before you," he began, "a man who once believed in the possibility of interpretation. That is, I thought that the goal of reading was to establish the meaning of texts. I used to be a Jane Austen man. I think I can say in all modesty I was *the* Jane Austen man. I wrote to establish what her novels meant -- and, naturally, to prove that no one had properly understood what they meant before. Then I began a commentary on the works of Austen, the aim of which was to be utterly exhaustive, to examine the novels from every conceivable angle -- historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, structural, Freudian, Jungian, Marxist, existentialist, Christian, allegorical, ethical, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it. So that when each commentary was written, there would be *nothing further to say* about the novel in question.

"Of course, I never finished it. The project was not so much Utopian as self-defeating. By that I don't mean that if successful it would have eventually put us all out of business. I mean that it couldn't succeed because it isn't possible, and it isn't possible because of the nature of language itself, in which meaning is constantly being transferred from one signifier to another and can never be absolutely possessed.

"To understand a message is to decode it. Language is a code. *But every decoding is another encoding.* If you say something to me I check that I have understood your message by saying it back to you in my own words, that is, different words from the ones you used, for if I repeat your own words exactly you will doubt whether I have really understood you. But if I use *my* words it follows that I have changed *your* meaning, however slightly; and even if I were, deviantly, to indicate my comprehension by repeating back to your your own unaltered words, that is no guarantee that I have duplicated your meaning in my head, because I bring a different experience of language, literature, and non-verbal reality to those words; therefore they mean something different to me from what they mean to you. And if you think I have not understood the meaning of your message, you do not simply repeat it in the same words; you try to explain it in different words, different from the ones you used originally; but then the it is no longer the *it* that you started with. And for that matter, you are not the *you* that you started with. Time has moved on since you opened your mouth to speak, the molecules in your body have changed, what you intended to say has become superseded by what you did say, and that has already become part of your personal history, imperfectly remembered. Conversation is like playing tennis with a ball made of Krazy Putty that keeps coming back over the net in a different shape.

"Reading, of course, is different from conversation. It is more passive in the sense that we can't interact with the text, we can't affect the development of the text by our own words, since the text's words are already given. That is what perhaps encourages the quest for interpretation. If the words are fixed once and for all, on the page, may not their meaning be fixed also? Not so, because the same axiom, *every decoding is another encoding,* applies to literary criticism even more stringently than it does to ordinary spoken discourse. In ordinary spoken discourse, the endless cycle of encoding-decoding-encoding may be terminated by an action, as when for instance I say, 'The door is open,' and you say, 'Do you mean you would like me to shut it?' and I say, 'If you don't mind,' and you shut the door -- we may be satisfied that at a certain level my meaning has been understood. But if the literary text says, 'The door was open,' I cannot ask the text what it means by saying that the door was open, I can only speculate about the significance of that door -- opened by what agency, leading to what discovery, mystery, goal? The tennis analogy will not do for the activity of reading -- it is not a to-and-fro process, but an endless, tantalising leading on, a flirtation without consummation, or if there is a consummation, it is solitary, masturbatory. [Here the audience grew restive.] The reader plays with himself as the text plays upon him, plays upon his curiosity, desire, as a striptease dancer plays upon her audience's curiosity and desire.

"Now, as some of you know, I come from a city notorious for its bars and nightclubs featuring topless dancers. I am told -- I have not personally patronized these places, but I am told on the authority of no less a person than your host at this conference, Philip Swallow, who *has* patronized them, [here several members of the audience turned in their seats to stare at Philip Swallow, who blushed to the roots of his silver-grey hair] that the girls take off their clothes before they commence dancing in front of the customers. This is not striptease, it is all strip and no tease, it is the terpsichorean equivalent of the hermeneutic fallacy of a recuperable meaning, which claims that if we remove the clothing of its rhetoric from a literary text we discover the bare facts it is trying to communicate. The classical tradition of striptease, however, which goes back to Salome's dance of the seven veils and beyond, and which survives in a debased form in the dives of your Soho, offers a valid metaphor for the activity of reading. The dancer teases the audience, as the text teases its readers, with the promise of an ultimate revelation that is infinitely postponed. Veil after veil, garment after garment, is removed, but it is the *delay* in the stripping that makes it exciting, not the stripping itself; because no sooner has one secret been revealed than we lose interest in it and crave another. When we have seen the girl's underwear we want to see her body, when we have seen her breasts we want to see her buttocks, and when we have seen her buttocks we want to see her pubis, and when we see her pubis, the dance ends -- but is our curiosity and desire satisfied? Of course not. The vagina remains hidden within the girl's body, shaded by her pubic hair, and even if she were to spread her legs before us [at this point several of the ladies in the audience noisily departed] it would still not satisfy the curiosity and desire set in motion by the stripping. Staring into that orifice we find that we have somehow overshot the goal of our quest, gone beyond pleasure in contemplated beauty; gazing into the womb we are returned to the mystery of our own origins. Just so in reading. The attempt to peer into the very core of a text, to possess once and for all its meaning, is vain -- it is only ourselves that we find there, not the work itself. Freud said that obsessive reading (and I suppose that most of us in this room must be regarded as compulsive readers) -- that obsessive reading is the displaced expression of a desire to see the mother's genitals [here a young man in the audience fainted and was carried out] but the point of the remark, which may not have been entirely appreciated by Freud himself, lies precisely in the concept of displacement. To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of the text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of striving to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing."

Morris Zapp went on to illustrate his thesis with a number of passages from classic English and American literature. When he sat down, there was scattered and uneven applause.

(text used: New York: Warner Books (1986), pp. 28–32)