Eric The Blue

Chaucer

 Geoffrey Chaucer was born into the growing English middle class, in London, most likely in 1343.  His father was a prosperous wine merchant, and in the normal course of things Chaucer might have been expected to follow a similar life.  But while still a young teenager he was sent to work as a page in the household of Lionel of Antwerp, son of the current king, Edward III, and brother of John of Gaunt.  Thus began his distinguished service, which would last for the rest of his life, to the ruling English nobility.  Much of what we know of his life comes from the governmental record.  He served in positions of increasing responsibility until, as a young man, he was a trusted diplomat carrying out foreign missions of considerable importance and sensitivity.  He married a woman, Philippa, who belonged to the household of Edward's queen.  Everything in the record suggests that he was highly esteemed by his royal employers.  He was the recipient of a succession of grants and annuities, which, upon the succession of a new king, were always confirmed. 

When I think of what is known of his life, and put it next to what I know of his poetry, I think of Chekhov, the son of a serf who went to medical school and worked as a doctor while writing some of the best stories and plays of the 19th century.  Chaucer started higher, and crossed a boundary higher up the stratum, but the circumstances of their lives made both men intimate with a wide range of humanity.  One may detect in Chekhov's fictions the bedside manner of a good physician--intelligent, sympathetic, but sufficiently detached to guard against false judgments; and in Chaucer very similar qualities of mind and character might be associated with the sensibility of an accomplished diplomat. 

His two greatest works are Troilus and Criseide, a narrative poem of some 8000 lines that he completed in about 1385, and the Canterbury Tales, the composition of which seems to have consumed his leisure time beginning in about 1386 until 1400, when he died.  The completed portion reveals a plan to compose well over a hundred tales--two for each of the 29 pilgrims on the way to Canterbury and two more for each of them on the return trip to London.  We have 22 completed tales and two unfinished fragments.  If we work out the ratio of finished to projected, it comes to only about one-fifth, but the universal judgment has been that in the Canterbury Tales "there is God's plenty." 

Some day I will read the Troilus, which is often regarded as a forerunner of the modern psychological novel.  Now, Chaucer obviously did not think of himself as a medieval writer endeavoring to give us a foretaste of modern masterpieces.  Nevertheless one recognizes why it's tempting to say such arguably silly stuff.  For example, in the Canterbury Tales, the Pardoner, a lost soul who is aware of his own depravity, will put some readers in mind of Dostoevski's anti-heroes.  But there is in Chaucer no hand-waving; the almost unbearably affecting portrait of a villain is achieved by means of a detached restraint that I tried to suggest by invoking Chekhov.  Here is E. Talbot Donaldson doing a better job of it in a single sentence:

He understands both the high and the low, but he remains curiously detached from both, and it is detachment, perfectly balanced in his poetry by sympathy, which distinguishes Chaucer's art.

And the Pardoner is just one of 29 pilgrims. Even in its one-fifth finished form, the Canterbury Tales stand as a sprawling human comedy wherein all stations and aspects of life receive vivid, entertaining treatment. Donaldson, again, on the characterization of one of the Pardoner's 28 fellows, the Prioress:

Chaucer shows us clearly her inability to be what she professes to be, a nun; shows also the inadequacy of what she thinks a nun ought to be, a lady; and shows the great human charm of what she is, a woman.

So we have the Pardoner and the Prioress.  I've written recently about Chaucer and the fabliau, here.  Kittredge, one of the great Chaucerians, was the first to point out that a series of tales--most memorably those of the Wife of Bath, the Clerk, and the Franklin--form a "marriage group" in which pilgrims advance, criticize, and rebut, by the stories they tell, each others' views on proper matrimonial relations.  As free-standing fictions, the individual tales are brilliant, but in their relation to teller and auditor they also build up the gallery of complex psychological characters.  In his artistic powers and many-minded mastery of the whole human scene, Chaucer reminds us of the only English poet greater than he.  Kittredge, at one point pausing in his explication, says that here is an instance of Chaucer "touching the garment of Shakespeare": it's hard to remember the particular occasion.

Stingo and me

Stingo, the narrator in Styron's Sophie's Choice, says that the prospect of spending an hour alone with the Brooklyn white pages aroused in him a sense of anticipation almost erotic in its intensity, such was his attraction to words on paper.  I don't have it that bad but I have it bad enough to know what Stingo's talking about.  This morning, I was off from work so that spouse Amanda could keep a 9:30 gyno appointment without having to drag along three bundles of proof that all her parts were there and functioning as of nine, four, and one year ago.  The message I had published on our intranet attendance tracker said "in around noon."  When Amanda got home earlier than I'd expected, I put George Lyman Kittredge's Chaucer and His Poetry into my backpack and caught an express bus before 11.  Suddenly it was clear that I would have almost an hour alone with Kittredge and Chaucer in the corner of a skyway coffee shop between the morning and noon rushes.  Medical devices that measure the rate of various physiological processes would have testified to my excitement, could I have been hooked up during the bus ride.  And the actual event did not disappoint.  The skyways were mostly empty, the coffee shop vacant, and Kittredge coming up to where he discusses how, in what he calls "the marriage group," different Canterbuy pilgrims are by their tales responding to the views expressed by the Wife of Bath, "one of the most amazing characters that the brain of man has ever yet conceived." 

I know, I know, I am a dweeb, but permit me my enthusiasms because when have I ever knocked yours?Unless you are a Republican volunteer or a devotee of some other exotic creed, never.  We are all just trying to do what Dr Johnson called "filling the vacuities" of life.  Have mercy on us.

Christopher Hitchens is dead; Ross Douthat comments

Christopher Hitchens is dead and every journalist who ever had a drink with him wants us to know it.  Ross Douthat, for example.  I wish this column wasn't a representative specimen of the work product of a regular New York Times op-ed columnist.  Let us take a look at some more or less randomly chosen passages and see whether it is possible to extract sense from the wheedling tone, the wordy self-regard.

• "Intellectually minded Christians, in particular, had a habit of talking about Hitchens as though he were one of them already--a convert in the making, whose furious broadsides against God were just the prelude to an inevitable reconciliation."  The wordiness starts with the first three words.  Why not "Christian intellectuals"?  Possible explanation: somehow the more dissolute expression is less apt to cause the reader to demand of the remote author, "Name one."  The gambit here is the cousin of that editorial cliche, "Thoughtful people believe. . . ."  It's as if the author, sensing the lameness of his argument, is obliged to make it impressive by invoking deep-thinking phantoms.  When Douthat says "Intellectually minded Christians," he means: I, Ross Douthat, smart Christian.  He's the intellectually minded one who, overcome by the force of Hitchens's arguments, simply says, x = y: really, deep-down, he's one of us.  (No, he isn't.)
• "American Christian intellectual life is sustained today, to a large extent, by the work of writers very much like Hitchens--by essayists and journalists and novelists and poets, from G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis to W.H. Auden and Eveyln Waugh, who shared his English roots, his gift for argument and his abiding humanism."  Why not Bertrand Russell and David Hume, a couple of Brits "with a gift for argument" whom Hitchens was in general agreement with on the topic under discussion?  Also, does the author realize that it is not an advertisement for the vibrancy of American Christian intellectual life to allow that nowadays it is sustained, "to a large extent," by a handful of dead Englishmen? 
• "When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin's poem 'Aubade'--that 'death is no different whined at than withstood.'"  Oh, spare us.  Is it Douthat's point that there is a God, because he'd be depressed if there weren't?  Or that he majored in English? 
• "Officially, Hitchens's creed was one with Larkin's.  But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair."  What exactly is meant by "giving in to despair"?  It's not as if Larkin committed suicide, and the aforementioned Russell and Hume were somewhat ruddier than, say, Kierkegaard.  But so what?  The question is about what's true, not who's cheerful. 
• "My hope--for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead--is that now he finally knows why [it's wrong to give in to despair]."  Only the rhetorical flourishes of unbelievers earn the epithet "happy talk." 

On miracles

The Star Tribune had an article the other day about a sullied but possibly miraculous communion wafer at a Catholic church in South St. Paul.  The wafer fell to the floor during a mass and, as it had presumably been consecrated, was placed in a chalice with water so that it would dissolve.  It seems that, having touched the floor, the wafer no longer qualifies as the body of Christ.  Nevertheless, you can't just toss it in the scrap, either.  There are rules covering these cases. Well, the wafer did not dissolve, as expected, but sank to the bottom and turned "a blood-red color," causing some to think they were in the presence of a miracle.  The Star Tribune article continues:

The church's pastor turned it over to the archdiocese for examination.

The archdiocese sent the host to an unnamed laboratory to be tested and released the results Wednesday in a statement from archdiocese spokesman Dennis McGrath.

"Exhaustive biological analysis by an independent scientific laboratory has determined that the reddish coloration on the Holy Communion host that was kept in a water solution after it was discovered on the floor of St. Augustine Church . . . was caused by fungus.  The host in question has been disposed of in a manner prescribed by church law.

"While the Catholic Church fully recognizes the possibility of miracles and remains open to their possibility, it does so with extreme scrutiny, investigation and care. This incident was the result of natural biological causes and should not be considered in any other way."

You have to love the tone of breathless stupidity in the church statement.  The analysis was exhaustive.  The laboratory was independent.  The situation called for scrutiny, investigation and care.  Oh, my! If you're worried about the manner in which the fungus-infested host was discarded (and who isn't?), rest easy: it was accomplished "in a manner prescribed by church law."  Whew! 

It's also good to know that "the Catholic Church fully recognizes the possibility of miracles and remains open to their possibility."  On the question of "miracles," the key word is evidently possibility.  There's a lot to love about this little story.  I think my favorite aspect concerns the wafer's ascent up the chain of command.  The parish priest turned it over to the archdiocese "for examination."  The archdiocese in turn called in the scientists.  That's why the archdiocese boys have been promoted--they know who is most apt to be able to explain the mystery, which in the end must be attributed to "natural biological causes," or, more colloquially, fungus.

 

 

Fun with Newt

Everyone is having fun with Newt!  Over at the New Yorker site, John Cassidy, whose Rational Irrationality blog is consistently a joy to read, has solicited responses from friends and correspondents to a simple question: "What is the nicest thing you can think of to say about Newt Gingrich?"  You can follow the link to his compilation; I can't repress the impulse to set down a few of my favorites.

• He and his wife both have nicely combed hair.
• Newt Gingrich is definitely less evil than Hitler.
• He's taller than James Madison.
• He hasn't shut down the government in years.
• Cheerfully provides his current wife with bling.
• His mother seemed to like him, in that interview with Connie Chung. Remember?
• For a fat man, he doesn't sweat that much.
• There's not two of him.
• He's the one to get Obama reelected.

Meanwhile, Cassidy's colleague Ryan Lizza surveys conservative opinion.  These are Newt's ideological fuck-buddies speaking. I know Romney is a bore and a toady, and that a randomly selected Republican voter is apt to be unconnected to any hinge, but, really, Newt Gingrich? Seriously? Go on!

Republicans debate: the beat goes on

I see that the Republican presidential candidates debated again on Saturday night and that the consensus is: Newt kicked ass--mainly, it seems, because his principal rival, Mitt Romney, by offering to bet Rick Perry ten thousand dollars about what is or isn't in the Massachusetts health care plan, proved himself "out of touch" with The American People.  "I want to know if he has $10,000 in his pocket," crowed a Gingrich spokesman soon as the lights went down.

As opposed to a half million on his Tiffany's charge, I guess.  I thought McCain was a poor candidate but am beginning to wax nostalgic.  Even for those of us who are enjoying the show, it's alarming that one of the two major political parties in our land of some 300 million citizens is apparently going to nominate one of these guys for the presidency--and that, considering who else is running, it makes a weird sort of sense that this should be so.

Chaucer and the fabliau

A fabliau, according to Merriam Webster's online dictionary, is "a short, usually comic, frankly coarse, and often cynical tale in verse popular especially in the 12th and 13th centuries."  Chaucer, whose life coincides pretty nearly with the second half of the 14th century, was a practitioner: of the Canterbury tales, the stories told by the miller, the reeve, the shipman, and the merchant all either qualify as fabliaux, or else exhibit the influence of the form.  Every aspect of the dictionary definition is present in these tales.  To illustrate, consider the plot of the tale of the shipman:

A merchant has a pretty wife who spends freely on the nice things she loves.  The merchant himself, however, is something of a miser, and is given to retiring to his counting house to tally up accounts.  His best friend is a young monk, who when visiting endears himself to the household help by tipping liberally.  On one of these visits, the wife confides to the monk that she is unhappy with her tight-fisted husband who, she suggests, does not satisfy her in bed, either.  She asks the monk for 100 francs to pay her debts.  The monk secures the 100 francs from the merchant and then, having turned it over to the wife, enjoys her sexual favors, their agreement being

That for thise hundred frankes he sholde all nyght
Have hire in his armes bolt upright.

When the merchant eventually asks for his money back, the monk says that he has returned it already--to the wife.  This man of God then hits the highway.  The merchant naturally asks his wife for the 100 francs.  She says that she's already spent it; also, that she had thought it was for the monk's long stay at their house, not repayment of an actual cash loan.  She will make it up to him in the bedroom:

For I wol paye yow wel and redily
Fro day to day, and if so be I faille,
I am youre wyf; score it upon my taille.

The pun--"taille" in the sense of "tally" or "ledger" and also "tale" or "ass"--neatly summarizes the theme of this story in which the price of sex, whether it be with your husband or his good friend the monk, is 100 francs.  F Scott Fitzgerald was not the first writer to investigate the financial foundations of the impulses to which all the finest citizens attach only the most exalted motives.  Everything in the story tends to impress upon us the brutal idea that money is at the root of everything.  The monk, besides duping both merchant and wife, purchases with coins the courtesy of the household help.  All of life is a confidence game.  Having been played herself by the monk, the wife cons the unknowing husband, and the tale ends with another double entendre:

Thus endeth my tale, and God us sende
Taillynge ynough unto our lyves ende.

The traditional fabliau is just for laughs, a kind of coarse joke at the expense of some ridiculous character.  In Chaucer's hand, the joke remains, you laugh and laugh, but finally you may wonder what exactly is so funny. The emotional source of the story is something like disgust.  And the tale of the shipman is by no means the only one like this.  One critic, discussing the merchant's tale, offers the opinion that it's "one of the most savagely obscene, angrily embittered, pessimistic, and unsmiling tales in our language."  In several of these stories, the coarse joke of the fabliau describes the whole human scene.

Gaming

I have been playing a lot of Yahtzee lately with Rianna, our 8-year-old.  If you've been exposed, you know that you play the game with five dice, and that the players in turn get to roll up to three times, setting aside after each roll the results they want to keep.  A "Yahtzee" is the same result on all five dice.  A pretty big part of the game is getting to three of a kind for all six numbers within the thirteen rounds that make a game.  Getting only two of a kind, especially for the higher numbers, will kill your score.  The first roll of a turn frequently yields two of one number together with three "singletons."  Rianna and I feel that it is an extraordinary run of bad luck not to pick up the needed third on either your second or third roll, yet it happens with sufficient regularity that I began to wonder just what the probability is.  The solution must be given by (5/6)⁶: the 5/6 representing the probablity that a single throw does not yield the desired result, and the exponent standing for the six (three dice times two rolls) straight undesired results.  This number turns out to be just about exactly 1/3.  In other words, the chance of failing to "triple up" after an initial pair is about the same as the chance of a major league batting champion getting a hit in his next at-bat.   He's more likely to make an out, but in a game in which he comes to bat several times you have to expect that he'll get at least one hit.  In fact, if he bats four times the chance of four outs is (2/3)⁴, which is less than 1/5.

Speaking of gaming and probability, isn't it sometimes in the interests of a football team to allow an immediate touchdown?  In today's Vikings game, for instance, Denver intercepted a Minnesota pass deep in Minnesota territory with the score tied and around 90 seconds left.  To me it seems obvious that the Vikings should have let Denver score a touchdown on the first play.  Instead, Denver ran a few plays, the last one being a quarterback keeper to position the ball immediately in front of the uprights, and kicked a winning field goal on the last play of the game.  If after the interception Minnesota had let Denver score an immediate touchdown, there would have been more than a minute in which to score a tying touchdown.  Isn't there a better chance of that than there is of the other team missing a chip-shot field goal?  But I've never seen a team pursue this strategy.  The commentators in today's game didn't mention it as a possibility.  It's almost as if it's against the ethics, but I don't see why doing what has to be done to increase the chances of victory should be frowned upon.  A team trying to win should pursue the optimal strategy.