Eric The Blue

Football

I have liked football for a long time now but there has to be something wrong with a game that is being constantly interrupted so that injured players may be hauled off the field. It is too big a subject to be ignored and the manner in which the television commentators talk about the injuries is almost as alarming as the injuries themselves.  Players are invariably praised for "playing with pain," their "toughness" an aspect of their value.  I have no credentials in this field, but neither do the commentators, and I think that pain is a useful symptom, a sign of something out of order, and that it must usually be bad practice to continue to play a game like football when your body is not sound. 

Sometimes the injured player is helped off the field by someone of normal proportions, thereby impressing upon the viewer the preternatural bulk of many of these athletes.  It cannot be healthy to be that big.

And now comes Malcolm Gladwell, investigator of diverse phenomena, to explain that all the limping and all the golf cart rides are, compared to the effects of innumerable subconcussive blows to the head, just temporary inconveniences.  His article is here.  A recent segment on the News Hour provides visual evidence, in the person of former NFL great John Mackey, of effects described in words by Gladwell.  Dog fighting, Gladwell points out, is regarded with aversion despite the many parallels between the dogs and the athletes in "America's game," including most especially the desperate, pitiful attempt to please on the part of both dogs and linemen.

I should be boycotting but I could not help tuning in last night when Notre Dame played Stanford.  Why is a team as mediocre as Notre Dame on national tv almost every weekend?  The obvious answer, that the nation's Catholics love to watch and cheer for the Irish, is for me and I am sure many others a sufficient reason always to pull for the other team--which is itself another reason to televise Notre Dame games.  Anyway, last night I was disappointed when the purity of my rooting interest was vitiated by the sight of Condoleezza Rice in the press box, presumably cheering for the same team as I.  Stanford had the ball last and won, 45 to 38. 

My resolution is not even to notice how often Notre Dame, now 6-6 for this season, is on national tv next year.  It makes no sense to care who wins football games and, by watching, you likely contribute in some infinitesimal way to the breaking of bodies and brains.

Dr. Johnson explains Tiger Woods's late-night car crash

The first paragraph of Idler No. 51, first published on Saturday, April 7, 1759:

It has been commonly remarked that eminent men are least eminent at home, that bright characters lose much of their splendor at a nearer view, and many who fill the world with their fame excite very little reverence among those that surround them in their domestic privacies.

Netflix: John Adams, the conclusion

Arriving home last night from our Thanksgiving dinner at the home of Amanda's aunt and uncle, in picturesque rural Cologne, Minnesota, we got the kids into bed and then watched in our own bed the last installment in the seven-part HBO miniseries on John Adams.  My reaction to the first four parts is here.  The last episode, concerning Adams's life in retirement after Jefferson's victory in the presidential election of 1800, is death-suffused: first his daughter, Nabby, of metastatic breast cancer; then his wife, Abigail, of typhoid fever (though I gleaned the cause of death from Wikipedia, not the show); and, finally, Jefferson, more friendly correspondent than political rival in these last years, and Adams himself, both on the Fourth of July of 1826, the fiftieth anniversay of the Declaration of Independence.  Adams was 90; Jefferson, 83.  I think the longest-lived people of the period died at around the same age they do today, but we lose fewer along the way.

Amanda commented that back then everyone seems to have died so peacefully.  I reminded her of the scene, from one of the early episodes, wherein a naval patriot dies below deck during, or immediately after, a limb amputation performed without anesthetic.  The preparations for the mastectomy performed upon the Adams' daughter, also without anesthetic, are likewise shown to viewers--the straps to hold her in place and the brutishly common looking tools with which the procedure was to be performed.  The medical history is apparently accurate as it conforms with this grim report by Jim Olson, author of Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer & History.  Nabby recovered from the surgery, but the cancer had not all been excised, and her painful death, about ten months after the operation, occurs off camera.  Abigail took to her bed with depression and it was the ex-president who cared for his dying daughter in her last days.  None of that is any part of the show, either.  On the other hand, Jefferson on his last day is shown lying propped up in bed while being fanned by a slave.  Sally Hemings is the third person in the room and it looks as if something could have happened were it not for the presence of the fellow with the fan. 

As biography and political history there are innumerable inaccuracies, but the series is interesting in ways I hadn't anticipated.  I've come to the end of this post without mentioning the Alien and Sedition Acts, which do not grab my attention in the same way as a woman having a diseased breast lopped off in an upstairs bedroom while biting down on a stick wrapped with cloth.

Bedtime reading

Just came down the stairs after reading, with our 6-year-old at her bedtime, The Cat in the Hat.  Is it just me or is there something kind of alarming and sinister roiling beneath the surface of the rhyming anapests?  Where has the mother gone, anyway?  It is not right to leave young children alone at home, apparently with the doors unlocked.  At the very end, she arrives back home and speaks, but she is never shown--a figure of mystery, which is a poor trait in a mother.  In her absence, the children sit and stare out the window at the bleak day until the Cat arrives on the scene.  He is no substitute for a decent mother and the children do not appear to be entertained by his "tricks."  There is no one to cheer for.  The fish?  No.  He is right, in a way, but he is also an unimaginative scold, and his repeated appeals to what the absent mother would say are morally repellent.  The children you just feel sorry for.  Until near the end, when the boy, who is the narrator, captures with his net the two Things, they appear flummoxed and passive.  I tell Rianna that of her books it is my favorite, and that is true, but I don't blame her for not liking it.  The story is sad and upsetting.  When on the last page the narrator asks the individual reader whether she would tell her mother what had happened, he comes close to making the same mistake as the fish.  I would not tell that mother a thing.  She is not to be trusted.

Dr Johnson & the problems of life

Still happily swimming in Dr. Johnson's orotundities.  Here he is, in Rasselas, on an old problem:

Such is the common process of marriage.  A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another.  Having little to divert attention or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together.  They marry, and discover what nothing  but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty.

When Johnson speaks of marriage, it is tempting to make biographical applications.  His wife, who was his senior by about 25 years, is a somewhat shadowy character in The Life of Johnson.  Perhaps Boswell didn't know too much about her, perhaps details would not serve a quasi-hagiographic purpose.  Perhaps both.  What I know of the record suggests that Johnson at first adored her, then neglected her, and finally, after her death, suffered terribly from remorse over his behavior toward her.  In Rambler No. 45 he advances the argument that people only think that marriage makes them miserable.  They recall their youth, when they were vigorous and full of hope, also as yet unmarried, then look across the room (I'm paraphrasing) and attribute to the first thing the eye settles on their current unhappiness.  But the real problem is that they are no longer young and vigorous and full of hope.  I shall cease paraphrasing: "It is not easy to surround life with any circumstances in which youth will not be delightful; and I am afraid that whether married or unmarried we shall find the vesture of terrestrial existence more heavy and cumbrous the longer it is worn."

By the way, if the SAT is in the future of your offspring, you may want to push on them Johnson's Ramblers and Idlers.  Hell, he wrote the Dictionary, and it shows. 

The fact of second marriages is adduced to show that matrimony, though complained about, is most probably not an inferior state.  There is wisdom in crowds.  Johnson, however, did not himself remarry, and lived a widower for his last 32 years.  Despite his many good traits it is hard to doubt that he would have been a trying domestic companion.  Better to read him, even if you've already taken the SAT.  Clear thinking, forceful expressions, a scorn for cant and sentimentality--recommended for all.  His great theme is wishful thinking, a ruinous folly that, on the topic at hand, wears the aspect of self-serving convictions.  Why do spouses resent one another?  "We are always willing to fancy ourselves within a little of happiness and when, with repeated efforts, we cannot reach it, persuade ourselves that it is intercepted by an ill-paired mate, since if we could find any other obstacle it would be our own fault that it was not removed." 

In the news

Barack Obama has not so far revoked the postlapsarian state.  I tell Amanda, who is less patient than I, that at least we are talking about getting health insurance to more Americans.  Beats hell out of invading Iraq.  But the whole health care debate has been dispiriting.  What we need, plainly, is a system like those functioning in all the other so-called advanced nations: national health insurance sponsored by the federal government.  What we are headed for, however, is exchanging our current awful mess for a marginally less awful one.  More people will be covered but the crazy quilt of competing plans and forms will survive.  When you go to the doctor, the first question will still be about insurance.  It will still be expensive and confusing and some will remain uncovered.  I am assuming something passes the Senate and, after the reconciliation process, makes its way to Obama and a rose-garden signing ceremony.

The measure that has now passed the House, on a 220-215 vote, with 39 Democrats joining the benighted Republican caucus in opposition, even after the adoption of an absurd and embarrassing amendment banning abortion benefits in private health plans purchased with the assistance of a government subsidy, shows pretty clearly the impossibility of doing what needs to be done.  I know, I know, we have to be mature, have to face facts, can't make the perfect the enemy of the good, or at least the better--all true, all true.  I am just saying it is dispiriting.

On a more uplifting note, there is the administration's decision, announced yesterday by Attorney General Holder, to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the 9-11 attacks, in a federal courtroom in Lower Manhattan, a few blocks from the former site of the Twin Towers.  You do not get justice in the dark, behind barbed wire at Guantanamo Bay, where ordinary people, like the nearly 3000 killed that day, are not permitted to look.  He says he was tortured?  Let's hear about it.  Sunshine disinfects.  Those opposed to the Bush administration's response to 9/11 are always asked: what do you say should be done?  Well, to start, let us not invade Iraq, which had nothing to do with it.  In general a law enforcement model, rather than a war model, should have been employed.  Putting KSM on trial before a federal jury of US citizens in a courtroom in Manhattan seems to me just right.  I'm confident the jury will listen, evaluate, judge.  That is how we used to do it here and we can do it again.

I write to the editor

I wrote it last Sunday and post it here today, as it appears that what the newspaper will publish in response has now been published.

November 8

To the editor:

Katherine Kersten rides back into town with gay marriage in the crosshairs of her intelligence (Opinion, November 8).  But not even she seems to believe the argument she tries to advance.  And no wonder!

The sorry state of marriage, she says, is "the result of divorce, cohabitation and rising out-of-wedlock births."  Since none of that can be laid at the feet of homosexuals, the line of reasoning ends with a whimper: gay marriage would "likely" make it even worse.

Having established that gay marriage, if permitted, will be the cause of things that have already happened, Kersten found she had filled only half the space the Star Tribune turns over to her each Sunday.  This problem she appears to have solved by channeling Michele Bachmann for a few paragraphs.

I'll write Kersten's columns for half of whatever you pay her.  The hard part of writing is making sense.

--Eric Jorgenson

Netflix: John Adams

The HBO miniseries, based on David McCulluogh's 2001 biography, stars Paul Giamatti, as John Adams, and Laura Linney as his wife, Abigail.  Amanda and I have now watched the first four (of seven) episodes and that means we have absorbed somewhere around 300 minutes of unrelieved solemnity.  No doubt lightheartedness will not accomplish a revolution but you might have thought that Abigail at least would take a day off from the heavy lifting.  In episode three Adams, in Paris to solicit French assistance, is appalled when, barging into Benjamin Franklin's quarters on some elevated matter, he discovers that electricity experiments are not the old man's lone avocation.  A little more of that, please.

The incident reminded me of the letter in which Franklin, in the course of advising a young friend to marry, sees fit also to lay out a Plan B involving older amours, who are to be preferred to their younger, fresher counterparts.  He enumerates the reasons; for example: 

5. Because in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part. The Face first grows lank and Wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower parts continuing to the last as plump as ever; so that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old one from a young one. And as in the Dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of Corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal and frequently superior; every Knack being by Practice capable by improvement.

The eighth, and last, is: "They are so grateful!"  Abigail would not approve.

 

Authors: Dr. Johnson

This is the second in a series, the first being here.

Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield, in the English Midlands, on September 18, 1709. If one scans what is known of his parents, the resemblance to his father, Michael, a bookseller and stationer, seems stronger--both were large men with quick minds and saturnine dispositions.  He had a younger brother, Nathaniel, who died in his 20s. Young Samuel was afflicted with scrofula, near sightedness, and deafness in one ear, all of which tormented him through his life.  He later developed odd motor and vocal tics, like those now associated with Tourette's.

He was a lazy but excellent student and, upon completion of the public education offered at Lichfield, his father, making use of a small inheritance from a cousin, took him in the fall of 1728 to Oxford and enrolled him at Pembroke College.  Beset by poverty, hypochondria, and depression, he returned to Lichfield at the end of 1729.  His one-year college career was marked by wide but unsystematic reading,  a revived religious devotion, and intellectual self-assurance tending toward a bullying arrogance.  In one surviving anecdote, he told a professor: "Sir, you have sconced me twopence for non-attendance at a lecture not worth a penny."

At Lichfield, he helped around his father's shop, wrote poetry in the manner of Pope, and continued to read widely.  His father died in 1731.  Johnson moved to Birmingham and in 1733, confined to bed by some malady, perhaps the recurring hypochondria, dictated to an old schoolfriend his first book, an abridged English version of a French translation of Voyage to Abyssinia, by Jerome Lobo, a 17th-century Portugese Jesuit.  Two years later, at age 25, he married Elizabeth Porter, a widow nearly twice his age who has been described as "flaring and fantastic," fat, large-busted, and rosy from the over use of paint and liqueurs. Her dowry temporarily relieved his poverty and he opened a school near LIchfield for the instruction of young men in Greek and Latin.  He may never have had more than three students, but one was David Garrick, who would become the famous actor-manager of the Drury Lane Theatre in London.  Garrick told about how the boys would peep through the keyhole of their master's bedchamber to observe his "tumultuous and awkward fondness" for his corpulent wife.

In 1737 Johnson gave up on the school and moved to London, where biography occasionally loses sight of him through the next roughly 15 years.  He found literary hack work but suffered extreme poverty, including it seems intermittent homelessness.  It is not clear how his wife fared.  Though a royalist and a Tory, he forever felt a kinship with the downtrodden.  When years later a pious second-rate philosopher urbanely explained that God in his mercy had compensated the poor by making them less concerned with small annoyances, Johnson retorted, in a review (I think it is almost his finest moment):

The poor indeed are insensible of many little vexations which sometimes embitter the possessions and pollute the enjoyment of the rich.  They are not pained by casual incivility, or mortified by the mutilation of a compliment; but this happiness is like that of the malefactor who ceases to feel the cords that bind him when the pincers are tearing his flesh.

His hack work included imitating debates, sometimes on no more evidence than the name of the speaker and his subject, in the Parliament.  These were published as the actual speeches of statesmen, and according to legend Johnson, once hearing the eloquence of a certain politician praised in a tavern, exclaimed: "Sir, that speech I wrote in a garret in Exeter Street!"

Despite many hardships his fortunes slowly rose.  By 1746 his reputation was such that he contracted with a group of London booksellers to turn out, for 1575 pounds, a Dictionary of the English Language.  For the next eight years, aided only by six amanuenses, he labored over his definitions, many of which he augmented with instances of proper use culled from the classics of English literature.  Since the 1575 pounds, a substantial sum, nevertheless was not sufficient to sustain him through these years, he worked simultaneously on other projects: he allowed Garrick to produce in 1749 an early tragedy, Irene (of which he famously remarked after seeing it performed, "I had thought it better"); he published his best poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, in the same year; and from 1750-52 he wrote and published, twice weekly, the series of essays known as The Rambler.  The Dictionary was finished in 1755.  Boswell, whom he did not meet until 1763, summed up the reaction:

The Dictionary, with a Grammar and History of the English Language, being now at length published, in two volumes folio, the world contemplated with wonder so stupendous a work achieved by one man, while other countries had thought such undertakings fit only for whole academies. 

Writing nearly 200 years later, the biographer and critic Walter Jackson Bate confirmed this opinion, adding that Johnson's Dictionary

easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one individual who labored under anything like the disadvantages in a comparable length of time.

He was now "Dictionary Johnson," a formidable self-made man, but his difficulties continued.  When his mother died in 1759, he covered the cost of her funeral and paid a few of her outstanding debts by composing, in the evenings of a single week, Rasselas, an Oriental tale of novella length that inculcates from its first words his theme of themes:

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope, who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow--attend to the history of Rasselas, prince of Abyssinia.

These "phantoms of hope" and, from a later chapter, the "hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life"--what we usually call "wishful thinking"--must be banished in order that we may learn sensibly to rely on what can be expected of life, which isn't much: it is "everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed."

In 1762 Johnson's services to literature were recognized by the Crown with the offer of a 300 pound annual pension.  Of "pension," his Dictionary had noted, "In English it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country"--but he accepted and, at age 52, years of gnawing want were at an end.  His wife had died while he labored on the Dictionary, and the next year he met Boswell.  In my Modern Library Edition of The Life of Johnson, the narrative of his acceptance of the Crown's pension occurs on page 236 of 1243, so you can see that 80% of that very enjoyable book's bulk is given over to the period in which Johnson, to deploy his own phrases, would "fold his legs" and enjoy the "bread and tea of life."

He had been working for years on an edition of Shakespeare, and the long delay, the occasion of wry speculation among friends, was probably made longer still by the receipt of pension payments. He held that no man but a blockhead wrote except to make money.  It was finally ready, however, in 1765, and secured for him a place in the pantheon of Shakespearean critics.  The famous Preface falls naturally into two sections, praise and censure.  Regarding the former, Shakespeare's "drama is the mirror of life," a long procession of "scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions."  Having elaborated generously on these ideas, he proceeds to the faults, which are twelve in number.  The first is that Shakespeare "seems to write without any moral purpose"; several of the others might be grouped under a single heading of general sloppiness.  These points are elucidated by his copious notes to the plays.  Of course some are unwilling to allow that Shakespeare can ever be at fault but the sloppiness is there to behold: it might be explained, I think, by the simple fact that Shakespeare was every inch a man of the theatre and his work was necessarily affected by professional pressures--exigencies that Johnson, of all people, should have recognized.  The standard retort to charge #1 is that Johnson was a Christian moralist and Shakespeare was not.  But perhaps this dismisses too easily Johnson's case.  If nothing else, his commentary on King Lear should impress upon more casual readers the desolating force of the conclusion to that play.

An aspect of Shakespeare's sloppiness, according to Johnson, was that toward the end of many of his plays, when the final events were in his mind and sights, he remitted his efforts and raced to the end in order to "snatch the profit."  Thus the latter parts are comparatively weak.  I shall now provide an example of what he meant.  Of Johnson's later years, his conversation at club and picaresque adventures as a traveller, Boswell is an admirable source.  His remaining notable work, The Lives of the Poets, which appeared in two parts in 1779 and 1781, is a worthy companion to the Dictionary and the Shakespeare.  I have neglected to mention The Idler, a second series of essays in the manner of The Rambler that appeared in 1758-60.   I also have not said much about his Christian faith, the one thing he put up opposite his otherwise dim view of life.  His Prayers and Meditations seem to be written by someone other than the acerbic bully who "talked for victory."  On Good Friday, 1779, he wrote:

I am now to review the last year, and find little but dismal vacuity, neither business nor pleasure; much intended, and little done.  My health is much broken; my nights afford me little rest.  I have tried opium, but its help is counterbalanced with great disturbance; it prevents the spasms, but it hinders sleep.  O God, have mercy on me.

Last week I published the Lives of the Poets, written, I hope, in such a manner as may tend to the promotion of piety.

In this last year I have made little acquisition; I have scarcely read anything.  I maintain Mrs. [Desmoulins] and her daughter.  Other good of myself I know not where to find, except a little charity.

But I am now in my seventieth year; what can be done, ought not to be delayed.

He died on December 13, 1784, and was buried in Westminster Abbey on December 20.