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It’s Like … Whatever

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You’ll Never Guess the Most Frequently Used Word

You’ll Never Guess the Most Frequently Used Word

Today I had to work in an un-air-conditioned high rise on a day when the temperature rose into the 90s. Midway through, I took a break and walked over to the UCLA campus, where I had lunch and hung out in the student bookstore for a while. Along the way (it was one mile in each direction), I heard snippets of a lot of conversations. You’ll never guess what the most frequently used work was. It was, like, like.

Let’s get Bill O’Reilly involved in this, because it looks as if there is a concerted attack by young women on the verb “to be.” Nothing any more is, it is “like.” It’s much worse than the War on Christmas or the Amphibious Assault on Arbor Day. When was it that young women realized they they weren’t anything in particular, just “like” something. The similes multiply so much that it resembles this at times:

Is Moon Unit Zappa to Blame for All This?

Is Moon Unit Zappa to Blame for All This?

By the way, note the misspelling of the word “Academy” in the lower left of the above illustration. That’s what happens when one starts over-using the word “like.” A certain level of brain rot takes place, and it spreads to other areas. I think it all started with Moon Unit Zappa singing “Valley Girl” back in 1982. Almost overnight, young women adopted the idiom:

Like, OH MY GOD! (Valley Girl)
Like-TOTALLY (Valley Girl)
Encino is like SO BITCHEN (Valley Girl)
There’s like the Galleria (Valley Girl)
And like all these like really great shoe stores
I love going into like clothing stores and stuff
I like to buy the neatest mini-skirts and stufl
It’s like so BITCHEN cuz like everybody’s like
Super-super nice…
It’s like so BITCHEN..,

On Ventura, there she goes
She just bought some bitchen clothes
Tosses her head ’n flips her hair
She got a whole bunch of nothin’ in there.

Yep, it sure sounds like “a whole bunch of nothin’ in there.” Wonder what they sound like in philosophy class trying to discuss something, like, really PROFOUND. Oh, like whatevah!

Bird of Paradise

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Bird of Paradise at Los Angeles Arboretum

Strelitzia reginae at Los Angeles Arboretum

Even before I came to Los Angeles for the first time in 1966, I could identify the Bird of Paradise, or Strelitzia reginae. For me, it always represented the exoticism of the tropics. It went with all those palm trees and other flora that one never found in Cleveland or New Hampshire. There is a funny thing about those exotic plants, including the Bird of Paradise. Whereas Eastern plants are more tactile, the palms and flowers in Southern California are not friendly to the touch.

That is especially true of palm trees. When I found out that rats like to live in palm trees, I lost all interest in touching them. As for the Bird of Paradise, which is actually an import from South Africa, where it is called the Crane Flower, it has no inviting scent, nor is it soft and approachable. It’s like many succulents, many of which are interesting looking, but do not reward close scrutiny.

Sometimes I wonder if the people in Los Angeles resemble the local plant life in that regard. We’re all from somewhere else, like the Bird of Paradise, but we’re hard tom get to now. There is a certain feeling of noli me tangere. (Do not touch!)

What Would I Have Done Differently?

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Our Embattled President

Our Embattled President

As we approach the end of the Obama presidency, a few thoughts are running through my mind, mostly along the lines of what I would have done differently. I am really not cut out to be a politician: From me. one is more likely to get a smoldering look along the lines of “What’s with you, f*ckwit?” than a glad hand.

The President has made an honest attempt to reach across the aisle to the Republicans and conduct his office for the benefit of all Americans. I would probably have been better known as the leader who invited the Republican leadership to the Oval Office, from which they mysteriously and unaccountably disappeared. Instead of playing golf with John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, I would have introduced those two traitorous obstructionists to a cat-’o-nine-tails and liberally (I use the adverb advisedly) slathered chile habañero onto their wounds. I would be like those ancient Roman leaders who urged certain opposition leaders to depart the political scene by opening their veins in a hot bath, lest they face something a whole lot worse.

Okay, so I’m not a nice guy, especially to people I perceive as having done me dirt. None of this turning the other cheek business. After all, these Evangelical tools don’t follow that rule, so why should I?

Barack Obama was probably too nice, too reasonable to be President. Within those constraints, I think he did a good job at a truly horrible time. Americans are being jerked around big time by a combination of Corporate Fat Cats and a few million Secessionists who just want to blow away anyone who looks at them cross-eyed or won’t let them marry their twelve-year-old cousins.

Attack of the Killer Fungus

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Bakersfield in a Windstorm

Bakersfield in a Windstorm

I have always felt that, as long as I’ve lived in the American Southwest, I’ve never wanted to live somewhere that had the word “Valley” in its name. After reading Dana Goodyear’s article entitled “Devil Dust” in the January 20, 2014 issue of The New Yorker, I find that I have better reasons for saying this than ever before. The culprit is a deadly fungus that dwells in the soil called Coccidiotes immitis, which causes a disease for which there is no cure called coccidioidomycosis, better known as Valley Fever:

C. immitis is adapted to lodge deep: its spores are small enough to reach the end of the bronchioles at the bottom of the lungs. We can breathe them in, but we can’t breathe them out. Once in the lung, the spore circles up into a spherule, defined by a chitinous cell wall and filled with a hundred or so baby endospores. When the spherule is sufficiently full, it ruptures, releasing the endospores and stimulating an acute inflammatory response that disrupts blood flow to the tissue and can lead to necrosis. The endospores, each of which will become a new spherule, travel through the blood and lymph systems, allowing the cocci to spread, as one specialist says, “anywhere it wants.” In people with weakened immune systems, cocci can take over.

Unfortunately, cocci, as it’s called, is endemic throughout the desert Southwest, as well as the desert portions of Central and South America. When there is  building, farming, clearing, or drilling activity, it gets stirred up and transported by the hot winds that characterize the deserts of the New World.

From 1998 to 2011, the Centers for Disease Control reported a 1,000% increase in the number of reported cases. The sad thing is that, because the more temperate areas are unaffected, there is less likelihood of a pharmacological solution to the disease. I’m sure that scientists in Europe and the Eastern part of the United States would prefer to find solutions to diseases that are much more widely disseminated.

So consider me a lifelong non-dweller in the valleys of California. I don’t care how cheap the housing is!

 

A Neglected Poet

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Rain as a Subaltern

Rain as a Subaltern

Thomas Hardy is not one of our most widely-read poets. If anything, people are far more familiar with his novels, such as Jude the Obscure, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Far from the Madding Crowd. Fortunately, after years of neglect, his poems are coming into their own. The other night, I was reading an essay on the 20th century Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in J. M. Coetzee’s Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986-1999, and I came across the following:

[Joseph] Brodsky’s system can best be illustrated from the essay on Thomas Hardy. Brodsky regards Hardy as a neglected major poet, “seldom taught, less read,” particularly in America, cast out by fashion-minded critics into the limbo of “premodernism” (On Grief, pp. 373, 315, 313)

It is certainly true that modern criticism has had little of interest to say about Hardy. Nevertheless, despite what Brodsky says, ordinary readers and (particularly) poets have never deserted him. John Crowe Ransom edited a selection of Hardy’s verse in 1960 [I have a copy]. Hardy dominates Philip Larkin’s widely read Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973), with 27 pages as opposed to 19 for Yeats, 16 for Auden, a mere 9 for [T. S.] Eliot. Nor did the Modernist avant-garde dismiss Hardy en bloc. Ezra Pound, for instance, tirelessly recommended him to younger poets. “Nobody has taught me anything about writing since Thomas Hardy died,” he remarked in 1934.

Here is my favorite of Hardy’s poems. Picture a man struggling to walk through a rainstorm:

The Subalterns

I

“Poor wanderer,” said the leaden sky,
“I fain would lighten thee,
But there are laws in force on high
Which say it must not be.”

II

–“I would not freeze thee, shorn one,” cried
The North, “knew I but how
To warm my breath, to slack my stride;
But I am ruled as thou.”

III

—“To-morrow I attack thee, wight,”
Said Sickness. “Yet I swear
I bear thy little ark no spite,
But am bid enter there.”

IV

—“Come hither, Son,” I heard Death say;
“I did not will a grave
Should end thy pilgrimage to-day,
But I, too, am a slave!”

V

We smiled upon each other then,
And life to me had less
Of that fell look it wore ere when
They owned their passiveness.

Hardy can be at one and the same time incredibly simple and incredibly deep. At the same time, we have sickness and death acting with compassion against the poor traveler. Who can write such a poem today?

Tarnmoor’s ABCs: Film

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Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties

Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties

I was very impressed by Czeslaw Milosz’s book Milosz’s ABC’s. There, in the form of a brief and alphabetically-ordered personal encyclopedia, was the story of the life of a Nobel Prize winning poet, of the people, places, and things that meant the most to him. Because his origins were so far away (Lithuania and Poland) and so long ago (1920s and 1930s), there were relatively few entries that resonated personally with me. Except it was sad to see so many fascinating people who, unknown today, died during the war under unknown circumstances.

This blog entry is my own humble attempt to imitate a writer whom I have read on and off for thirty years without having sated my curiosity. Consequently, over the next few months, you will see a number of postings under the rubric “Tarnmoor’s ABCs” that will attempt to do for my life what Milosz accomplished for his. I don’t guarantee that I will use up all 26 letters of the alphabet, but I’ll do my best.

These Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties are not what you usually think of when you think of the movies, but that was about a hundred years ago. Film has been around for more than a century, and I have been  a film freak for almost half that time. It all started at Dartmouth College, where there were frequent free screenings at Fairbanks Hall. One afternoon in my freshman year, I saw Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943), about witchcraft in seventeenth century Denmark. I was hooked.

Although my original intention was to become a professor of English, somewhere during my second or third year at college, I decided to switch to film. The Hopkins Center had just opened, and there was a large beautiful theater for screening films. The Dartmouth Film Society put on an ambitious year-long Alfred Hitchcock Retrospective, and my career choice began to waver. When, finally, Arthur L. Mayer, the author of Merely Colossal, came to teach a class in film history, my mind was made up.

Dartmouth had a long history of ties with the film industry. Its Baker Library was the home of the Irving Thalberg collection of Hollywood scripts. Graduates included such film luminaries as Joseph Losey, Robert Ryan, Budd Schulberg, David Picker, and Max Youngstein. Even before my senior year, I had decided to do my graduate work in film history and criticism. During the summer of 1965, I went with my parents to New York, mainly to see Haig P. Manoogian, who ran the film department at New York University. Mr. Manoogian was kind enough to see me, but not kind enough to encourage me—although he was a favorite of Martin Scorsese, who went to school there. I guess he was more interested in film production. (That summer, I also saw the New York World’s Fair of 1964-1965.)

That left the University of Southern California (USC) and UCLA. One of my Dartmouth classmates from the Class of 1965 had attended UCLA. When he came up to Dartmouth to visit, he discouraged me about USC, which he said was a slum and Smog Central.

So I came out to Southern California, where I still live. I attended graduate school at UCLA for several years until Professor Howard Suber put the kibosh on my budding career as a film professor. He was a lackadaisical academic who supposedly was working on a shot-by-shot analysis of Citizen Kane and who didn’t much like movies. I was about to write a thesis about the Westerns of John Ford with Robert Epstein as head of my thesis committee, but then Suber replaced him with himself. At that point, I knew I was finished, as there was little love lost between us. Years later, I joined a letter-writing campaign to have his tenure denied, calling him a cross between Mr. Pickwick and Caligula.

Although I’ve always loved film, I had by this time taught myself how to operate and program computers, and I got a job at System Development Corporation in Santa Monica. Curiously, the person I replaced at SDC was a young woman who had been murdered by a UCLA film student. So here I am today, a computer expert at a Westwood accounting firm, still in love with film, though greatly disappointed because all the great filmmakers I idolized are dead, and the quality of films now being produced has fallen markedly.

Tarnmoor’s ABCs: Earthquakes

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Earthquake Fissure in Road

Earthquake Fissure in Road

I was very impressed by Czeslaw Milosz’s book Milosz’s ABC’s. There, in the form of a brief and alphabetically-ordered personal encyclopedia, was the story of the life of a Nobel Prize winning poet, of the people, places, and things that meant the most to him. Because his origins were so far away (Lithuania and Poland) and so long ago (1920s and 1930s), there were relatively few entries that resonated personally with me. Except it was sad to see so many fascinating people who, unknown today, died during the war under unknown circumstances.

This blog entry is my own humble attempt to imitate a writer whom I have read on and off for thirty years without having sated my curiosity. Consequently, over the next few months, you will see a number of postings under the rubric “Tarnmoor’s ABCs” that will attempt to do for my life what Milosz accomplished for his. I don’t guarantee that I will use up all 26 letters of the alphabet, but I’ll do my best.

If there is any natural phenomenon that frightens me, I would have to say it is earthquakes. During my years in Southern California, I have lived through two big ones: The Sylmar earthquake on February 9, 1971 (Richter 6.6) and the Northridge earthquake of January 17, 1994 (Richter 6.7).

On Friday, we had a small tremor centered on nearby Marina Del Rey. It was only a 3.2, but I acted as if it were just the start of a much bigger shake. Sitting in my library reading Proust, I dropped the book, jumped clear over the hassock and headed to the hallway just outside my bathroom to brace myself for what (perhaps) was to come. It didn’t. In the meantime, Martine peered around the corner and asked what was wrong. Did she feel the quake? Yes, but it was only a tiny one. But there I was, standing in the doorway with my heart racing, preparing myself for the worst.

The origins of my fear go back to 1994, when I used to sleep on an improvised futon in my living room. It was around 4:30 am when the earth began to shake in the darkness of the pre-dawn hours. Lights flashed whenever a nearby transformer exploded. Things were falling down from the walls and shelves, and some of them even rolled to where I was lying in terror as the sounds and smells and shaking had incapacitated me. What happened immediately after, I don’t recall because I actually lost my memory. All I know was that I was picked up by the police several hours later carrying two gallon jugs of purified water on Santa Monica Boulevard with blood flowing down my right leg.

Little by little, my terror subsided, only to be ramped up again with each aftershock. The damage caused by the quake was substantial: some nearby buildings were askew, and my kitchen had to be cleaned up with a shovel.

Ever since then, I do not go to bed without laying out all my clothes for the next day on a chair between the bedroom and the front door. Walking barefoot on broken glass and crockery is not a pleasant experience. So even now, a small temblor is capable of bringing back the terror, for however short a time.

 

 

Odette

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Detail of Zipporah from Botticelli’s The Trials of Moses

Detail of Zipporah from Botticelli’s The Trials of Moses

Shown above is a detail from Sandro Botticelli’s painting “The Trials of Moses” depicting Jethro’s daughter Zipporah. It is this image which Marcel Proust used to describe the love of Charles Swann’s life, Odette de Crécy. It was a mammoth undertaking, especially as Proust was gay: He constantly had to translate heterosexual behavior through a homosexual template, which was more familiar to him. (In later volumes, Marcel’s lover Albertine was thus “translated” from his Italian chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli.) As difficult as it seems to do this, Proust succeeded so well that Swann’s Way is perhaps the greatest work in literature about disappointment in love.

Swann was not immediately taken with Odette:

[S]he had seemed to Swann not without beauty, certainly, but of a type of beauty that that left him indifferent, that aroused no desire in him, even caused him a sort of physical repulsion, one of those women such as everyone has his own, different for each, who are the opposite of the kind our senses crave. Her profile was too pronounced for his taste, her skin too delicate, her cheekbones too prominent, her figures too pinched. Her eyes were lovely, but so large they bent under their own mass, exhausted the rest of her face, and always gave her a look of being in ill health or ill humor.

A few pages later, we see what Swann (and by extension Proust) was doing in crystallizing his feelings toward this young woman::

He placed on his worktable, as if it were a photograph of Odette, a reproduction of Jethro’s daughter. He admired the large eyes, the delicate face, which allowed one to imagine the imperfect skin, the marvelous curls of the hair along the tired cheeks, and adapting what he had found aesthetically beautiful up to then to the idea of a living woman, he translated it into physical attractions which he rejoiced to find united in a creature whom he could possess. The vague feeling of sympathy that draws us toward a masterpiece as we look at it became, now that he knew the fleshly original of Jethro’s daughter, a desire that henceforth compensated for the desire that Odette’s body had not at first inspired in him. When he looked at that Botticelli for a long time, he would think of his own Botticelli, whom he found even more beautiful, and bringing the photograph of Zipporah close to him, he would believe he was clasping Odette against his heart.

Alas, Odette is openly unfaithful to Swann and drives him crazy with envy as the Comte de Forcheville moves in on his woman, while their friends at the Verdurins’ salon conspire against him. In the process, Swann’s life becomes bitter; and he no longer derives any joy from the things that hitherto had sustained him, his friends, his art, and high society. In the end, Swann admits to himself: “To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!”

Of course, that didn’t keep him from marrying her. But that is another story.

Still a Good Investment?

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University Buildings at UCLA

University Buildings at UCLA

Over the years since I graduated from college, I’ve seen the cost of a university education climb to stratospheric levels. At the same time, I’ve seen massive unemployment among college graduates, sometimes even those with a postgraduate education. It forces me to think what I would do different if I had a couple of teenaged children to put through school (though in fact I have no children). Would I still at this date recommend that children go to college to improve their chances for the future?

Part of the problem is symbolized by that “One Way” sign in the above photo. It used to be that the object was to get everyone into college: It was a bargain back then. Even if the kids washed out within the first quarter or two, the thinking was that they were given the opportunity.

I went to an Ivy League college for four years—Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire—whose tuition back in the years 1962-66 was only $1,500 a year. With the dollar as it is today, that would be somewhere between $9,000 (using the CPI) to $27,200 (using the relative share of GDP) in 2012, the most recent year for which this calculation is available. For the academic year 2013-2014, Dartmouth’s tuition is now $45,445. The question I ask is this: Is a Dartmouth education worth twice as much as when I went to school? I think not. It’s still very good, but not at two to five times the cost.

Other related costs have also been skyrocketing. I am particularly incensed by textbooks that run to several hundreds of dollars each. I remember paying something under a hundred dollars for all the textbooks for an entire quarter. Admittedly, textbooks can be gorgeously produced with nice bindings and four-color illustrations, but is that always necessary? I can see where these expensive productions will eventually be replaced by software programs, but even then the temptation will be to charge more than they are worth, even after the production costs for multiple copies have plummeted.

So, what to do? There isn’t much chance that youth between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one will find jobs that at the same time do not require a college education, yet provide a reasonable opportunity for advancement. How does one advance after a job flipping hamburgers or selling tee shirts? A college degree will help, even though it has been devalued over the years. It costs twice as much in real dollars, yet probably isn’t as good as it was when my generation was on campus.

I still urge kids whose intellects are sharp to go to college whenever they can. It doesn’t have to be the best college, but it should be a decent one (and I don’t mean something like the University of Phoenix and its imitators). To get a good job after graduation, some thought has to be put into a good choice of a major. Perhaps it would help to have some kind of certification in certain subjects attesting to a student’s proficiency in, say, writing or mathematics. If instituted, it may even replace the whole notion of a major; and it may help grads with multiple certifications to have different options to choose from when looking for a job.

In 1966, I graduated with a major in English. Then I went on for two years at UCLA in motion picture history and criticism, stopping short of getting my M.A. for mostly political reasons. (The instructor I hated most got himself appointed to head up my thesis committee, upon which I switched over into computer software.) It was a good thing that I had taught myself how to become conversant with computers at Dartmouth, where every student was allowed free time on the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, the nation’s first. That kind of flexibility to switch among career alternatives is becoming more important than ever.

 

 

A Republican Designed by Cubists

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Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA)

Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA)

Every time I look at a picture of Troglodyte Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, I think of the cubist paintings of a century or so ago. The lack of symmetry of his facial planes is rather marked; and I cannot help but wonder if it represents some seismic disaster in his brain. His right eyebrow seems to be an inch or more above his left eyebrow. Seems quite appropriate for a rightist, no?

Compare with the portrait by Juan Gris below and you’ll see what I mean:

Portrait by Juan Gris

Portrait by Juan Gris