This and That

     I know the title is what one would expect from the local news reporter for a small town Midwestern newspaper listing church rummage sales and fiftieth anniversaries, but I am resolved to use it anyway. For me, though I suspect for no one else, it carries a bit of association with a book, a thrift store curiosity I remember fondly though I discarded it years ago titled This Way and That that consisted of examples for British students’ test preparation not only of translations from the Greek and Latin classics, but also versions of, for instance, Milton made into Latin (not too great a leap there) and Shakespeare in Attic Greek. What a wonderfully demanding, utterly superfluous skill! Does anyone now learn to translate into the languages of the Classics? Not four decades ago I witnessed an academic panel that presented and discussed research papers entirely in Latin. Could one still convene such a group?
     My direct inspiration, though, is the Japanese zuihitsu genre the most well-known of which is the marvelous Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. Yoshida Kenko’s Essays in Idleness is a later example. My own reading and writing are so desultory that I believe the form may fit me well. Only when I’ve written a few dozen pages will I know. If so, this feature may recur.

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     Rereading Thomas Love Peacock I find myself as pleased with his name as his books. The “Peacock” is grand enough, but “Love” as a middle name makes it irresistible while “Thomas” keeps it plausible. Surely he was fated to attain Romantic celebrity whether he aimed to do so or not. I am put in mind of sitting in the Old English classroom of Prof. Rainbow whose very name seemed to spread a soft and charming light over the rasping consonants and willed fortitude of those old poems almost fifty years ago.

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     In my cupboard for spices and herbs is a small tin of asafoetida with a cobra rising to meet the cook. I sometimes add a grain or two to my Indian dishes. The brown balls of dry congealed gum are apparently a lifetime supply. Among its vernacular names are devil’s dung and Teufelsdreck. Though known for its disagreeable odor, this latex or oleoresin from the root of the Ferula (a cousin of the carrot) is said to lend the flavor of leeks to cooked food. I cannot say that my own taste can perceive this subtle flavor, but I add it anyway. It is too strong for some as it is one of the five vegetable foods avoided by some East Asian Buddhists along with several varieties of garlic and onion. Such foods were thought to excite desire in a way in compatible with enlightenment.

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     I sometimes think that Manhattanites are among the most provincial of Americans. When I taught at L.I.U. in Brooklyn, the English Department had thirteen professors, eleven of whom were native New Yorkers. Virtually all of them had also attended university in the city. Saul Steinberg’s celebrated New Yorker cover showed the nation foreshortened almost out of existence on the west side of the Hudson. This was not merely a joke. It used to be that people who lived in Manhattan rarely even ventured to Brooklyn, but that has changed.

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     I cannot accept the current use of the word “hipster,” today used to describe the affluent young who are busy gentrifying Brooklyn. Are these not the same people, though possibly with the camouflage of enhanced facial hair, who used to be called yuppies? In the fifties the hipster was on the edge – see Mailer’s “The White Negro” for evidence – whereas today’s crop care primarily, so far as I know, for elaborate espresso drinks.

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     We appreciate the marvelous beauty of nature, admiring an Insect’s anatomy, the veining of a leaf or the branching of a tree, an irregularly shaped rock, or the movements of a house cat. To what extent is such pleasure distinct from that derived from the contemplation of works of art? While it is true that art may seem set apart from nature due to its intentionality – absent from a sunset unless one considers some deity as the artist – perhaps in the reception of a work by Mozart, Delacroix, or Sir Philip Sidney, one is simply admiring the structure of that other consciousness, itself as “natural” as everything that exists must be.

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     Why are so many of the people at left-wing demonstrations today so old? In the sixties most activists were my age then, but today it seems still to be my cohort that is keeping alive the hope of progressive change. Age seems even more a selector at artistic events. From the rear of the hall it is often a sea of white hair at chamber music concerts and plays and poetry readings. Public television ever since Upstairs, Downstairs has run utterly commercial dramas lacking in artistic ambition while “non-commercial” radio does publicity for commercial rock and rollers and television programs. In this era are all art lovers old fogeys?

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     Near my home is a warning sign for a school zone with the familiar silhouettes of a boy and a shorter girl carrying books. Though the year is 2017, the boy is wearing knickerbockers. Now, I was born in 1946 and such pants were never part of my experience. They appear in thirties movies, so I imagine the cataclysm of the war may have altered this fashion as it did many others. I doubt that the sign I see on my daily biking is seventy-five years old. It seems odd that this iconic image enjoys such longevity. It reminds me of the ink-wells on the right corner of my elementary school desks, though dipping a pen into ink struck me even then as archaic. These were long shadows cast by the past like my father’s uniform hanging in our attic, and a few ragged comic books I somehow acquired from the years before I was born, featuring Joe Palooka and the Blackhawks battling Nazis, the most vicious of villains.