Mistakes, Minor and Major

Let me start with a postscript to a previous blog entry about obesity. There is a plea on ABC television for locating missing children, which provides a picture and description of them, and, perhaps inadvertently, induces some serious observations.

First off, these missing children are preponderantly girls. Why? While differing in other ways, some 95 or more percent have one thing in common: they are overweight, many of them grossly so. Well, what imposes itself as the likely connection between obesity and vagrancy?

My guess is unhappiness at the bosom of their families, assuming that their families even have a bosom. The attempted compensation is overeating, mostly of junk food, and if that doesn’t help, escape. Now, lack of bosom brings me to reconsideration of a mistake that has haunted me through the years. Forgive me if I have inflicted it on you before.

It is something recorded, among other places, in the book, “No Stone Unturned” by Diana Rigg, a collection of hostile criticisms disbursed and endured in the theater. There she cites my review in New York magazine of a play called “Abelard and Heloise,” in which she starred as, you guessed it, the latter. And not only starred, but also appeared in a brief, rather discreetly lit, nude scene. It elicited my comment, “Diana Rigg is built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses.” Or so she claims; actually what I wrote was “brick basilica.” This sally, I regret to say, quoted thus mistakenly, is the only quotation from me in a number of anthologies.

More importantly, alas, it prompted what she describes as follows: “I remember making my way to the theatre the following day, darting from doorway to doorway and praying I wouldn’t meet anyone I know.” Besides being needlessly injurious, my remark was also inaccurate. Neither a mausoleum nor a basilica, whether it refers to an ancient Roman public building or an early Christian church, had, or was expected to have, a flying buttress, something that came in with cathedrals.

Aside from being in questionable taste (but then witticisms--especially needed in reviews of poor plays—are seldom kind to their targets), there is also a historical question involved: Did Heloise have a flattish chest, and if so, would it have mattered to Abelard, her lover, about whose pectoral preferences. as about so many other things in the Dark Ages, we remain in the dark?

I doubt whether Miss Rigg, a lovely and gifted artist, has read my apology buried somewhere in my writings, but let me assure her herewith that had she ever deemed fit to appear in my bedchamber (to use an appropriately medieval term), the last thing I would have thought of is kicking her out of bed-- basilica, mausoleum, or any other metaphor be damned. Need I add that my joke was based on the popular expression “built like a brick shithouse,” another edifice forgoing flying buttresses.

But on to more impressive mistakes. I repeat here the remark of a female graduate student guide through Olana, the Hudson Valley home of the painter Frederick Church. Before a grand landscape, she declared that “this was the work with which Mr. Church plummeted to fame.” A rather unique mistake from charming lips, forgivable with friendly titters.

But so many other mistakes nowadays are more widespread and far less pardonable. Take what has been issuing with alarming frequency from competing Republican politicians these days on television. Hardly one that hasn’t been wallowing in such idiot idioms as “cannot help but” and “the reason is because.” Call it pleonasm, tautology or redundancy—by any name it smells just as unsweet.

Now it is true that grammar can be curiously idiosyncratic: why should it be “other than” and “different from”? Why is a demeanor masterful and an argument masterly? Why, in popular parlance, is “parameter” wrong for “perimeter”? (If you had some knowledge of Latin, perimeter would be obvious, but who nowadays has even that much Latin?) And in pronunciation, why DESpicable rather than DeSPICable? One could go on and on.

Yet there are cases where minimal thought could avoid illogical lapses. How could “the reason is” be anything other than the same as “because”? How can “cannot help” doing something not suffice without that “but,” and why “cannot but” do something subsist without “help”? Again, doesn’t it take two, and only two, people to love each other, whereas it takes more than two to love one another? There is such a thing as mutual respect, but a friend can only be shared, not mutual, i.e.,reciprocal. Again so on and on. And don’t get me started on the ubiquitous pleonasm “free gift”;, of course the world of advertising can no more be trusted than that of television, whose regulars usually “lay” where they should “lie,” never mind that other “lie,” a synonym for major fibbing.

To be sure, there is incorrect usage that has become so ingrained that there is scant hope for correction. There is no chance of good food being called “healthful” rather than “healthy,” as if good could otherwise be infested with germs. And will a crowd of spectators ever be consistently a “number of people” rather than an “amount,” as if it were a quantity of salt in your diet.

So, mostly out of mistaken political correctness (and when is P.C. not mistaken?) we get “everyone has their reason” or “everyone please sit in their seat” where the “one” part in “everyone:  begs for a singular. But “his” would be, it seems, an affront to feminism, and “his or her,” though correct, would be cumbersome. Thus does gross solecism become enshrined in polite discourse. How much real harm does “his” and, for that matter, “mankind,” do to rational women’s self-respect? Of course, for “mankind” there is “humanity,” but for “his,” despite the weirdest attempts, there is no bisexual version.

And why, out of sheer ignorance, come up with “thanks for inviting Bill and I to your party,” as if there were no such thing as the properly accusative (or objective) case to be made for “me.”” This is an errant gentilism, which assumes that “I” is always more refined than “me.” Not only is “me” mandatory there, it has also pretty much replaced “I” in phrases like “It is me.” With this, we cannot but acquiesce, even without reference to (preferable to “referencing”) Rimbaud’s renowned “Je est un autre.”  This usage is so ingrained that it bypasses the rule that any form of the verb “to be” governs the nominative, thus “It was they [not them] who got there first.” Complicating matters is that the correct phrase “Than whom no one is smarter” somehow may justify “He is smarter than her.”

These days “good” has, with like illogic, replaced “well” in an answer to “How are you?” The questioner is, however uninterestedly (not, please, disinterestedly, which bespeaks selflessness), politely inquiring about your health, not about your behavior, about which he couldn’t (not “could”) care less. “I am good,” besides being a mistake, is boastful; only other people can truly judge how moral you are. The problem is that adjectives, like good, are more popular than adverbs, like well. This, probably, because they are shorter, snappier, than adverbs: “I was doing nice (rather than nicely) before I met you.” Also, confusingly, adjectival forms often do nicely as verbal complements: “Go slow,” for “go slowly.”

Ah, grammar! It has more pitfalls than a minefield, and similar problems arise with spelling and pronunciation, the rather dim Spellcheck notwithstanding. And the same for phrases: how many people use “begs the question” correctly? It is not only a matter of British versus American English, although Bernard (not George Bernard) Shaw was right to characterize us brilliantly as two nations separated by the same language. There are obvious differences involved here (in England, Parliament is plural; in America, singular) and a difference in one does not affect the other. The problem is that English’ unlike French, does not have an Academy prescribing what is correct. And even the good old Academie Francaise is apt to change its mind, presumably to follow usage rather than to stipulate it. I was in Paris on a Fulbright when it was announced that the “s” in “pas” (not) may or may not be elided, which, as I recall, caused quite a fracas. What we do have are the Internet and the computer, bit I won’t go into the devastation they have wreaked.

A good many mistakes could be avoided if we did have some sort of established guardians of correctness, although even then we could ask with Juvenal, “But who will guard the guardians themselves?” And there I am concerned with bigger mistakes than the mere linguistic ones I have mostly dealt with herein.

How to avoid the wars that cover more of our globe than do the oceans? How avoid the folly of many of our elected—or worse yet, unelected—leaders? How to try more earnestly to eschew religion, or at least differences in religions, setting us at one another’s throats? How to get our teachers to really teach, and our students to really study? Surely we could do better than that fine writer George Meredith, who, because of his own marital troubles, arrogantly demanded for women “More brain, O Lord, more brain.” There is no such thing as more brain to be granted, or even a Lord who might do the granting.

Obesity

Any discussion of obesity comes down to the not particularly friendly contest between thick and thin, with the body as the chief battleground. Mostly the female nude, because that has been the main interest of heterosexual men, the principal arbiters. Women and homosexuals had far fewer votes in the matter of svelte versus corpulent, in art as in life. Thick or thin has been the great divide, as the expression “through thick and thin” encapsulates. Between them, they subsume the world

Let me state right off: I am a partisan of thin in human bodies as well as many other things. But let me make clear: slim, trim, slender, yes; but not spindly, emaciated, frangible, anorexic. It is, I believe, the majority view, excess being, as usual, undesirable. That majority view is exemplified in the history of painting and sculpture, but is the majority always right? Or do you think that intelligence lords it over stupidity, that sagacity outnumbers benightedness?

All right, you say, forget about majority, but what is so attractive about slimness? I suppose it is partly its suggestion of moderation, elasticity, embracableness. Also the practicality, the implication of flexibility, of not hogging too much space. And also gracefulness: how does a somersault by a fat woman compare with that of a slender one? Which one would you rather share a bed with or have plunk down in your lap?

And further: don’t clothes fitting snugly but not constrictingly look better than those stretched to bursting? But where exactly lies the boundary between just right and too much? Is the eighteen-inch waist so striven for by the girls in “Gone with the Wind” the correct ideal or is it exaggeration? Finally, are angels ever depicted as anything but slim, and what man would not cherish an angelic woman?

However, let us look at specific instances of thin versus thick. Even among animals, plants and objects, isn’t slim generally preferable? To be sure, among trees, a sturdy oak is as fetching as a willowy willow, merely in a different way. But that is a case where thickness means dependability in storms, a joy to be climbed up on, a potential for a tree house. In other words, function, even when merely implicit, may unconsciously color our aesthetics.

Consider another example of where thickness may beat out thinness. I am thinking of the beloved ante bellum Negro mammies of the era leading up to the Civil War. Their attraction lay in the capacious bosoms on which a hurt child might find refuge and solace. I am not thinking of the Hottentot Venus.

It may be argued that there were times and societies in which ample females were in favor: think Junoesque, think Rubens. But may it not be merely the consequence of some important personage, say a queen or some powerful aristocrat, having been stout, though she could just as easily have been thin as a rail.

Language, too, may play a role. The notion of “fat cat” seems to have an appeal beyond the mere rhyme—otherwise “bitty kitty” might have been the cat’s meow. But language does have emanations: if “large” did not have some positive connotations, would “largesse” be such a good thing? And does not “portly” carry fortuitous implications of “port,” something we all seek in our tempest-torn lives?

For my part, however, the capital sins are, in that order, wickedness, stupidity, cowardice, and obesity. To me, they are the Four Riders of the Apocalypse. I find relatively few things more painful than sitting on the subway opposite a truly obese person. I would risk an uncomfortably averted head just to avoid having to look at the fatso.

To be sure, there are the charitable souls who speculate that it may be a glandular matter over which the obese person has no control. I tend to think that it is rather a case of laziness: a careful diet and steady exercise are simply too much trouble. Yet even assuming that it is a problem of recalcitrant metabolism, it hardly makes fat acceptable. After all, stupidity is also a guiltless infirmity, yet we do not pardon it.

Now take dogs and cats. Doesn’t obesity in some of them—a belly that hugs the floor—strike us as offensive? Isn’t much of the beauty of leopards and panthers in their lissomness? But then what about elephants, whose bulk we do regard with admiration? There is something proportionate about their structure and a kind of lumbering grace in their movement. And their size itself fills us with awe akin to that with which we view loveliness. As for the whale, we may well want to save it, but not for its obese looks. And dolphins, however intelligent, are downright homely

in their chubbiness.

There are many things in nature that are obese. A melon, for example. But we do not value it for its looks, which it takes a still-life painter to make, conceivably, beautiful.

I personally find a well-made barrel attractive, but it may be only a transference from the good potables it contains. Usefulness may simulate sightlines.

But now take the case of pigs. Full-grown they are obese and unsightly. But piglets, even if you haven’t read “Winnie the Pooh,” may strike you as pretty. And so they are, not merely for their winsome smallness and roseate color. Isn’t a piggybank a pleasing object? There is a shape involved, and the shape is geometrically articulate.

This is the beauty of curves, which we find enticing. It suggests the undulation of a fair-weather sea, the hand-favoring rotundity of a perfectly designed pitcher. But they are beautiful only on a slender person, where they are perceived as such. On an obese person, we see curves only as lard. They function best in conjunction with firmness, say the firm flesh of youth or the perdurability of marble. Which makes a statue such as the ever-young Venus de Milo a paragon of beauty, even without a full complement, or armament, of arms.

And please don’t talk to me about inner beauty being more important than outer.  So it may be, but it is the outer that usually leads the viewer to the inner. It is the pursuit of the outer beauty of youth that lures the aging virago and still cruising homosexual to desperate stratagems that turn them into grotesques. You cannot be young forever, but you can try hard, and more often than not successfully, to eschew obesity.

Memory

Memory is one of our most interesting possessions; its failure, our possibly most grievous loss. What enhances its importance is its mystery, its surprises, its ultimate inscrutability.

Its chief competitor is our intellect, but intellect is measurable, comprehensible, transparent, less fascinating. We can assess what we know and recognize our ignorance. But both what we remember and what we forget are shrouded in a certain mystery; puzzling, illogical, challenging.

Why does this bit from our past suddenly pop up in our brain? Why in the name of God do we recall this and not something else—and recall it at this unrelated moment? We try to explain such things to ourselves, but virtually always fail.

In rereading my doctoral thesis, I came across a word I now no longer understood, but evidently remembered then. As I am making myself a hamburger, the word “phatic” crops up in my mind even though it has nothing to do with hamburgers or cooking or eating.  Another time I think about a woman I once loved while talking to a woman who merely interests me and bears no resemblance to the other, lost woman. Why this sudden uncalled-for remembrance?

Or take this. I am an opera lover and own a goodly number of operatic CDs, but definitely not Donizetti’s “Linda di Chamounix,” which I have never seen or even heard on the radio, yet “O luce di quest’ anima,” the title of one of its arias, suddenly crops up unsolicited in my mind. I may have read about it somewhere, but why recall it now, or at all?

Conversely, I own several versions of Verdi’s “Falstaff,” and have seen it performed quite a few times. But then why when in a conversation I want to remember what comes after “Bocca bacciata,” I can’t for the life of me do so? I have to look it up“non perde ventura.”

Now take another example. Few movies have affected me as strongly as, during my boyhood in Belgrade, the Hungarian film “Deadly Spring,” based on a fine novel by Lajos Zilahy. In one scene, the gorgeous Katalin Karadi (I don’t have the accent for the second A) does a kind of dancing striptease while singing a terrific song “This Will Be Your Undoing” to the man who loves her.

Still, how come that I kept remembering that song, so many years later, as a Harvard student? Both the melody and the words. In fact, I kept singing it out loud in the streets of Cambridge because I knew that the great composer Bela Bartok was there at the invitation of the Harvard music department. I am hoping that, his path crossing mine, he would be tickled pink hearing someone singing in Hungarian, stop and befriend me. It never occurred to me that, considering it kitsch, he might smile at me and pass by.

But now, when I try to sing the song to myself, I remember it only imperfectly. Why perfectly then and only dimly now? Memory mysteriously gives and, as mysteriously, takes away.

The common view, seemingly based on scientific evidence, is that we lose our short- term memory but retain our long-term one. So, theoretically, I may not remember what soup I had yesterday, but warmly recall a pastry I ate as a kid in Belgrade. But does it really work that way for me?

Or can it be that, even long-term, we only remember pleasant things from the distant past and not the unpleasant ones? Then how come that, at a time when I already had a fair knowledge of English, I arrived for my private French lesson a bit early and came upon the preceding pupil, Sinka Nikic, the great beauty of Belgrade, who, unusually for that time, spoke good English, which may have helped her become, as rumor had it, the mistress of Yugoslav Crown Prince Peter. To impress her, I quoted something from, as I put it, an “English poetist,” which had both Sinka and the French teacher burst out laughing. I never was as ashamed as at that moment, which I still recall with a shudder, not even when, years later, people told me that Sinka remembered me as the boy who waved two toy guns about. True, I had an MG, an expensive faithful German toy replica of a shiny a momenthandgun, which I may have fired in public. But I don’t remember a pair.

I also remember ashamedly a moment from my early childhood, when I was learning to swim on Hungary’s lovely Lake Balaton. The swimming instructor was just finishing up with another child, whose frightened howl when tossed into the water (the instructor’s rough method) earned it the scornful nickname “musician.” Seeing me next in line, he turned to someone and jeered, “Another musician.” O the shame of it! 

So those are black marks that stick to the memory. But happy events are not necessarily more precisely remembered. I know that, as an adult, I sought out the distinguished Serbian poet Vasko Popa, but I can’t remember anything about the interview. No less painful is not recalling a single detail about a very enjoyable lunch with Jorge Luis Borges, during which, I know, he said many fascinating things.

There is a well-known memory test: showing someone a drawing with numerous details for a very short time, then asking what he remembers. If I were ever given it, I doubt whether I could acquit myself with distinction. I think it comes from Kipling’s “Kim,” one of several prize books I earned at the end of my one year at the Leys School, Cambridge, England. Correct me if I misremember.

Not for nothing did the ancient Greeks call one of the Muses Mnemosyne. As Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary remarks, “The word Mnemosyne signifies memory, and therefore the poets have rightly called memory the mother of the Muses,  because it is to that mental endowment that mankind are indebted for their progress in science.” But surely not only in science.

                                                                                                                                                                After all, volumes of memoirs are so named because they record their authors’ memories—indeed the French word  for memory is memoire. One of Vladimir Nabokov’s best books, a marvelous account of his young years, is entitled “Speak, Memory,” which is what memory does. If you look in any dictionary ofquotations, by the way, you will find no dearth of entries under “Memory.”

Yes, memory speaks to, for, and about us; without it, we might as well be dayflies, here today and forgotten tomorrow. Without memory there would be no computers and, worse yet, no learning. 

“I remember, I remember” begins Thomas Hood’s justly famous poem, and I cannot refrain from quoting one of my favorite English quatrains, Swinburne’s “And the best and the worst of this is/ That neither is most to blame/ If you have forgotten my kisses/ And I have forgotten your name.” But enough—I could go on like this for pages.

A tricky thing memory. Suddenly there is in your mind the name of a person, a character or title in fiction, a thing, a word, out of nowhere, with no rational cause. And yet somehow it is there. Only the other day the name of a medicine popped up, one that neither I nor anyone I know had ever taken, taking me aback in total surprise. I wondered at my even knowing it. But don’t ask me what it is: I have already forgotten.      

Naomi Wallace

Naomi Wallace’s “Night Is a Room” was recently playing at the Signature Center, the third part of a trilogy from their playwright in residence. Wallace has received every conceivable award and had her many plays produced to mostly critical raves. She has climbed to the pinnacle of pretentiousness with labored grandiosity, erudite posturing, and variety in vacuity.

To begin with, the script of “Night Is a Room” features not one but three superscriptions, meant to confer instant prestige, even though none of them has anything to do with the play it overhangs.

From Walter Benjamin, a snobbish cult figure critic-philosopher: “The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.” Benjamin enjoys the eminence required to get away with such balderdash. From William Carlos Williams, a vastly overrated poet: “Night is a room/ darkened for lovers.” Together, the two lines make sense; by itself, the first is meaningless and irrelevant. From William Blake: “I shew forth the pang/ Of sorrow red hot: I workd [sic] it on my resolute anvil.” No discernible relevance to Wallace’s play.

“Room” is one of Wallace’s modern pieces; others are historic. Most of them are pretentious even in title. Thus “The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek.” “Things of Dry Hours,” “The Liquid Plain,” and my favorite, “And I and Silence.” Her fist success, “One Flea Spare,” is about the Black Plague that swept 14^th-century Europe, and has been incorporated in the permanent repertoire of the Comedie-Francaise, the French National Theater, proving that the bubonic plague is not the only international kind of pestilence.

Wallace’s honors include: the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (twice), Joseph Kesselring Prize, Southern Writers Drama Award, Obie and Horton Foote Awards, Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, National Endowment for the Arts development grant, Broadway Play Publishing Inc. Playwright of the Year, Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters chiefly for “her three ’Visions’ of the Middle East that comprise  ‘The Fever Chart’” (note the subliterate use of “comprise”), and, best of all, the Charles MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a. Genius Award).  The MacArthur people preconize left-leaning radicals, e.g., Wallace’s involvement with the Palestinians and membership in SURJ (Showing up for Racial Justice).

She has taught in a number of prominent institutions, ranging from the far out Hampshire College (whose graduate she is) and University of Iowa, to the far in Yale and Illinois State University, as well as universities in Amsterdam and Cairo. She has co-edited “Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora,” and published a volume of verse, “To Dance a Stony Field,” another winning title. She is married to Bruce E. J. Macloed, her frequent co-author, has three children, and lives in Kentucky (born there) and Yorkshire, England.

Now to “Night Is a Room.” There is a Note on the Set. “Set is minimal. Scene changes might morph into other places/spaces rather tan be replaced or exchanged so that there is a subtle layering of both theme and material that undermines the reality of the moment.”  As if her moment needed any additional undermining.

There follows a Note on the Dialogue. “Characters may flow from one idea or subject to the next [flowing characters?], even if there seems to be no obvious connection between lines. [Ms. Wallace is an addict of unobvious connections.]. As though the link between thoughts is sometimes missing, but perhaps only for us. [Incomprehensibility just our fault.] Some lines have no break between them and should be treated as complete sentences. [In other words: unpunctuated and incoherent.] Accents are light, not ‘realistic.’ [If so, why bother?]  Liana and Marcus have a mild standard English accent. Dore [I lack even a light accent on my keyboard. Please visualize an acute one on the E in Dore.] has a light Yorkshire accent. A beat is one second long. A period within a line signals a break, a half second.” [How are the actors going to manage that? Even if they carried about stop watches, that wouldn’t give them half seconds.] A forward slash signals an interruption at the end of the word. [Is there such a thing as a backward slash as well?]

And now for the story. Liana is 43, a senior account director. She is married to Marcus, a school teacher [Why two words?] He is the son whom Dore had with a French husband when she was 15. He gave her, besides a child, that gilded name and then took French leave. The child is Marcus. He and Liana have an unseen daughter, Dominique (Dom), now studying in the U.S. [Good for dramatic phone calls, among other things.]

 We begin in the paltry, neglected back garden in Dore’s home. She has put on her “better” clothes for Liana, who is dressed “elegantly but subtly.” For Marcus’s birthday [but he isn’t there!], she has brought along a bagful of multicolored balloons, good for all kinds of tomfoolery. Dore is shy, barely looks at Liana, but gazes “intently elsewhere, though her gaze is neither vacant nor passive.” Shy but not passive? And how can a gaze be passive, anyway? After much fussing with the balloons, one explodes.  Dore watches with fascination, no longer elsewhere, and not vacuously, I presume.

Liana says, “You’re not an easy woman to find. It took me quite a few weeks of intense searching.  Intense searching, to find you. And a pretty penny.” [Leeds, where the scene takes place, is not that big; the search would be either easy or impossible; in between makes no sense.] I certainly wouldn’t do it on my own.” What kind of helpers then, on whom she spent 200 pounds? But anything for a perfect 40^th- birthday present for hubby, even after decades of abeyance.

When Dore is made to speak about herself, “her words seem all of a piece without breaks . . .  At other times her speech is more conventional.” Why the inconsistency? Here she is of a piece: “When I go to the market on the weekends I wear my slippers no one notices they almost look like outdoor shoes and much warmer. . . . they have lasted seventeen years.” How self-revelatory can you get? But Wallace relishes such no-account, irrelevant trivia.

She also loves to get pornographic. While they await Mother Dore’s visit, Marcus and Liana have at it sexually. Herewith a slightly abridged version. “ MARCUS: Extraordinary. With one finger I can turn on the taps. [Liana slaps his face quite hard.] LIANA: (breathless): Let me touch you. MARCUS: Not now. . . . Just for you this time. You’re so beautiful, darling. [Marcus’s fingers move deeply inside her.] You’re a celestial sphere inside. . . .  LIANA: Ah, teaching the Renaissance again. Always gets you spunky. [Liana gets closer to cumming.] MARCUS: Louder. I want to hear you.” [The phone rings just as she cumms.]

This usage is faulty. “Cum,” vulgar slang for “come,” is a noun. In no way is it a verb or a participle.  And with a preposterous double M yet!

Liana talks to her daughter on the phone. [Stage direction: As L. talks, M. takes a napkin from the table and, with relish, carefully dries his hand, his fingers, as he watches L. L. arranges herself as she speaks. M. hands her the napkin and she quickly wipes herself. L. throws the used napkin playfully at M. M. looks to throw napkin in bin, but there is no bin in sight, so he pockets it.]

There is, never fear, a complementary bit. Liana fantasizes their going to bed early for a good read. “But before we do that, I’ll lay you down on this floor and open your trouser buttons [What? No zippers in Leeds?] with my teeth, one by one. [That could make quite a circus act.] Then I’m going to suck your cock. I won’t tire, my tongue never does. I’ll tease you until you’re furious and rigid in my mouth. When you finally cum  [Heavens, where did that second “M” disappear to?], I want you to cum so hard--  MARCUS: --that I knock out the back of your throat—LIANA:—and scramble my brains.” [Wonderful how Naomi can wed the intellectual (Renaissance, read in bed) to the sexual. Wouldn’t you just love to be a fly on Naomi and Bruce’s bedroom wall?

Evenhanded as she is, Ms. Wallace gives you also a truly romantic moment, this between mother (55) and son (40). They have been secretly in touch for a time and clandestinely meeting for three weeks, but this is the first invitation to the couple for dinner. But what evolves? “SD: Marcus kisses Dore lightly first, then more deeply, and she responds. He envelops her in his arms like a lover. It is a quiet, focused moment of passion, restrained but therefore the desire all the more evident. Liana watches them frozen, mesmerized. Etc.” The upshot is that they leave together, though Marcus refuses to answer whether he “licked his mother’s cunt.” Dore advises Marcus, “If you still care for Liana, don’t leave her with hope.” And so the bestower of fabulous fellations is left abandoned, tireless tongue and all.

As Liana remarks: “Each of us is born with the smear of our mother’s cunt across our faces [Note the faulty agreement between “each” and “our.”] We carry it with us all our lives. A very, very few of us go back for more. That’s all.”

The third act takes place, six years later, in a small room off the side of a church chapel, with Marcus’s closed coffin on a table. Now Dora looks more youthful, even taller, elegant, fashionably though subtly dressed in black. Liana looks to have aged beyond her years, and has a slight limp. Though her clothes are worn, “ they still retain a sense of flair.” Note redundancy: flair is itself a kind of sense.  A sense of sense?  Dore’s shyness is gone, we read, “replaced by a calm steadfastness.” So we get here the female version of the Hotspur-Prince Hal reversal.

This act is a weird mixture of friendliness and hostility between the women (the latter more on Liana’s part). Liana even tries to strangle Dore but fails, yet causes Dore to piss herself. Dore tries to wipe it up with a tissue she has, but needs more and ask for one from Liana, who says she wouldn’t give it to her even if she had it. She does however give Dore her scarf, which her ex mother-in-law finishes the task with, then drapes the soiled scarf on the coffin to dry. Eventually, Liana rummages in the suitcase she carries and produces a pair of clean panties for Dore, who finds them “not very attractive,” but does put them on discreetly behind the coffin.

All kinds of nonsense passes between the women. Thus Dore declares, “Rain falls through me, not on me.” Liana explains why she quit her job without benefits: “Those days, unless you’re eating rabbits off the road, or can demonstrate, right there in the office, that you make a hot cuppa every morning, with small, measured spoons of your cat’s excrement, you don’t get any benefit. Instead, I got a fork stuck in my leg.”

About Marcus: LIANA: Did I care for him completely? No. Because I never cared for his feet.  DORE: Neither did I.  LIANA: He gave his feet too much attention. DORE: Yes, he did, as though they were . . . pets.  LIANA: Always hold something back, a little piece of aversion keeps one inquisitive, cognizant. [Huh?] DORE: I did not have an aversion to his feet. I just couldn’t feel friendly towards them. They were too clean.  LIANA: Clean the way feet shouldn’t be, and pink, and moist. DORE: The nails clipped straight across, no curves! LIANA: And his particularity with socks! [There follows a brief discussion of Marius’s socks, which I skip.] LIANA: To love one’s own feet with such diligence, such zeal.  DORE: It’s suspect. LIANA: Always glancing down to make sure they were still there— DORE: As though they were two holy relics. Sometimes it seemed they actually gleamed in the dark! [It also seems as if those feet were more interesting than the play.]

No less absorbing is the explanation of Liana’s limp. She stabbed herself with a fork.  Why a fork? “Anguish is elegant and for elegance one uses a knife: deep and smooth. However, when your insides have arranged themselves and are now hanging on your outside, I recommend a fork. There’s no pretence with a fork. (Beat) A more practical reason was to apply for sympathy.” Shouldn’t that be “appeal”? In any case, the wound got infected, and no benefit was incurred, only a limp.

Of some interest too are Ms. Wallace’s frequent lapses in grammar and usage, but this is getting too long and I’ll skip them. In the end, after that touching panty business, it may not come as a surprise that the women leave together as the play ends.

However, on the Signature stage, the director Bill Rauch introduced some chic ambiguity: Liana leaves, even as Dore’s gaze follows her amicably. The production was far better than the work deserved. There was good set and costume design, and the direction was effective. Bill Heck was fine as Marcus, but Ann Dowd was, in Acts One and Two, a bit too dowdy. Frumpy, more precisely. Why, in any case, does this intelligent woman, Dore, have to earn a living cleaning other people’s apartments? (That, to be sure, is very much in the script.) The stellar performance was the Liana of Dagmara Dominczyk, who was not only perfectly lovely, but always did everything right, elegant but also subtle, as Wallace says of her attire. I could go on for paragraphs about the admirable touches she brings to her silly part.

Well, dear reader, if you have gallantly kept up with this, let me explain the length of it. It’s not just to castigate Naomi Wallace, worthless as she is, but also to convey what is wrong with our theater, with those who write it, produce it, crown it with award upon award, heaping absurdity upon absurdity. And worst of all, the wretched theater critics, who contribute to rather than execrate this nonsense.

UGLINESS

A letter in the November 23^rd New York Times from Bonnie Berry, the author of “Discrimination and Social Power,” expresses her approval of Julia Baird’s November 9^th Op-Ed essay “Being Dishonest About Ugliness,” which I unfortunately missed.

In that piece, Ms. Baird argued that we “assign moral judgment against the unattractive,” which she and Miss Berry reprehend. In her letter, Ms. Barry notes, “I am working with two research teams examining police reaction to suspects’ appearance and public reaction to crime victims’ appearance.” She adds, “I can barely wait to see what we discover.” Surely it is easily predictable what they will discover.

Ugliness is not merely a disadvantage; it is, at least in most people’s reaction to it, tantamount to a sin. This has always been so and will, I am afraid, never entirely change. Yet there are some exceptions even now. Some of the most obvious villains in art, like most of the villains in Dickens and Victor Hugo are really ugly. But even those innocents who only look ugly, e.g., Quasimodo, are suspected of villainy. That is so in romantic fiction in general.

Good places to start looking for the archetypical equation ugliness equals evil, are fairy tales, which embody centuries of folk “wisdom.” Prime example are the wicked witches. Why did these creatures have to be old and ugly, when they could just as easily have been young and beautiful?

Think of the worthy citizens of Salem, Massachusetts, and the witches they hanged, who, contrary to some romantics’ notion, were not beautiful but old and ugly. Their supposedly innocent victims, however, were young and attractive, which made the wicked crones even uglier, physically as well as morally. To this day, to vilify a woman, she is often referred to as a witch.

There are, I repeat, exceptions, though far less numerous. Sirens and mermaids are evil and dangerous because of their treacherous allure, but they are, it would seem, more infrequent than witches. And some of them even are good: think of the Little Mermaid, or Medea, a witch who, in love, becomes good (except to a brother), but who, betrayed, turns killer.

Noblesse oblige, the French saying has it, but ugliness, too, obliges, at least in the public imagination, to be bad. If, by the way, I keep coming back to fairy tales, it is because, whoever claimed their authorship by putting them in writing, nevertheless gathered them from the great mouths of the anonymous. In other words, they were folk tales, representing popular beliefs and attitudes.

So we come to Cinderella and her wicked sisters who, signally in the ballet versions, are always grotesque, grotesque being the ugly when it is comical. Their purpose, among other things, is to offset and distinguish the pretty and good one that much more. Much the same is true also of Snow White’s seven dwarfs. Though they are not evil, indeed quite the opposite, they do serve as contrast to and enhancement of Snow White’s beauty. More often, though, we get evil dwarves, as in the novel “Klein Zaches” by E. T. A. Hoffmann or in Rapunzel’s fairy-tale tormentor.

Wizards, too, if they are evil—which they most often are, think “Swan Lake” and “The Firebird”—are also ugly, even if the title Magician might hint at the opposite. So, too, in “The Fiery Angel,” Prokofiev’s marvelous opera, the Magician Agrippa von Nettelsheim, master of the diabolical arts, is usually represented as ugly. But no one could be uglier than the wicked Svengali, as the illustrations show, in Gerard du Maurier’s “Trilby,” whose lovely eponymous heroine he viciously dominates. Svengali has even become a generic term for evil manipulators.

Hollywood, before it became obsessed with various forms of violence, initially had looks playing the first fiddle. Here, too, less good looks, if not explicit ugliness, attested to flawed character. Thus Barbara Stanwyck often played less than sympathetic heroines, although leading actresses, no matter what their parts, were never outright ugly, unless they played a witch, such as Margaret Hamilton in “The Wizard of Oz,” of whom I wrote that, although 83, she didn’t look a day over 82.

The male villains also could be very ugly, none more so than Peter Lorre, an otherwise excellent actor in both European and American films. By the way, I seem to recall reading that he, in spite or because of it, received oodles of fan or love letters from (no doubt perverse) women. Other specialists in Hollywood evil looked either totally scary, like Boris Karloff, or displayed a horrible hypocritical slipperiness just as bad, like Bela Lugosi.

In no sense though is ugliness considered stupidity or lack of talent. Otherwise one would have had to view a fellow like Stravinsky (supremely ugly), or the great poet Leopardi (a hunchback), negatively in a play or movie. In fact, Iago, though usually played as somewhat ominous-looking, is the epitome evil, but by no means stupid.

There are also a number of characters in various arts who do start out as ugly, but  turn out to be even physically transmuted into beautiful, this being the ugly duckling syndrome, as he turns into a lovely swan. That kind of ugliness is not only not bad, but a message of hope to the unsightly, who may yet dream of miraculously becoming beautiful. And so, be it said, in lovers’ eyes they do.

Let us finally turn to the world of opera, which being anyhow usually topsy-turvy. Here it generally requires no ugliness to be evil. Thus Salome is beautiful enough to drive her stepfather and the young officer nuts, and Lulu, though not basically bad but driven so by men, is likewise beautiful, indeed fatally so.

But even in life, is ugliness a sign of wickedness? Few women were uglier than George Eliot and George Sand, yet they were surely not evil. Fickle perhaps, as in the case of Sand, but not evil. And some of the most amoral ones, like Alma Mahler and perhaps (though not latterly thought so)  Lucrezia Borgia, were the very antithesis of ugly.

To return, however, to Ms.Berry’s letter: despite the bias against bad looks, there may be some consolation for uglies in that even the attractive may not be attractive enough, like those who strive, as she puts it, for a job at Abercrombie & Fitch (a peculiar choice) or a career in modeling, but do not make it.

And is there not perhaps a reverse ugly duckling syndrome, whereby the not quite attractive enough turn sour, and from sourness to meanness, and ultimately ugliness? That may be saddest case of all.                                                                                          

What’s in a Name?

This one really works only in German, but I’ll render it into English. “What’s the dog’s name?” the new maid asks. “Herkules,” says the mistress. “Herr Kules?” responds the maid. “I’ll just call him Kules.  I ain’t gonna call no dog Mister.”

How clever is Agatha Christie in calling her sleuth Hercule Poirot. First make him Belgian, French would be too clever by half. Belgian is close, but less grand, especially when followed by the homonym for “poireau,” which is French (and Belgian) for simpleton. So, a heroic naïf? Not bad.

Names matter. Your name and being may somehow intertwine. Not, I dare say, if yours is a very commonplace name, say Peter, Paul or John. Or, if feminine, Jane, Joan or Jean. But even those may have implications, as one may derive from the linguist Eric Partridge’s invaluable little book, “Name This Child: A Handy Guide for Puzzled Parents,” on which I heavily rely.

Like in so many other things, there are fashions in names (even fashions in crime, as we learn from ever more frequent mass shootings, most often in schools). So, recently in France, there has been a Thierry lurking in every other corner, and, in Germany, a Juergen or Joerg. In America, there have been fewer pronouncedly trendy names, although David has been a bit of a contender, especially among homosexuals. This presumably derives from Michelangelo’s statue of David, which as male paragon corresponds to the Venus de Milo as female. Partridge explicates David as “the man after God’s own kind,” and adds that it strikes few as stemming “from the Hebrew verb ‘to love.’” But its bearers are surely aware of its derivation.

My own name, John, acquires its vast popularity not so much for deriving from the Hebrew “gift of the Lord,” as from the name of the Evangelist, as Partridge suggests; but then why are Matthew, Mark and Luke not equally frequent? This may well have to do with euphony. In English, at any rate, John has an awesome thud, which the other three lack. There is something propulsive about the Italian Giovanni, as also about the German, Johannes. The French Jean, on the other hand, has a calm quality. Are French Johns more pacific than German and Italian ones? I wonder.

The feminine Jane, Joan and Jean are equally appealing because of a long, resonant vowel sound and minimal consonants. They are all derived from Johanna or Joanna and the Hebrew for “God is gracious,” though Jean is mostly Scottish, Jane mostly English, and Joan, presumably, equally both.

These all used to be known as Christian names, of whatever religion their bearers. But with the coming of P.C., the term“Christian” has become insufficiently multidenominational, and “first names” has supplanted it. So too the once fairly popular first name Christian has become relatively rare, as derived from the Latin of ‘follower of Christ.”

But, with no great consistency, Christopher remains popular, derived from the Greek for “Christ bearing,” and stemming  from the well-known legend of Christopheros, which has no basis outside of myth.  Mythic too, too, was the gift-bearing and bringing Saint Nicholas, for obvious reasons beloved of children, who would affectionately have him be Saint Nick, or, coming by way of the German, abridged into Santa Claus. By neither name, however, did he exist.

Other names too come from the German, as, for example, Heidi. The German name comes from Heide, meaning moor, and surely not from another meaning of the word, pagan. Moors, as lovers of Emily Bronte must know, are very romantic places. But the abbreviation as Nick brings us to the enormous popularity of nicknames having nothing to do with Santa.

Indeed, Anglophone first names are often nicknames, indicative especially of the American craving for familiarity with one another that nicknames imply. So it is that even a president will want to be known as Bill rather than William Jefferson Clinton and even the Rough Rider Roosevelt welcomed Teddy for Theodore. So a Bob comes across more friendly than a Robert, a Jim more egalitarian than a James.

You may wonder then why so many nicknames minimize their being such, as John becomes Jack, Alexander turns (among others) into Sandy, Elizabeth into Betty, and Margaret into Greta, Peggy, and Meg (among others), none of them manifestly derived from the formal, longer version. I suppose that the key here is trying to have it both ways: like yet also unlike, the latter suggesting individuality within relatedness.

But as tendencies create countertendencies, so there are clearly parents who don’t want their offspring made smaller, stuck with a diminutive even in adulthood.. Hence we have names like Karen and Ingrid, Austin and Otto, which cannot be diminished. Yet an obvious nickname has, as far as I know, never miniaturized an Al Gore or a Max Beerbohm in the public eye.

Now what about surnames that, especially often in the South, have been turned into first names? They have the distinction of sounding special, without being weirdly excogitated as are nowadays those of many blacks. (They may be bona fide African, but how many of us would know that?)

To be sure, even many surnames have achieved  a certain ordinariness, when a playwright can be Taylor Mac, and a chanteuse Taylor Swift. They seem to beg for some kind of felicitous appropriateness, yet I doubt whether either one of those Taylors can do more with a needle than sew on a button.

Most surnames were clearly not conceived as firsts. They may have begun as middle names, as when Mary Flannery O’Connor became Flannery O’Connor, Lula Carson Smith, Carson McCullers, the (McCullers through a brief marriage), and   Nelle Harper Lee, Harper Lee. Note that these are all women with family names moving into firsts, so as to retain something of their original bearers’ identity as marriage changed their surnames—if they got married, which many of them didn’t.

Moreover, surnames are not gender-limited. As being male carries with it certain privileges, so not having a markedly feminine first name may increase one’sstatus. So Leslie is a handily bisexual name, though originally a merely female one, it allows for a woman, if only by unacquaintedness, to pass for masculine.

Altogether, more significance is being attached to first names these days, so that there are organizations such as BabyCenter, whose head, Linda Murray, speaks of a database of 40,000 possible names, and says “Now parents are really trying to choose a name that is unique, that suits their child and that says something about their personality.” To be sure, if it exists in a database, it is not going to remain unique forever, but perhaps something close to it to it. Yet what about suiting the child’s personality, when the infant by the time of christening can hardly have developed much of one. To be sure many babies are said to look like Churchill, but looks are not personality, or else there would be no end of Winstons around.

Name changing was a big thing in the old Hollywood, where the idea was precisely to be less unique but more recognizably Anglo-Saxon, and thus not Jewish or Polish or Russian or Hispanic, or whatever smelled of immigration and therefore most likely impoverished lower-class. This affected primarily surnames, but first names too underwent that supposed upgrading.

So Nathan Birnbaum became George Burns,; Jacob Julius Garfinkle, John Garfied; Marion Levy, Paulette Goddard (the double D not very French, although French was acceptable, e.g., Charles Boyer); Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, Hedy Lamarr; Lucille Fay Le Sueur (too fancy) Joan Crawford; JudithTuvim, Judy Holliday; Alfred Arnold Cocozza, Mario Lanza; Ramon Estevez, Martin Sheen; Sophia Kosow, Sylvia Sydney; and so on and on.

This was not limited to actors. So producer Schmuel Gelbfisz became Samuel Goldwyn; producer Robert Shapira became Robert Evans; director Mihaly Kertesz, Michael Curtiz; director Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, Nicholas Ray; and again so on and on. But there was also an opposite current, whereby Hollywooders wanted to sound  grander, more fanciful, as when, Mary Leta Dorothy Kaumeyer turned into Dorothy Lamour; or Betty Joan Perske into Lauren Bacall, and so on yet again. In some cases it was a matter of mere euphony rather than anything more devious. Archibald Alexander Leach was Anglo-Saxon enough, but Cary Grant just sounded better and was easier to remember,

These name changes now prevail among couturiers, almost none of whom go by their original name. Of course Ralph Lifshitz prefers to be Ralph Lauren, but Michael Kors could have stayed just as well with his legal, less coarse Karl Anderson, Jr., perhaps just dropping the Jr.

Strangest of all are the changes of name among composers, music being all sound, and thus a sound owned from childhood would seem something to cling to even if odd or hard to pronounce. Obviously a nimble movie composer could well turn Israel Baline into Irving Berlin, although there was nothing Berlinese about him, but even those aiming a bit higher, i.e., mainly the stage, have often changed their names-- in the case of Broadway, away from their Jewishness. This is somewhat paradoxical, given that Jews, along with gays, have constituted the most faithful Broadway audiences.

And then there are the Simons. My father, Joseph Simon pronounced Shimmon in his native Hungary and Simmon in his Yugoslav businessman identity, and my mother, born Revesz or Reves, never mentioned our family’s religion, though other people’s was sometimes brought up and perhaps discussed. I never attended a church, synagogue or mosque, and this somehow seemed perfectly normal to me.

It is only when I met, fairly late in life, my favorite poet, Robert Graves, he asked me whether I was a Welsh or a Jewish Simon, asserting that those were the only extant kinds. An extremely learned man, his word, if I will be pardoned for putting it that way, was gospel. So, since Welsh was out of the question, this meant a Jewish heritage of some kind, though practice there never was. This made some sense in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, now merely Serbia, where if you weren’t Greek Orthodox, you were lumped together under the label Other, but just what kind of other hardly mattered, unless you chose to make it an issue. However, when we emigrated, for some reason religion became necessary, conceivably for one’s passport. And then, much to my amusement, one could—and my father did—buy oneself and one’s family into Old Catholicism, although what that was I had not the faintest idea. Roman Catholicism, however, for better or worse, it was not.

Here in America, where Simon must have sounded strange to my parents, they legally changed their name to Simmon, with the O pronounced more or less as in Simmons. This, however, seemed neither fish nor fowl to me, so I remained Simon and a thorough atheist. Latinos of all kinds pronounce it as rhyming with bemoan, which I have become perfectly used and resigned to. As the saying goes, what’s in a name anyway?

I once heard a radio program about strange first names culled from the Registry, and were they ever strange, but I regrettably did not write them down. Noel Coward, in a song lyric reminds us of the weird Marmaduke. If influenced by his name, what would a Marmaduke become? An eccentric, most likely. I certainly hope that a person named Peregrine would become a traveler, if not indeed a wanderer. Noel himself was so named because of his Christmas birth date, and I daresay it had an effect on him as lover of exotic holidays.

The Absurd

A time when puny Roberta Vinci—bless her!—derails the elephantine Serena on her route to the Grand Slam, the moment is rife for a discussion of the Absurd, which I deliberately capitalize. What a presence it has in our lives, both for the good, as for Vinci, and the bad, as for Williams.

This is also the time when Brian Kellow’s biography of Sue Mengers, “Can I Go Now?” hits the bookstores, to mixed reviews: pretty good in the Sunday Times, pretty bad in the daily one. What absurd grandeur that woman had! I wish Brian had consulted me about the admittedly not very prime time story about my lunch with Sue Mengers. This was during her prime time—and perhaps also mine—during a brief visit to Tinseltown, when she invited me to lunch. The object was to bring the one critic who was a nonbeliever in her star client, Barbra, into the church—or should I say temple?

I wish I had a transcript of our conversation. Sue deployed all of her charms and hegemony among Hollywood agents to entice me into having lunch with Streisand, panegyricizing about her wit, her smartness, her charm as she strove to effectuate a conversion of Saul-into-Paul magnitude. This proved no more likely to succeed than to convince Barbra of the need for a medial A in her name. But it was all worthy enough of at least a footnote in the bio.

Ah, yes, the Absurd. How it dogs us at every other step—to fully catalogue it would have added another labor to Hercules, surely the hardest. I am barely up to it, but at least I can advert to a few salient examples, and some worthy quotations from others.

For instance, I have always loved the name of an African head of state: Good Luck Jonathan, the first part of which he did not evince when it came to recovering the 300 abducted girls from his country. Well, as the song has it, maybe some other time. Or, for a nearer example, take the coiffure of Donald Trump, which in itself would be enough to make his presidency absurd. It is easily the worst since that of Anthony Burgess and Moe of the Three Stooges.

There had to be a philosophy of Absurdism, of which Albert Camus—“the absurd is the essential concept and the first truth” plus all his other writings—is the finest proponent. And how appropriate for the stage to have spawned he Theater of the Absurd. Here the chief proponent—Samuel Beckett having, however absurdly, declined having anything to do with it—there remains Eugene Ionesco, who at a lunch argued with me that his “Macbet” was superior to Shakespeare’s similarly titled play. Actually, Ionesco did very well by the Theater of the Absurd, “Rhinoceros” and “The Bald Soprano” being his most popular successes, although I prefer “Jacques or the Submission” and “The Chairs.”

But to revert to philosophy. I. M. Bochenski, in his book “Europaeische Philosophie der Gegenwart” (European Philosophy of the Present) has, as one of several epigraphs (I translate), “Modern Man, i.e., human beings since the Renaissance, is ripe for burial.” This attributed to Count Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, about whom there is regrettably nothing further in the book. Yet that is perhaps a bit too strong from someone unexposed to the works of America’s younger dramatists, and thus spared (to borrow a title from Carlo Emilio Gadda) the acquaintance with grief, or, if you prefer, the depth of the absurd.

It occurred to me to look up the entry Absurdism in the American Heritage Dictionary, and find, to my surprise, the following: “A philosophy, often translated into art forms, holding that humans exist in a meaningless, irrational universe and that any search for order by them will bring them into direct conflict with the universe. “True absurdism is not less but more real than reality. (John Simon).”

What a remarkable quotation, if only I knew just where it came from and contextualize. Could this come under the heading of Jonathan Swift’s famous exclamation, “What genius I had then”?

Let me start with a humble but telling aspect of quotidian absurdity. Until fairly recently people had no problem with correctly pronouncing “groceries” as if it were spelled “grosseries.” Then along comes some idiot or bunch of idiots proudly mispronouncing it by false analogy as if it were spelled “grosheries.” This would be correct if the spelling were “grocieries,” with an I after the C softening it from an SS sound to an SH, as in word like “glacier,” where there is such an I. But not so in “groceries.” Yet so ubiquitous has this blooper become that people who know better don’t even notice it on television or elsewhere. But all it takes in our democratic society for one ignoramus to come up with such an absurdity and promptly the sheep will follow.

Or take the world of fashion. Almost anything you see on runways or in magazine and newspaper pictures is absurd: anorexic models wearing things that no woman in her right mind would want to touch with a ten-foot pole unless she was a six-foot pole herself. Some women realize how ridiculous and uncomfortable those gladrags would be on them; others know that they couldn’t afford them if they were foolish enough to want them. But on and on the parade goes, as long as there are gay men to design them and Anna Wintours to promote them.

And how about those absurd opera singers? Rabid opera fans or persons with underdeveloped sensibilities can tolerate an Isolde who could use a slimming potion more than a love one {“It is only the voice that matters,” they say) or a Lohengrin who could more suitably ride on an ox than be drawn by a swan--although there has lately been some improvement in the average avoirdupois, but still here are plenty of Stephanie Blythes unblythely around.

A rather different kind of absurdity are the wretches who keep buying lottery tickets hoping for the big prize, who, even if they win a pittance, will have spent much more for years on lottery tickets than their win amounts to.

Still, there is also the good, the positive absurd. Surrealism sometimes provides that. Take the piquant perversity of some of those clever Belgian painters, Magritte, Delvaux  and Ensor. Does it have something to do with the drama of a country and language split in two? So, too, perhaps with such rather less talented Spaniards, Miro and Dali, think Basques and Catalans. But then where are the Canadian equivalents?