Uncoupled - a movie review

Neil Patrick Harris in Uncoupled

A playwright friend of mine once staged a reading of a play of hers in progress. She's a very close friend and normally I'd go out of my way to say nice things when asked for an opinion. But she said this was a work in progress and wanted honest criticism, no matter how harsh. I hesitated, even then, worrying about crossing the line into unkindness, but I gave her what she asked for. I told her the play was about people I couldn't get myself to care for. It was about rich people and their problems. What I want to see on the stage is something with universal appeal. Rich people's problems that are also poor people's problems, by all means. But rich people's problems that are only rich people's problems, no way.

I revisited that response last night while watching the 2022 Netflix production, Uncoupled. It's a product of Darren Star, who gave us Sex and the City. At the risk of again going over the line from constructive criticism into unkindness, I have to tell you, until I learn more about him, I'm inclined to think of him as a writer with only one story in him. Uncoupled is Sex and the City. It's just that he replaced all the women with gay men before taking it for a spin. The story line is unoriginal, predictable, and tortured. Uncoupled stars a gay hero of mine, Neil Patrick Harris, and I give him credit for stretching his acting skills here to include some raunchy near-naked romping around with one-night stands and setting the story in the world of Grindr and Tinder, complete with dick-pics. What I admire about Harris the man is the beautiful image he portrays as a gay married man with kids. And the fact that since making a splash as Doogie Howser his career has risen steadily, even to include hosting The Academy Awards. The fact that he chose to play a character so out of sync with that image does him credit.

Besides his convincing acting, there are some laugh-out-loud lines. But that about exhausts what I have to say about the film that is positive. Who, I'd like to know, gives a hot damn about a bunch of shallow rich New Yorkers having a bad day now and again? Harris plays Michael, a man whose husband, Colin, played by Tuc Watkins (Hank, from the recent remake of Boys in the Band), walks out on him after seventeen years of living together, and never quite figures out - right up to the end - that the fact he's a lousy self-involved listener might have something to do with the walk-out. Colin, too, remains largely inarticulate, says only that he "needs some time" and the two never seem to figure out how to put their problems into words. The Harris character makes his living talking other rich folk into buying what he has to sell. When he's not stroking egos to sell prestige addresses, he's socializing with friends who exploit each other's insecurities.  It's a movie about a pile of spoiled brats, the kind of people who live high off the hog and then, when it's over, sink into self-pity.

I get that it can't be easy to satirize superficial people without leaving an audience with a bad taste in their mouths.  Satirizing rich people ought to be like shooting fish in a barrel. But after a time, even Claire in action, the character probably written to be the most obvious object of satire, the character who illustrates how easily people allow themselves to be abused by the wealthy, burns out and simply becomes tiresome.  And again, as with Patrick Neil Harris, the character is well played - by Marcia Gay Harden.

Only occasionally does the film move beyond aggressive sex-centered acts by people making themselves look good while putting others down. Mostly it dashes from one gay stereotype to another, the nobody-loves-an-old-gay pity party, the importance of appearances over reality, the need to measure friendship on the strength of how useful people are when you want something from them.

That said, if you can summon the kind of motivation that drew folks into the cinemas of yesteryear to watch glamourous people parade themselves fashionably across the stage, to escape for a couple hours the reality of their own ordinary dull lives, you can probably get yourself in the right headspace to enjoy what this film has to offer - some genuinely guffaw-generating moments. It's not that bad. It's just that, with a conspicuous absence of heroic characters or interesting villains, it doesn't have that much to offer.

A for acting, B- for character development, C for plot line.

photo credit: Barbara Nitke/Netflix

Variants of Us

I like to say I became a Jew the moment I heard the cantor chant the prayer for the dead at Harvey Milk's memorial service at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. I had felt an affinity for Ashkenazi Jews for years, loved the self-deprecating humor, loved latkes, got a kick out of throwing Yiddish expressions into my conversations. What's the difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazal? A schlemiel goes through life spilling his soup; a schlimazal is the guy he spills it on.

When the cantor came out onto the stage and translated what I saw as thousands of years of grief and mourning into exquisite sound, though, I took on a connection with Judaism, and not just Yiddishkeit - Jewishness - that went into my bones.

Over the years I have struggled mightily with organized religion. I was baptized in a Baptist church, raised to think of myself as a Congregationalist surrounded by mostly Catholic friends, before becoming a Lutheran during my sophomore year at college after getting special dispensation from the Episcopal bishop of Vermont to take communion in the local Episcopal Church. While still in high school the local Methodist Church lost its organist and I got to replace her for a year. I was up to my neck in religious influences.

The break came when I went to Munich in my junior year of college. I lived in a Lutheran Church dormitory and attended St. Mark's Church, about a 10-12 minute walk away, where the Munich Bach Choir brought home the connection between Lutheranism and Bach. That was the good part of being Lutheran in Munich. The bad part was being shunned by my dorm mates when I made the mistake of telling them I loved drinking beer at the Hofbräuhaus on Saturday nights. I was not prepared for the differences between the cigar-smoking, life-loving, dancing, singing, beer-drinking Germans I grew up with in Connecticut and the cold puritanical Lutherans I was rubbing elbows with now in the catholic city of Munich. I concluded, rightly or wrongly, that it was their sense of being a religious minority that made them circle the wagons around their religious identity, and it wasn't long before the radically different approach to life these two groups of Lutherans, one American, one German, created a cognitive dissonance in me that ultimately led to my leaving the church altogether.

It would take another couple of years for me to realize that I was gay and that even if I had not loosened the once strong ties I once felt to the church, the church was not going to allow me to be both gay and Christian. By this time I was working pretty much full-time on my gay identity and I realized that if I had to choose between them, it would be no contest. I had not chosen my gay identity; it had chosen me. And with almost every new gay friendship I made, or even with acquaintances I engaged in conversation with, came a new tale of persecution or shunning, a new horror commonly centered on one church or another. Religion, remember, played a much bigger part in our lives back then.  Over a relatively short period of time, my reaction moved from alienation and shame through annoyance and disillusionment to rage and the desire to burn anything that looked like a church to the ground.

I became a fierce church basher. I joined organizations like the Freedom from Religion Foundation and would come, in more recent times, to feel a close affinity with the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other outspoken advocates of atheism or agnosticism. I watched with great satisfaction how catholics began leaving the pews after the priest sexual abuse scandal spread around the world. I got into an interesting discussion once with a prominent rabbi and relished being able to tell him that my favorite Jewish theologian was Spinoza. And another with a Roman Catholic bishop up north somewhere, whom I enjoyed explaining that my problem with priestly child abuse was not the occasional messed-up cleric, but with the Church itself for working so hard to further enable their abuses by juggling them around to other parishes and trying to sweep the whole business under the rug.  I rarely missed an opportunity to tell representatives of churches I came across how much I loathed their very existence. 

I don't know when it began, but at some point my urge to strike out tapered off.  I'm pretty sure the gradual acceptance of LGBT people into American society had a lot to do with it. By 2013, when I was able to marry my life-partner of many years, in the rotunda of San Francisco City Hall, next to the bust of Harvey Milk, officiated over by the daughter of the woman who swore Harvey Milk in when he first became a San Francisco supervisor, I no longer felt the need to jump at every opportunity to identify myself as gay. Being gay was no longer my primary identity. These days I see myself as a longtime San Francisco Bay Area resident, a retired university professor with New England and Nova Scotian roots, an old man married to a Japanese guy much younger than myself, and a German-American lover of chocolate and macadamia nuts who is blessed with a wonderful circle of friends, many of whom I consider chosen family and most of whom have no religious affiliation. The church, once so central in my life in my first couple of decades, now crosses my consciousness only rarely, and no longer invokes the slightest interest on a personal level. The only reason for paying it any mind at all is the fact that these days one cannot escape the insidious influence on us all of militant white supremacist Christian nationalism.  Historian John Fea has described the leaders of this movement as "Court Evangelicals." Love that term and its association with Court Jesters.

In addition to the tapering off of the power of homophobia over American culture, which I still attribute largely to authoritarian religion collectives such as traditional cleric-centered Roman Catholicism, Mormonism and fundamentalist Evangelicalism, there is a second source for what is the reshuffling of the meaning of religion in my life: my background in linguistics and anthropology. For many years I taught seminars, both graduate and undergraduate, in the meaning of culture. The way I went about it was to explore with my students the many areas that culture intersected with. There was culture and civilization, culture and society, culture and power, culture and morality, and - the area that interested me most - culture and religion. I say "explore" rather than teach, because many years ago I got a chance to have lunch with a well-known professor of linguistics. I noted that she had lined up two courses for the coming semester that sounded terribly interesting to me and I must have sounded like a pitiful sycophant when I told her I wished I could sit in on the sessions. And, by the way, I asked her, how did she ever find the time to acquire the knowledge she obviously would need to be able to teach this course?

"Oh, I never teach anything I know," she said. "If I did, I'd get bored with the gap between me and my students and my boredom would infect my work with them. I only deal with things I'm interested in learning myself."

That conversation was a turning point in my career. I still had to teach basic level courses in reading and writing, but when it came to my seminars, I chose things I wanted to understand better myself. That decision paid great rewards, and over the years I came to a much better understanding of religion, including especially the field of ethics. Over time I began to pull apart the aspect of religion that we can call spirituality, and see it as distinct from doctrinal belief. I became aware of how my Protestant upbringing led me to the conviction that religion was all about sincerity and developing a personal relationship with God. And that meant that prayer was only prayer if it was a sincere attempt to communicate personal feelings with god. And that explained why I used to hear criticism of the catholics as people who simply went through the motions with their ritualistic pre-packaged prayers, their trips around the rosary, where quantity often outweighed quality - or so it was explained to me in my Protestant Sunday School.

I began to look for the many ways there are of being religious. I looked for shorthand ways of putting my finger on the essence of one group or another. I came to see Christianity as the effort to spread love and compassion, the primary goal of Islam to spread an attitude of humility and submission, the essence of Judaism centering on law and justice. I noted that Evangelicals tended to talk with Jesus as if he were their buddy and how they loved to use the word "just," as in "We just want to thank you, Jesus, for coming to our house today to be with us..." And that Catholics could get grisly with their "bleeding heart" and references to suffering and pain. And that Jews (the ones I knew, at least) never seemed to be doing anything with much reverence. Rather, they struck me as carrying on a meta analysis of what they were doing at any given point in time. "This is where we light the candles, turn our heads to the left, say this prayer..." In fairness, that could be because they were so aware of the presence of outsiders who needed such explanations. But outsiders often were backsliding Jews.

The more I learned of the virtually infinite variety of ways to identify with one religion or another, the more my attention became focused on the role of culture in religious practice. Swearing allegiance to the Bishop of Rome makes you Catholic. Refusing blood transfusions makes you a Jehovah's Witness. Praying with your shoes off makes you a Muslim. Excuse the oversimplification; you get my meaning. With some it's belief that counts; with others, it's behavior.

I said there were two things that were important in changing my consciousness of religion, the slow but sure loss of power that homophobes once held in the world I lived in and the gradual awareness of the role that culture played - culture being attitudes, values and beliefs - in what it meant to be religious and how to be that way. There is a third. And that one came to me as I improved, over time, my ability to approach linguistics descriptively rather than prescriptively, as I had as a teacher.  And life as an anthropologist, as a neutral observer and not as a religiously indoctrinated Protestant Christian with an urge to carry my missionary message to the world. That urge lasted way beyond my days as a Christian. An example of what I mean by identifying a person by their behavior. I was no longer a Christian in terms of doctrine, but I was still very much a Christian as reflected by the behavior I learned as a protestant kid, the need to spread the gospel. I may not be pushing what is known as "biblical truth," but I'm still pushing truth-as-I-know-it. As a shrink said to me once, "You think you have tossed out religion. You may have, but you're still in possession of the box it came in."

That sounded clever to me at the time. These days I think it misses the point. It's not that I have failed at something - to not scrape the last bit of religion off of me. It's that I've gotten more comfortable with just letting the many varying aspects of religion be. To embrace the positive and go on dismissing its downside.  Religion's spiritual side, the one you tie to your emotions, is but one aspect of religion. Another is its intellectual side - or maybe theological is a better word - the one we use in the way we frame the stories we tell each other as a way of making life meaningful.

No less important than the spiritual side of religion and the efforts to create a moral universe and the intellectual/theological narratives we live by is the practical culture aspect. This is probably the one more than all the others which keeps most people going to church. Which shows up in people who say, "It would break my grandmother's heart if I stopped going to confession and to mass." Or "I go for the music." Or "I go because of the fellowship."

I separated religion from the pope the other day. He was in Canada apologizing to the Cree Indians for the misery inflicted by the Catholic church on so many indigenous children who thought they were doing them a favor by making good little Christians out of them, no small number of whom actually died from clerical abuse. I saw a tired old man, only three years older than tired old me, and I felt an instant connection. I've always seen Jorge Bergoglio as a kindly old man. Never mind that he runs some awful organization I'd rather not talk about most of the time. I listened to him deliver what I took to be a heart-felt apology. I then turned on the news and listened to all the reports of people complaining what he had to say was too little too late. Poor guy, I thought. People ought to lighten up. They need to blame the perpetrators, not the scapegoat.

You don't have to be an anthropologist, of course, to develop analytical skills. Anybody who values objective truth needs to learn to distinguish the objective from the prescriptive and determine when to use one or the other.  And while I found it useful to turn the tool of analysis on myself, and observe my own behavior with more objectivity than I ever had before, I also found it useful to look at the behavior of religious groups, especially the ones I had once judged so harshly because I saw them coming at me with such hostility.  I went from being a religious person to being a non-religious person who overgeneralized religious people as  potentially dangerous homophobes. And I followed that up with a time, in my initial atheist phase, when I saw them as largely irrelevant largely harmless delusional fools.

Today, I see church goers through the lens of secular humanism. I've come to love what was once called philology in the broadest possible sense, the study of language and literature, history and classical scholarship in general. I no longer view Christians and other religious people as potential killers refueling for the fight against people unlike themselves, but as searchers for meaning like myself.  Some are, of course, but I've managed to generalize them less often as "other," and more as just other seekers in the same boat. I can't image coming around to their way of thinking, but I no longer need them to come around to mine, either. I do try to spot the sincere seeker from the phony, and I remember that my father never went to church. "Why should I?" he used to say. "That's where all the hypocrites are." These days I look for - and find - earnest folk seeking communion with others of their ilk and meaning in their lives.  I am less inclined to label them "them," more inclined to see them as a variant of "us."

I had an important moment some years ago when I listened to myself ranting away at "those goddam Christians." I caught myself. I suddenly remembered that until I went away to college I lived immersed in a world of people who taught me what it was to be kind, to be generous, to be forgiving, to share my toys, to avoid gossip. To be good, in other words. And these people, if asked to identify themselves, would all tell you they are Christians. (Would have told you - they're all gone now.) I've been making the mistake for years of allowing the worst of their lot to represent the whole. An elementary intellectual error, something I should have learned not to do long before I learned to live without religion.

Half a century ago, I went to Japan for the first time. Almost immediately I met my lifetime friends, Don and Alice. I spotted them as soul mates, and I watched their kids grow up and came in time to see them as chosen family. In 1970 they lived in a wonderful old run-down Japanese house by the beach, and I started the habit of spending much (eventually most) of my free time with them. They had an old rinky-dink piano and they asked me to play. "I'm no good," I told them. "All I ever played, actually, was hymns." Don's face broke into a broad smile and we were off and running.

I mentioned that I was a church organist at sixteen. I also used to play for the hymn-sings during the summer that we held just outside of town in the Church in the Wildwood. I can't remember which night it was - a weeknight - but people would gather and sing their hearts out week after week. I was nervous at first, unsure of my ability to sightread the entire hymnal, but in time it got into my blood and it remains one of my best memories of growing up in rural New England. That memory came rushing back to me at Don and Alice's and went a long way toward easing my adjustment to living in such a strange still alien land.

Don and I have similar views on religion. Stuff and nonsense, as our parents might have described things. But we both understood, without having to discuss it, that just as one can reject religious doctrine but still love stained-glass windows and organ music, just as one can sing the Hallelujah Chorus at Christmas Time and Silent Night on Christmas Eve, one can have a beer in one hand and a hymnal in the other. One can sing the doxology or "The Church's One Foundation" with even more relish than we did as kids.  A way of processing nostalgia, no doubt, of getting back in touch with who we were long ago.

I couldn't hold back the tears when I watched Notre Dame go up in flames. 

And when I hear a congregation singing The Old Rugged Cross, I still feel goose bumps.

I am a Jew. Not a religious one. Technically not the kind of Jew that most Jews would ever consider a Jew. But I know I am a Jew when I hear Azi Schwartz do his thing. I am a Catholic when I hear a pure soprano voice singing Schubert's Ave Maria. And I am back in my childhood Protestant skin when I hear The Old Rugged Cross.

I used to say I was not Christian, but perhaps a bit "Christianesque." That was me still working out my identity and not quite there yet.

These days I'm quite comfortable proclaiming I am, among other things, a New Englander by birth, a teacher by profession, a Christian by culture.

________

End of sermon.

Now for some of my favorite hymns I'd like to share with Don.

Three sung by the Mormons, one by Dolly Parton,  one is Aretha's famous 1972 rendering of Amazing Grace.

Ending with my all-time favorite:

1. Church in the Wildwood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRbasj13PII Dolly Parton

2. The Church's One Foundation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LZVz1guz2c Indian Congregation

3. How Great Thou Art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NowZNAqHlc8  Mormon Tabernacle Choir

4. Nearer My God to Thee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1mQT1u_45I André Rieu orchestra

5. Abide With Me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpLsLuuVmtk

6. You Raise Me Up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF_cJtUEzdg

7. Amazing Grace: Aretha Franklin, 1972: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBKwV6oNYvw

8. Rock of Ages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAfAko5dwoM Mormon Tabernacle Choir

9. Lead Kindly Light: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnIYLEXHeFk  Mormon Tabernacle Choir

10. The Old Rugged Cross: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sBd-VWMYvo Belfast congregation

Joe Manchin's legacy

In the wee hours of the morning, especially when waking from a conflict dream, I sometimes have trouble distinguishing between those ideas in my head which are trivial or silly and those which are worth pursuing. I realize I'm not alone in there. There used to be a subconscious I could trust to work things out for me I couldn't work out during my waking hours. These days, though, I'm more aware of two little guys, one a good little boy, the other a mean and perverse SOB who seems to enjoy watching me squirm. 

This morning the one voice (I couldn't be sure which) was asking, "Is Joe Manchin responsible for the end of the world?" The other was apparently uninterested in a debate. Instead, he responded, "No, he's not. But he is responsible for bringing it on a whole lot faster than necessary."

I'd have to classify that thought as unoriginal. I'm just reflecting all the cross talk on television and the internet regarding Joe Manchin, I know. He is being turned into a first-class monster, by some. And even those who defend him (a theoretical possibility more than a reality - I don't actually know anybody coming to his defense) have a hard time not thinking of him as a giant stone blocking the road ahead. Something that has to be removed before we can proceed.

One group of folk present his case like this: The world is burning up. Old people are roasting in their beds in Britain. Spain is on fire. There is no longer the slightest doubt that we are suffering from global warming. The only question is whether there is still time to stop the floods and fires, stop the rivers from drying up, the last of the glaciers from melting, cars and busses from sinking into melting asphalt.

Tune into the news and you read that the American president has proposed radical measures to slow the process down. Republicans, who have been in full obstructionist mode since Newt Gingrich came up with the brilliant idea that if he drove us all off a cliff, we'd all die, sure, but at least democrats wouldn't get reelected. And because of the way our political system errs on the side of protecting us against a possible tyranny of the majority, if even one democrat fails to keep us away from the cliff, that's all it takes to finish us off.  While Democrats were coming to San Francisco with flowers in their hair, the Republicans were getting elected to school boards and building a solid and powerful infrastructure for keeping the country in their hands. Today we are seeing the result of that divergence of goals.

And Joe Manchin is the man of the hour.  The Democratic Party's analogue to the RINO Republican.  A man plucked out of near obscurity to assure that, just as Wyoming has as powerful a voice in Washington as California or New York, Appalachia need never bow down to either Hollywood or Wall Street.

There is a larger debate over whether we ought to concentrate, in our great democratic experiment, on persuading each other to inform ourselves and stay rational, or simply let each other vote our self-interests, damn the torpedoes. And yes, that's a real debate, and all sorts of really good thinkers have made the self-interest argument. Probably - I'm not sure of this - the same folk who argue that free speech should be total, and untruths will eventually be overrun by truths.

What we're up against is the weakness of democracy as a form of government. It may indeed be that it's the worst form of government except for all the rest, but that pearl of wisdom can't hide the fact that it can only work when there is high participation by informed members of society. And we haven't had that for some time. Until recently, in the U.S. (and many other places) that has not been a serious problem. There were enough good people doing the work of democracy to keep the ship afloat. What we didn't see coming was that information would no longer come from a garden hose but from a bursting Hoover Dam, and that, at present, we are powerless to filter the water from the dam. We lack the critical thinking skills, for starters, even if we could manage the volume.

I'm old, and I have a terminal disease. Not to worry. My doctor tells me death is not imminent. But the fact that I can see through to the end of the tunnel means I've had to rewire my head to include things like deciding how best to use my time. And sometimes in those wee morning hours I find myself wondering whether people will remember me when I'm gone. I know they will remember me for a time; the question is more how they will remember me. I have a family tree that goes back for six generations. When I get to the fourth generation I find myself in a forest of names of people I know absolutely nothing about, other than that they have a place on the tree. They are, for all intents and purposes, forgotten. In fact, I live with the melancholy reality that most of the members of my own biological family in the generation after mine, those who never knew my parents and grandparents, know next to nothing about them, and seem to be fine with that.  When it does occur to them to ask, they stumble over names, don't know who was married to who, don't know the sounds of their voices, don't know what would make them smile. 

My cousin Betty and I are the last human beings alive who remember my great-grandmother (her grandmother) Mary sitting in a rocking chair, and the fact that we had to keep matches out of her hands because she was always wanting to build a fire in the kitchen stove so she could bake bread. Which she would never have gotten around to because she would have burned the house down first. How often I've wondered how my grandmother remembered this woman from her childhood, her mother, when she was too busy raising nine children (well, the seven who lived past infancy) to burn a house down.

My mind goes to legacy, in other words. Something to which very few young people give even a passing thought. And I find myself thinking of Joe Manchin. Does he worry at all about the effect on his legacy of joining forces with the Republicans?  Is preventing the U.S. from adopting better curbs to global warming in order to put more money in the pockets of the superrich the way he'd like to be remembered?

Maybe he's philosophical about it. Maybe he simply assumes that nobody will remember him, that he will not be even a footnote in history. After all, he's not an active purveyor of misery, not a Hitler or a Stalin or a Pol Pot. He's an enabler of misery of far lesser note.  But he shares with the more active bastards of history the fact that he didn't listen to his mother when she told him to leave the world a better place than he found it.

Now I've got another thought I want to have on my mind as I fall asleep tonight, and let the two voices in my head work out.  What did poor Joe Manchin do to become a plaything of the gods like this? He's not the worst guy in the world. I'm sure his loved ones have good reasons for sticking by him. But why does he appear to be some modern-day Job, whom God and the Devil treat like a rooster in a cockfight? Why was he chosen for this role of bad guy, of enabler of sleaze and political corruption?  Was it simple greed? Simple weakness of character? The calculation that he could do more good as senator if he just stayed in office and sold out to big oil for the greater good?

Greater good than stopping climate change?

He's not special. Corrupt self-serving politicians who work for big corporations at the expense of the constituents they claim to represent are a dime a dozen. It's probably not his choice to have his moment in the sun showing him counting his coins like Scrooge McDuck. He'd probably rather be remembered as a great leader.  Maybe have a congressional building named after him like Sam Rayburn or Tip O'Neill.

Instead, he will go down in history as somebody who found himself in the driver's seat of a bus filled with people working to slow climate change. 

And put the pedal to the metal and aimed the bus for the cliff.

Living Latin

I have known since college that "Vermont" is "Mons Viridis" in Latin, because I'm so damned old that they still used Latin at my college in their diplomas. I have a diploma not from "Middlebury College" but from "Collegium Medioburiense." I'm surprised the "titulo graduque" (graduate degree) was not awarded to Alanus McCornickus.

One of my many fun activities during the lockdown, when we have had little chance for distractions outside the house, has been googling all manner of trivia. One of those has been digging into how Cicero and Virgil might pronounce the other forty-nine states of the Civitates Foederatae Americae (USA to you).

Fortunately, there is a Latin version of Wikipedia (it's Vicipaedia, in Latin) where you can look this kind of thing up. 

A great many states have names that work as is in Latin.  There's Georgia with its capital at Atlanta. And there's Indiana, where even its capital, Indianapolis, works as is, provided, of course, you allow room for Greek loan words like -polis.  And there's California, for example, with its capital, Sacrament(um), requiring the bare minimum of Latinization. And when it comes to the Greek loan polis, there are also these states/state capital combinations: Terra Mariae (Land of Mary) - Annapolis; Virginia Occidentalis - Carolopolis (Charlestown); North and South Dakota (Dacota Meridiana and Dacota Septentrionalis) and their capitals Pierre and Bismarck, respectively: Petropolis and Bismarcopolis. Iowa and Des Moines (Iova and Monachopolis) take a bit of extra work, but they make sense once you press your French into service. And there's Montana - Helenopolis. And Ohium and Colombopolis. And last, but not least, Texia and Austinopolis.

Minnesota, with its capital at Sanctus Paulus, is an easy one, as is Novum Mexicum and Sancta Fides.  The city of Campifons is likely to throw you until you learn it's the capital of Illinoesia. And the state of Nova Caesarea may also challenge you until you learn its capital is Trentonia.

Pennsylvania and Harrisburgum and Rhodensis Insula and Providentia are no challenge. Neither is Uta and Urbs Lacus Salsi. If you happen to know that Ludwig is the German version of Louis, then you're ready for Ludoviciana and its capital at "Red Stick" (Rubribaculum). 

I won't go through all fifty states, but I do need to give special attention to my neighboring state (speaking now as a Vermonter) of New Hampshire.

That one is a real muddle. The reason is the original Latin for Hampshire is a muddle. "Hampshire" (with apologies to my British friends for explaining to my American and other non-Brit friends who may not know) is a county, and not a town, in Britain, as the suffix "shire" indicates. Before the Normans invaded in 1066 and renamed the Anglo-Saxon "scir"s as comptés (counties in Anglo-Norman), "Hamm" the settlement in the bend of a river carried the name of Hamwic - "wic" being the word for "trading center."  But for reasons I have been unable to fathom, it also carried the name of "Hantune," which evidently evolved into Hantonia, the current name of the county in Latin, if the Great Seal of New Hampshire is any indication. It reads Sigillum Reipublicae neo hantoniensis."

I say "muddle" because the Vicipaedia page which carries a map of the United States calls New Hampshire "Nova Hantonia" on its list of states below the map, along with their capitals (Nova Hantonia's is Concordia), but "Nova Hantescira" on the map itself.

A quick phone call to Bishop Peter Anthony Libasci at (603) 669-3100 might clear this up. He's the Archbishop of the Diocese of Manchester, which serves the entire catholic population of New Hampshire, and as far as I know the Roman Catholic Church is the only organization (besides Collegii Dartmuthensis, of course) that still uses Latin with any frequency in their official dealings. He may know.

This reflection on Roman Britain stems from about a year ago when I was up to my ears in that popular Netflix history of Viking Britain, The Last Kingdom, and googled to find out when the Romans left and the Danes moved in. (Answer: The Romans left about 410, the first recorded Viking raid was in 789, so considerably later). One of the things I always pay attention to in historical dramas is how they handle language. How did the invading Danes and the local Saxons communicate?

And that led to the question of how much Latin still remained, if any, outside of the church and in academia.

So many things to fuss over.  Why does Mons Viridis (Vermont, you remember)'s capital, Montpelier, comes out Mons Pessulanus? The answer, it turns out is that  Mons Pessulanus was the ancient name of the city of Montpellier (with two l's) in France. Somebody's actually paying attention to historical detail.

Latin is not dead. It's just hibernating. There's still so much you can do with it.  You can say, for example:

Recedite, plebes! Gero rem imperialem!

 (Out of the way, peasants! I'm on imperial business!)

or

Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?

(How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?)

Linguistic schizophrenia

      

I was talking the other day with a friend who smarts every time he hears or reads such current indicators of English-in-transition as

Go lay down
Between you and I
I shoulda went
It's important to know your right's.
A chameleon can change it's color.
12 items or less

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I share his distress over a world clearly going to hell. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and on weekends, I put on my descriptive linguist hat and cluck that he needs to stop being an old-maid schoolteacher and recognize that language is an organic phenomenon, constantly in flux, and we're none of us in a position to police our co-anglophones. 

A descriptive linguist (i.e., a real one, not a prescriptive one who likes to tell you how you should use language) is like a good anthropologist. Doesn't scold. Doesn't shame. Stands apart, like a good scientist should (as a good scientist should), and simply describes what he sees.  They see.

Language evolves, and so does our sense of right and wrong. I no longer use "old-maid schoolteacher" to refer to those wonderful lesbians who taught us to say "I should have gone" and not "I shoulda went."

I'm glad I got a middle-class American education, that somebody took pains to instruct me that an apostrophe-s marks possession and the plural-s is written without an apostrophe. School, for me and for countless others like me, was a tool for leaving my working class origins behind and acquiring the rules, linguistic ones most definitely included, of "polite" society. 

This topic came up when I happened upon a video of a scene from the 1954 movie Magnificent Obsession with Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. Here's the link. Go to minute 1:30 and you'll hear the first Mrs. Reagan say, "You hadn't wrote all those months!"

I went back over it half a dozen times, convinced I must have heard it wrong. I didn't.

Now why, I wondered, did the editors let that through. Because it would have cost too much money to do the scene over? Could it actually be that nobody noticed?  Is it possible that somebody made the decision to keep wrote in the script because they thought written sounds too fussy and breaks the rhythm of the love scene?

My interest in linguistics began with a course back in the early 60s in historical linguistics when I first learned about such fascinating things as the first indogermanic sound shift, between 200 B.C. and 600 C.E. when people began devoicing their b's, d's and g's (making them p's, t's and k's). That's why, to jump over the small details and get to the point, people stopped saying labium and started saying lip, for example. And a whole bunch of other goodies, like the fact that words for father in the Romance languages, padre, père, and pater were all connected to the words for father in the Germanic languages, father, Vater, far, and föður and that they all had a common ancestor. Somewhere in Late Latin times there were people like my friend and me clucking over the fact that some people were saying padre instead of pater and getting away with it. And nobody these days would complain that "these young folks are pronouncing all their s's like t's. And their g's like y's. They're saying that instead of das, water instead of wasser,  foot instead of fuss. And yester(day) instead of gester(n) and yell(ow) instead of gel(b)."  These days, we'd simply say they're speaking English instead of German.

I quickly went from historical linguistics to just-plain linguistics (phonology, morphology, syntax) and eventually to sociolinguistics, as I began to realize I was more interested in people than in linguistic forms. And was using linguistics as a key to learning how to become a better teacher of English as a foreign language, rather than as an end in itself.  It was there I found a home among folk who advocated a descriptive approach to language learning, people who categorized "Ain't nobody gonna tell me what to do!" as a legitimate variant of American English and not as "bad" English. And suggested not replacing it with "Nobody is going to tell me what to do" but adding "Nobody is going to tell me what to do" to one's linguistic repertoire and becoming bi-dialectal, and then figuring out when the first variant communicates more effectively and when the second one does. And that implies that you might actually want to communicate. Sometimes the way you speak becomes your identity marker and you take the attitude, "They can damn well learn to understand me instead of expecting me to talk like them." That all depends on who has the upper hand. Language speaks loudly in the realm of power.

To live in the modern world, where change is rapid and sometimes dramatic, it's a wonder we're not all linguistic schizophrenics. In my local grocery store I was delighted when the "12 items or less" sign was taken down at the express checkout and replaced with "12 items or fewer." Somebody else in my neighborhood clearly fits in the schoolmarm category. And good for the grocer that he let himself be persuaded! I say. That they let themself be persuaded.

I can't deny that for all my advocacy of a descriptive approach to language over a prescriptive one, I remain more conservative linguistically than I am about other things. It's hard to shake the idea that people who say "you don't talk good" sound dumb. The word irregardless drives me up a tree. I used to be embarrassed as hell at the fact that my father regularly pronounced these, them and those as deze, dem and doze.  I was well into my thirties (and into sociolinguistics) before I came to realize if he had not spoken that way he would have been shunned by his fellow factory workers.

And as a white boy, I grew up with the idea that black people who said things like "Ain't nobody gonna tell me..." and transposed the s sound with the k sound in the word ask,  pronouncing it as if it were written axe, were dumb - just like my father.

I've been listening with great interest to the House Select Committee hearings on the January 6th coup attempt and I'm like a little boy again, looking up at my new heroes, Zoe Lofgren, Adam Schiff, Pete Aguilar, Stephanie Murphy, Jamie Raskin, Elaine Luria, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

And I have an especially warm place in my heart for Bennie Thompson when at the end of each session he announces that he would like to "Axe people to remain in their seats until the committee has been excorted from the room."

In the first instance, "ask" (pronounced /æks/ instead of /æsk/) - the k sound and the s sound have been reversed. In the second - "escorted" (pronounced /ɛkskɔrtɪd/)- the k and the s sounds have been reversed and then a second k has been inserted.   

And I love him for it. The man who's doing what he's doing is speaking a dialect I once used to look down on. Then, in time, I came to see it as simply an alternate to the one I speak. And now, in my enthusiasm and respect for what this man is up to, it's music to my ears.

photo credit

Me and Jonas and Dmitri

Kaufmann and Hvorostovsky in Moscow
singing the Pearl Fishers' Duet

You know all about "six degrees of separation," right? Pick somebody you know and call them Somebody 1. They are connected to Somebody2, who is connected to Somebody3, who is connected to Somebody4, who is connected to Somebody 5, who is connected to Somebody6.  Each somebody becomes a Somebody 1 and if you add up all the connections you are connected to every other human being on the planet. You just don't know where all the connections are.

I remember the time I was at a New Year's Party with the British Commander in Berlin. This was in the early 1960s, and there wasn't much for him to do by this stage in history, with Germany well on its way to becoming the free modern democracy it is today, so he found time to play chess regularly with Rudolf Hess, who was in Spandau Prison, in the British Sector and therefore directly in his charge. He was a delightful conversationalist, way out of my social league. He probably would not have engaged in conversation with me, an American soldier in his early 20s, except that he and I were both members of the occupying forces - him at the top of the totem pole, me at the bottom - and it's possible he was relieved to find a native speaker of English in the crowd.

I don't know if it was right then I realized this meeting put me within three degrees of separation to Adolf Hitler - and everybody I knew within four. I could see how this six degrees of separation thing worked.

*            *            *

From left to right: Giuseppe De Luca (Zurga), 
Frieda Hempel (Leila) and Enrico Caruso
 (Nadir), in the New York Met
 1916 production

I discovered another way you can play the six degrees game yesterday. I had been listening to one of my favorite pieces of
music - the Pearl Fishers Duet from Bizet's opera, The Pearl Fishers. I keep going back to it because it's a recording made by Dmitri Hvorostovsky, my favorite singer of all time, and Jonas Kaufmann, whom I'll go ahead and say is Number Two.

In chasing down Kaufmann's history, I learned that he got his start at the Munich Conservatory (official name: Hochschule für Musik und Theater München, or, in English, the University of Music and Performing Arts in Munich), just 600 meters down the street from the dormitory I lived in in 1960 and 1961. The address of the Munich Conservatory is Arcisstrasse 12; I lived at Arcisstrasse 31.  Practically neighbors.

Except for a couple complicating details. The Music Conservatory only moved into that building in recent times.  At the end of the war, the Americans used it as one of two storage locations for Hitler's loot, the paintings and other treasures Hitler had taken from all over Europe.  And more interestingly, before that, it was the building in which Neville Chamberlin and Hitler signed the Munich Agreement of 1938, giving a meaning to the word appeasement that would go down in history.

left: The Führerbau - (Führer's Building) in its present day form as the University of Music and Performing Arts, at Arcisstrasse 12.

Hitler's office was on the second floor in a room now used as a rehearsing room.

right: The Führerbau as it was all gussied up for Chamberlin's arrival for the signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938.

photo credits:

Kaufmann and Hvorostovsky

Caruso and company in a performance at the Met of Pearl Fishers in 1916

Führerbau, (both photos) and more recently the Hochschule für Music und Theater (Music Conservatory)

my room, 62 years since I occupied it

Meanwhile, in another room just a block up, I shared space first with a guy who lived on one boiled egg and a slice of dry bread with lard for lunch, while I, with my $80 a month stipend, was able to dine out on Wienerschnitzel every night if I wanted to. Then with a guy three friends of mine and I bought a '48 Volkswagen with and totaled one night in Strasbourg. We argued over whether we should reimburse him his share. I'd like to think we did, but I live with doubt. $40 was half a month's income. If I knew how to find him, I'd contact him and ask, but the only other thing I ever knew about him was that he would lay his socks on the window sill to air at night. I think he only had one pair and he washed them maybe once a week, if that. I can still see them in that window above. And I don't remember the radiator.

Above: My room (or one identical to it) in the dormitory of the Evangelisches Studenten-wohnheim in der Arcisstraße as it looks today. In my day, there was no built-in closet or bath in the room, only a table under the window with two chairs and two beds along the right wall, and closets along the left wall.  All rooms were double rooms. I can still get the feel of the room from the picture, despite the 62 years that have transpired between this photo and the one in my memory. The building is no longer a church-owned dormitory. Today the building is (part of?) the Collegium Oecumenicum.

Finding this connection, this "x degrees of separation", with Jonas Kaufmann (and thus also with Dmitri Hvorostovsky, of course) is a bit of a stretch, I know. But only if you make a big deal out of time.

And while we're wallowing in trivia, all this googling made me realize I might get an answer to a question I had sixty years ago that nobody I knew could answer. Where does the name Arcis, as in Arcis Street, come from? (It's pronounced AR-TSIS in German.)

Still don't know for sure, but there was a battle in the town of Arcis-sur-Aube in France where the Austrians clobbered Napoleon in 1814. Among the forces line up fighting with the Austrians against Napoleon were the first and third Bavarian divisions. That's my best guess of why Munich would name a street after the place.

What did we do with our time before Google?

Kyohei Sorita

Kyohei Sorita

When I went to bed last night, I had just heard that Japan's former Prime Minister Abe was shot in Nara by an unknown assailant with a home-made gun. For reasons I can't easily explain, this news shook me to the core. I never liked Abe, thought of him as a wretched right-winger. But unlike Donald Trump, who expressed the view that his vice president "deserved" to be hanged, I am absolutely committed to non-violent solutions. I don't want crooked politicians to be assassinated; I want them jailed. Fined. Their lies and their deceptions exposed so they can fade away to the ignominy they richly deserve. I didn't want Abe to die.

The shock I felt comes from another direction. It brought home how deep my love for Japan is. I lived there a total of twenty-four years, when you put the pieces together. For a very long time I described it as a love-hate relationship. That's not accurate. It was more a question of admiration and annoyance. Love in a much larger sense. The culture of the place is still to a large degree insular and introspective, and people like me remain eternally marked as foreign. I hated that. In time, though, I accommodated even that and began to feel the warmth of a place that took me in, gave me a home, a good job, a comfortable existence. In time, the positive side of the place became dominant and I seriously considered retiring and living my life out there.

For that reason, I have to admit that my affection for the place runs deep. I care about it, want it to succeed (and not just because it pays me a pension!). I want to be able to mock its absurdities, but as when you discover you are free to poke fun of a parent or a sibling you don't want anybody else to do so, I smart when I hear criticism of Japan and when it shows its dark or shabby side.

That's why Abe's assassination hit me hard. I feel a sense of personal shame. I know there's no rational explanation for this, and maybe I ought to be ashamed of myself for trying to make this about me when it actually has nothing at all to do with me, but I feel like circling the wagons. Don't you dare, I want to tell the world, don't you dare think badly of Japan for this dastardly act by a crazed individual. It has nothing to do with Japan, in the end, and everything to do with modern-day anomie - a universal phenomenon.

*            *            *

The gods must have been listening in on my thoughts this morning. I began looking for music to start the day with and came upon an NHK feature on Kyohei Sorita, one of the second-prize winners of the Chopin Competition in Warsaw that monopolized all my attention last October.

If you can find the time, I urge you to listen to the entire video. It focuses on Sorita the person as much as Sorita the musician, the two parts being largely indistinguishable. In the video he talks about the importance not only of technical proficiency, but of physical strength. He relates that he observed, at some point, that Asians, with their less muscular bodies, tended to crouch over the keyboard while Westerners sat back and sat tall. He decided he needed to learn from this and strengthen his body mass and his upper body muscles, so he could play with greater strength. What happened, though, was that he found he was playing too aggressively. He lost some of that muscle and began to play "softer" - the implication being "more musically."

Now that sounds very much like the cultural comparisons I lived with all those years in Japan which drove me up the wall. On the one hand, I can't really corroborate this kind of generalization, but I can't deny it, either. I have to leave it to others to decide whether there is any truth in it. The statement lives in the kind of place that religious conviction lives in - you believe it and it strengthens your faith, or you label it as poppycock and move on.

Sorita goes on, though, to another of those mystical Japanese comments which the rational part of your brain instinctively rejects out of hand. He is scheduled to play in a concert, and for a solid hour, right up to concert time, he is at the piano on stage because it has fallen asleep. Covid-19 has led to a lack of concert performances, he says, and the piano was in sore need of attention.

How could you not love a guy who tells you he needed to lose some muscle control in order to be a better pianist and then speaks of a piano as if it were a much-loved housebound dog in terrible need of a vigorous walk?

How great a country is Japan, that it has people like Kyohei Sorita in it?

photo credit

Separate - but equal - 4ths of July

I had a wonderful 4th of July dinner at my friends Sharmon and Luis's yesterday. Hitched a ride down with their daughter, who knows Julia Child's secret - never hold back on the cream and butter - when making out-of-this-world shortcakes for the strawberry shortcake dessert. About twenty of the usual suspects were there, people in S&L's inner circle who have all been coming together to those dinners for so long that we've all become friends as well. That's a nod, in case you missed it, to that line in Casablanca where the police chief tells his men to round up all the usual suspects.

Taku, who believed he had to work on the fourth of July to get his new room put together with a new desk that goes up and down - which makes sense for folks, unlike me, who like to work standing up - decided to enjoy a little alone time after his travails. That included grabbing the opportunity to cook something his spouse won't eat. He has done all the cooking in the house for some time now that I have demonstrated, by putting an insufficient amount of salt in the pasta cooking water, that I'm not up to the task. So last night gave him an opportunity to cook clams and oysters - which I have no taste for.

I learned about this when I got back and opened up his Facebook page and read:

Fried up my favourite scallops tonight as my partner is out who doesn't like reptiles.

Reptiles?

Absolutely true, reptiles give me the creeps. But what does that have to do with anything?

It took me a minute to realize the problem was that Taku had written the message in Japanese and I was reading the automatic (mis!-) translation Facebook was providing me with, based, evidently, on my Caucasian features.

Here's the whole of Taku's original, for those of you who read Japanese:

 

今晩は貝類が好きではない相方が外出してるので、私が大好きなカキフライを揚げました。アサリのパスタも作りたかったけど、それは次回。ワシントン州産の生牡蠣は小ぶりで、9個で7ドル也。こちらの調理用生牡蠣は瓶に入って売られています。

And here's the English translation Facebook provided:

Fried up my favourite scallops tonight as my partner is out who doesn't like reptiles. Wanted to make clam pasta too but that's next. Washington state ginger is tiny, 9 for $7 This cooking ginger is sold in jars..

Two comments here:

1. I refer to Taku as my "husband," because we are legally married and there's no reason not to. But gay liberation is not all that advanced in Japan, and with the traditional lack of gender equality in Japan, the words "husband" and "wife" are loaded.　"Husband" is commonly rendered by 主人 shujin, the original meaning of which is "master." "Master of the house" is bad enough, but "my master" just doesn't hack it with English speakers these days.

There are other words. There is 旦那　- danna - which isn't much better. It carries the connotations of protector and keeper and "lord and master." The word 夫 otto is legalistic sounding, like male spouse, so that too doesn't serve the purpose.

So he uses the word for "partner," which is husband with all the nutritional value drained out of it.

Nobody ever suggested the road to gay liberation doesn't lack potholes.

2. I'm adding to my list of things I don't understand (like why would anybody vote Republican?), why it is that Facebook would translate カキフライ = kaki fry = fried oysters as scallops! Totally different animal. Totally different taste in the mouth. Who makes a mistake like that? What's next? Calling beef chicken?

And why would they translate 生牡蠣 = namagaki = raw oysters as ginger!?

And 小振り koburi simply means small in size. There's no reason to hyperbolize it with tiny.

But these bad translations are nothing compared to how it is that 貝類 could possibly have been translated "reptiles."

I mean look at it! The first character, 貝, is one of those few characters, like tree, sun, and mountain, 木　日　山, where you can, if you squint close enough, almost see the object from which the character is derived. Doesn't 貝 look like a shellfish to you?

Google Translate does a much better job than Facebook. If you run Taku's Japanese original through Google Translate instead of Facebook, you get

Tonight, my partner who doesn't like shellfish is out, so I fried my favorite fried oysters. I also wanted to make pasta pasta, but that's next time. Raw oysters from Washington State are small, and 9 pieces cost $ 7. This raw oyster for cooking is sold in a jar.

OK, so they messed up with アサリのパスタ (asari no pasuta = short-necked clam pasta), calling it "pasta pasta" for some reason. And then there's the ungrammaticality of "This raw oyster...is sold..." Win some, lose some.

Translating is an art. There's no reason to be surprised at an occasional unfortunate misstep. But here it's almost as if Facebook was determined to get it wrong at every possible turn.

OK, given that the Supreme Court is now into preventing the government from addressing climate change, Facebook's incompetence is not in the top ten of pressing issues, I suppose. But I saw a chance to rant and I took it.

And while we're on the subject of not trusting the robots which run your life, there's this nice little bit I saw on Facebook the other day. The important thing seems to be not to reject Facebook and Google out of hand, but to use them judiciously: