Down the hatch
September 9, 2009
Fratelli Branca, Milan
Something I just read reminded me of the only remedy my paternal grandmother swore by: Fernet-Branca. If you’ve never tasted it, you don’t know what you’re missing — and I say that without prejudice one way or the other.
Fernet is a liquer concocted of a couple of dozen herbs and spices and heavily laced with alcohol. There is more than one brand, but Fernet Branca — distilled by the Fratelli Branca in Milan — is the only one most people know.
Well, actually, I’m not sure most people know about Fernet at all, but to the extent that some people do, most of them know Fernet-Branca. I haven’t had Fernet in many years, but even when my memory of it was fresher I’m not sure I could have described the taste. The website romefile.com calls it “a cross between medicine, crushed plants and bitter mud,” but I don’t think that does it justice.
Fratelli Branca, Milan
As I implied, I was introduced to Fernet-Branca by Teresina Giordano Paolino, my grandmother, who kept it on hand to cure ailments of the stomach. When I was a kid, the combination of free range in our grocery store and my grandmother’s determination to kill me with food resulted in frequent attacks such as George Ade used to call “the stomach-ache.” If she got wind of such a calamity, Grandma would summon me to her kitchen — we had two, like all good Italians — and force me to swallow a shot glass full of Fernet-Branca. I say “force me.” That was only at first. After a while, I developed a taste for it — my first “acquired taste,” I suppose. It hits the belly like a shotgun blast — garlic, aloe, gentian root, rhubarb, gum myrrh, red cinchona bark, galanga, zedoary, and heaven knows what else simultaneously colliding with gastric acid. And the alcohol — oh, my. Depending on where one buys it, the alcohol content of Fernet-Branca can exceed 40 percent. It should come as no surprise that the firewater works — every time.
Fratelli Branca, Milan
When Pat and I were on our honeymoon in Bermuda, my stomach started barking after a few days of high living. I was complaining to Cappy, the hotel bartender, when I spied a Fernet-Branca label among the bottles behind him. It was like spotting an old friend in a crowd. I got Cappy to pour me a shot, although he was convinced it would make me sicker, but nothing doing — I was ready to resume the feast in about five minutes.
From what I’ve read on the Internet, Fernet-Branca, which has been around since 1845, is very trendy these days, particularly in Argentina, where many folks like it mixed with cola. In fact, it’s the subject of a song, “Fernet Cola,” by the rock group Vilma Palma.
There’s a Chicago Tribune story about the Argentine connection at this link:
http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2008/jan/02/news/chi-0102argentinacoke_filljan02
“Hear the word of the Lord” — Hosea 4:1
September 7, 2009
I see by the papers that the publishers of the New International Version of the Bible are preparing a new edition of the scriptures that is likely to re-ignite the debate about sexist language.
I was discussing sexist language with one of my English classes the other day. The text for that class advises students to use the construction “his or her” in order to avoid expressing gender bias. So, for instance, students are advised to write. “A person who has been drinking at a party should surrender his or her keys to a sober friend,” rather than, “… surrender his keys to a sober friend,” which is grammatically correct, but some say not correct in other ways.
Several years ago, a translation called Today’s New International Version was introduced in which many gender references were changed in order to avoid what the publishers felt were unwarranted or unnecessary male nouns or pronouns. For example, a verse from the Gospel According to Matthew was altered from “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye ‘ ….” to “How can you say, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye’ ….” That doesn’t seem to alter the meaning of the verse, although I don’t know why the translator, if he or she wanted to alter that verse didn’t resort instead to “How can you say to your sister or brother ….”
An even more curious change affected a verse in St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians: “For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.” That was changed to: “For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a human being.” The first man referred to was Adam – who was incontrovertably male – and the second man referred to was Jesus – also incontrovertably male, so that change seems unnecessary if it does not actually obscure Paul’s meaning.
The committee working on the new translation has explained that every gender reference in the Bible will be reviewed, but the outcome remains to be seen — sometime in 2011.
This aspect of Today’s New International Version was controversial. Some Christians who rely on this version argued that the text should stick as close to the original as possible, for reasons of authenticity and scholarship. Some objected to the tinkering with gender references as a disingenuous bow to political correctness. And some, including the translators, argued that those and other changes were designed to make the Bible more attractive to a younger audience and more accessible to all English-speaking people.
My own view as a reader of the New American Bible is that a book that is presented to the reader as the Bible should reproduce as closely as possible the language and meaning of the original writers and traditions. Reading the scriptures without historical context is always a risky business, and not just with respect to gender bias. Serious readers of the scriptures should know enough about the cultures in which they were written to understand that the status of women was very different from their status in the 21st century and even more different from the status they should occupy in the 21st century. There are many popular and scholarly commentaries on the Bible that explain the contents and background of the scriptures from a variety of religious perspectives and for a variety of audiences.
Meanwhile, the Huffington Post report on the revisions to the New International Version of the Bible is at this link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/01/new-international-version_n_274299.html
Netflix Update No. 17: “October Sky”
September 5, 2009
JAKE GYLLENHAAL
We watched “October Sky,” a 1999 film based on the real life of Homer Hickam Jr., who became a NASA engineer after initially experimenting with rocket flight against his father’s wishes.
Homer is played by Jake Gyllanthaal and his father — called John in the movie — is played by Chris Cooper.
John Hickam is a supervisor in a West Virginia coal mine, and he expects Homer to follow him into the trade, as most boys in the town have followed their own dads. The unexpected launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in October 1957 inspires Homer to work with some of his friends to build and fire a succession of rockets, gradually refining the devices. Homer’s open desire to escape from what seems to him the pointless existence in his hometown — and specifically to enter a national science fair in order to get a college scholarship causes increasing tension between him and his father.
CHRIS COOPER
This movie is a little melodramatic, but it presents a stark picture of the lives of people in a company town that depends for its mean existence on a failing mine.
Cooper gives a credible performance as a man whose own courage and determination with respect to protecting the mine and the livelihoods of his employees does not help him recognize his son’s courage and determination, though directed at a different goal.
Laura Dern plays the idealized role of a high school teacher whose mission is to help the boys and girls in these grim surroundings to pursue their dreams.
“You’ve been more than a daddy to me” — Henry Burr
September 4, 2009
BRIGITTA JACOB-ENGELKEN
The BBC marked the anniversary of Britain’s declaration of war on Nazi Germany with a story about the last survivor of the bunker in which Adolph Hitler killed himself.
The survivor is Rochus Misch, 92, a resident of Berlin, who was an SS officer serving as a body guard, a telephone operator, and a messenger. The report included an interview with Misch’s daughter, Brigitta Jacob-Engelken, who recalls the day in 1953 when her father returned from the gulag where the Soviets had confined him after the Red Army invaded Berlin. The homecoming was joyful, but father and daughter didn’t get along.
ROCHUS MISCH
Their relationship wasn’t improved when Brigitta’s maternal grandmother informed her that her mother — Misch’s wife — had been Jewish, something Misch refused to accept.
Brigitta accepted it, learned Hebrew, spent time on a kibbutz, and used her architectural talents to help restore synagogues in Germany.
She says she doesn’t hold her father’s wartime role against him, because the work he did was “harmless.” “Harmless,” of course, was a relative term during the Nazi era. Compared to ordering and carrying out the deaths of tens of millions of defenseless people, protecting the life of the worst dictator in history may seem mild.
Misch didn’t talk about his place in Hitler’s inner circle for many years, but now he discusses it freely — including his first view of the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun.
The BBC stories are at this link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8237708.stm
ROCHUS MISCH DURING THE WAR
Talkin’ baseball
September 3, 2009
DEREK JETER
Derek Jeter is on the verge of accumulating the most hits by any member of the New York Yankees – surpassing the record of 2,720 held since 1939 by Lou Gehrig. Gehrig would have had more, of course, had he not come down with ALS and died before he was 37 years old. That’s not Jeter’s fault; he got his hits one at a time like everybody else, and he deserves whatever recognition comes with them.
This not the kind of record that is subject to rationalization by people who don’t like the player — like those who say that Alex Rodriguez built up his records by driving in runs when his team didn’t need them. When a man gets 2,700 hits, there’s only one reason for it. He’s damn good.
LOU GEHRIG
Still, there will be some hint of melancholy around the hit that breaks Lou’s record. Maybe this is a generational thing. I don’t remember Gehrig, but I didn’t miss him by much, and my father — who saw him play scores of times throughout his career — kept the memory alive in our house. Younger people may not feel the regret that someone my age will feel when Lou is no longer Number One on that list.
One of the charms of baseball has always been that everyone who has ever played is still in the game. Today’s players compete against yesterday’s players in statistics and in memory. I wonder, though, if that is waning. I notice, for instance, that the frame of reference for the play-by-play and color announcers usually extends back only as far as they can remember. References to people like Gehrig are rare, and they often sound like references to fictional characters.
BILL DICKEY
I was in the Yankee clubhouse with Ed Lucas one day about 15 years ago, and Ed was talking to a young player who had come up from the farm for a cup of coffee. In the conversation, Ed mentioned Yogi Berra. Ed is blind, but I noticed the blank look on the player’s face, and I said, “You know who Yogi Berra is, don’t you?” The guy said: “I’ve heard of the gentleman.” I guess there would have been no point in asking the young man if he knew who Bill Dickey was — the Hall of Fame catcher who preceded Berra on the Yankees.
People of my generation lived through the phenomenon of grieving a record when Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in 1961 to break the mark set by Babe Ruth in 1927. I was rooting for Maris, partly, I suppose, because Ruth’s transcendent place in the game doesn’t depend on any of his individual records. But a lot of people resented Maris and said so. If anyone broke that record, it should have been Mickey Mantle, a legitimate power hitter year after year and a lifetime Yankee. That was the feeling. We were at Yankee Stadium the day Maris broke that record; the excitement was muted, to put it mildly, Phil Rizzuto notwithstanding. Henry Aaron went through something similar when he broke Ruth’s lifetime home run mark — and there was a strong racial ingredient in that — but Aaron was such a great all-around player for so many years, that only cranks were against him.
CARL HUBBELL
Speaking of Bill Dickey, he came to mind the other day when a friend of mine mentioned Carl Hubbell’s well-known feat in the 1933 All-Star Game, striking out in succession Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmy Foxx, Joe Cronin, and Al Simmons — all future Hall of Famers. Hubbell, a Hall of Fame pitcher himself, was a screwball-throwing left-hander and one of the best of his time — many would say all time.
It doesn’t come up often, but the batter who followed Simmons was Bill Dickey, who got a hit to break Hubbell’s streak. The next batter was Lefty Gomez, a pitcher with the Yankees and one of the great humorists of the game, and a notoriously bad hitter in the days when American League pitchers were fully employed and took their turn at bat.
LEFTY GOMEZ
Gomez struck out, and when he went back to the dugout, he was ripping mad at Dickey.
“What did I do?” asked Dickey, who was flabbergasted. “It’s going to go down in history,” Gomez told him, “that Hubbell struck out five of the greatest hitters in baseball. If you had had the decency to strike out, it would have been seven, and I would have been one of them!”
The Times has a story about Jeter’s achievement in the context of the end of Gehrig’s career. It’s at this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/sports/baseball/04gehrig.html?hp
Two hearts that stopped as one
September 2, 2009
ART CARNEY
In a 1956 episode of “The Honeymooners,” Ed Norton (Art Carney) is advising Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) that one of their neighbors reads all the mail that comes into the building. To illustrate his point, Norton tells Ralph what the Kramdens’ gas bill was the previous month. And then he congratulates Ralph for breaking the all-time low gas bill record set by the Collyer Brothers in 1931.
The studio audience laughs, because they remember the Collyer Brothers, whose macabre death had occurred only about nine years before that episode was filmed. Homer and Langley Collyer, offspring of a well-to-do family, lived in a mansion in what was then high-fashion Harlem — remaining there after their father inexplicably abandoned them in 1919 and moved downtown. By that time the brothers were well educated — at least one of them had graduated from nearby Columbia — but instead of pursuing careers in engineering or admiralty law, they gradually withdrew from society, living like hermits and literally filling the house with tons of newspapers, bicycles, firearms, electric motors, musical instruments — a collection far too varied to be characterized, although it is usually referred to as “junk.”
LANGLEY COLLYER
In 1947, the two men died in the house under tragic circumstances. Langley Collyer had been killed by one of the booby traps he had assembled to ward off intruders and Homer, who was blind and largely helpless, had died of starvation, just a few feet from his brother’s body. Police and laborers removed 103 tons of material from the house, which was condemned and razed.
E.L. Doctorow has written a novel, “Homer and Langley,” being released this month, which consists of what Doctorow describes of his “reading” of the Collyer Brothers’ lives. By that he means that the book is not a history; in fact, he said he did no research, which may be an exaggeration, but he makes his point. He was curious, not about morbid details that had been repeated again and again, but about what motivated the two men to shut the world out of their lives or rather, as he puts it, to “emigrate” to a life within their home, a life lived on their own terms.
HOMER COLLYER'S BODY IS REMOVED FROM THE HOUSE
Doctorow was interviewed on NPR today — specifically, on “All Things Considered: — and his remarks suggested more respect for the Collyers than they usually are afforded. Certainly he eschewed the ridicule that an Ed Norton couldn’t help but attach to the names. The writer apparently doesn’t begin with a judgment about the brothers — or about people who don’t choose to live as others do. He begins with curiosity about how their lives fit into the whole picture of life in their time. He also said that he was saddened by a comment made in the novel by Homer, who is the narrator: “What could be more terrible than to be turned into a mythic joke?”
A story based on the Doctorow interview, the audio, and an excerpt from the novel are at this link:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112346577
It wasn’t her money I was after
September 1, 2009
Archie Comics
I turn my back on a woman for 50 years, and this is what happens. Veronica Lodge has agreed to marry Archie Andrews. I will admit that Archie has aged a lot better than I have, although he’s 10 months older, but I still consider this the height of perfidy.
The news has been out for a long time, but the comic book containing the engagement story arrived on news stands today — or so I’m told. I didn’t have the heart to look.
Meanwhile, the news today that Disney is going to buy Marvel Entertainment — Spider Man, Captain America and all — got me to thinking about the other comics I read, when I wasn’t fawning over Veronica.
My pantheon was Plastic Man, Blackhawk, the Green Lantern, Superman and Batman. Plastic Man had one of the most complicated personal histories of any comicbook hero. I don’t want to go into it here (I do have to teach the first class of the semester tomorrow morning) but one aspect of it is reminiscent of the Toxic Avenger, now an off-Broadway attraction, thanks to the George Street Playhouse. Toxie, to his intimates, was a nerd who was thrown into a vat of toxic chemical waste that turned him into a superhuman mutant. Plastic Man was an underworld figure who was accidentally sprayed with a chemical that made his body so flexible that he could bend himself into any shape, though he retained the red color and black-and-yellow stripes of his body suit. I remember him, for instance, disguising himself as an icicle, but even as a kid I didn’t understand why his pursuers couldn’t spot an icicle with that color scheme.
I don’t know whether this Disney transaction is good or bad, but I did read an analysis of the financial aspects of the engagement of Archie and Veronica. Roma Luciw, writing in The Globe and Mail, examined whether a couple with such disparate underpinnings — a wealthy she and a middle-class he — should enter into a prenuptial agreement. You can read what the experts think at this link:
“… que, are, ess, tee, you, vee …”
August 30, 2009
Drawing by Mark Hicks
Garrison Keillor mused in one of his monologues about the days when life wasn’t so complicated — for instance, when there was no entrance exam for kindergarten.
Things are almost that bad, according to Patti Hartigan, writing in the Boston Globe. Experienced educators are troubled, Hartigan writes, by the atmosphere once dominated by wooden blocks and graham crackers: “(I)ncreasingly in schools across Massachusetts and the United States, little children are being asked to perform academic tasks, including test taking, that early childhood researchers agree are developmentally inappropriate, even potentially damaging. If children don’t meet certain requirements, they are deemed ‘not proficient.’ Frequently, children are screened for ‘kindergarten readiness’ even before school begins, and some are labeled inadequate before they walk through the door.”
I remember all of my elementary school teachers, but the class I recall most vividly is kindergarten. Our teacher was Miss Botbyl, who had been at the school for decades. In a corner of the room she had an upright piano that had been painted lime green with a high-gloss enamel. I don’t know if that’s normally good for a piano, but the way Miss Botbyl attacked those keys, the piano would have responded out of pure fright. That’s not to say that Miss Botbyl was mean to us kids; she was in command at every moment of the day — she admonished us collectively as “people” — but she was likeable. It was the kind of relationship many kids of my era had with their grandparents.
I can visualize the interior of that room, including a series of cartoons that were posted above the blackboards illustrating unacceptable types of behavior. My favorite, which was labelled “Me First,” recommended against pushing ahead in line. I’m 66 years old, and I still don’t push ahead in line.
Maybe Jenna Bush Hager, in her new role as an education reporter on “Today,” will examine the question of academics in kindergarten. My uninformed opinion is that the Botbyl model should be restored, but the overall academic experience should be expanded, whether that means one or two more years of school before college or career, or the same number of years with more hours or days of instruction. Considering how the body of human knowledge has expanded since Miss Botbyl banged on that piano, why do we think we can teach it — learn it — in the same framework that served us 60 years ago? Forcing academics on five-year-old kids who are not ready doesn’t seem like the answer.
You can read Patti Hartigan’s report at this link:
“There are people living back there — little girls!”
August 30, 2009
This Phillip Garrido case stirs up such a complex of judgements and emotions that it’s hard to think about it dispassionately. The account from University of California police officers Lisa Campbell and Ally Jacobs suggests that Garrido himself is far more than a calculating rapist; he’s a human being spinning out of control.
Unlike the outfall that often follows a case like this, in which the neighbors tell how the suspect was a quiet man who always waved hello when he went out to pick up his mail, the folks on Garrido’s block perceived that there was something way out of whack with this man, and they said so more than once — they said so to law enforcement authorities.
With unerring hindsight, we can see that those authorities should have discovered the facts at Garrido’s home long before they did. I have heard the rationalizations about the amount of territory the sheriff’s department has to cover and the descriptions of visits to the house in which investigators could detect no crime — perhaps code violations, but no crime. However culpable the authorities are for the fact that Jaycee Dugard was not found sooner, this case challenges again the wisdom of registering convicted sex offenders and allowing them to live unsupervised in society. And while Garrido was supposedly under the supervision of a parole officer, anyone can now judge how effective that arrangement was.
I am among those who think there are far too many people in prison in the United States. But it is a matter of common sense that a person who has been convicted of a serious sex offense should either be incarcerated for life or kept under constant surveillance, and in either case provided with intense and consistent treatment — and we have to be willing to seriously invest in that treatment. The rate of recidivism and the impact of such crimes on their victims demands this.
I sat on a criminal jury a few years ago in a case that involved a corrections officer who had committed sexual offenses against two female inmates. One of the inmates was participating in a release program at the time of that offense. The corrections officer was accused of seeking her out at the home where she was staying, ostensibly under strict supervision. An officer who was supposedly keeping track of the inmate, testified that the inmate was not permitted to have any social contact with men while in the release program. But the officer also testified that she paid an unannounced visit to the house on one occasion, found the defendant there with the inmate, and accepted the explanation that he was the inmate’s billiards coach. I’m not making that up. Apparently the supervision of Phillip Garrido wasn’t much better.
I am too much of an optimist to give up even on a Phillip Garrido, but while we’re trying to take care of him, citizens deserve much better protection against a person who is likely to repeat such a crime.
Pencil points and Burgers
August 28, 2009
We once received an invitation to a dinner in Trenton, and the invitation came with a menu. We noticed on the menu the term “pencil points,” but we didn’t know what that meant. We resolved to be scrupulous about what we ate, but the dinner was several months later and by that time we forgot about it. After we had eaten, one of us recalled it and asked our table companion, who lived in that area, what had happened to the “pencil points.” “You ate them,” he said — the pasta. He was referring to penne, which had been the course before the entree. When we said we had never before heard penne referred to as “pencil points,” our companion said, “Well, I guess you’re not Burgers.” Hmmmm? “I guess you don’t come from Chambersburg,” he said. Comes the dawn, as my mother used to say: He was referring to a section of Trenton that at one time had been the “Little Italy” of the city and still maintained some vestiges of that past, including a few good Italian restaurants.
RESTAURANT IN CHAMBERSBURG
Chambersburg, incidentally, was a distinct municipality from 1872 to 1888. It had been a part of Hamilton Township. Janet Evanovich, who is from South River, has used Chambersburg — the Burg, as it were — as the locale for her series of novels and stories about bounty hunter Stephanie Plum.
“Pencil points,” “the Burg,” and “Burgers” are examples of slang in the strict sense. By the strict sense, I mean that these terms originated among and in a way distinguished a certain group of people — the residents of Chambersburg. Slang can evolve within social groups, demographic groups, professional or occupational groups — within pretty much any subset of society.
Heaven knows we had enough slang in the newspaper business, and I mean slang in the strict sense. During the summer semester I was explaining something to my class and I used the term “graf” — a common expression in publishing industries. I noticed a quizzical look on one student’s face and I asked him what was the matter. He said, “You always use that word – “graf.” What does it mean? This was about half way through the term; the class had sat there in silence up to that point, and I don’t know how many references to “paragraph” they hadn’t understood.
Douglas Quenqua, writing for the New York Times News Service, reports that slang terms of that kind may be passing from the scene. “Keeping up with the latest slang,” Quenqua writes, “is at once easier and harder than ever. The number of slang dictionaries is growing, both online and off, not to mention social networking media that invent and discard words, phrases and memes at the speed of broadband. The life of slang is now shorter than ever, say linguists, and what was once a reliable code for identifying members of an in-group or subculture is losing some of its magic.”
LEON TROTSKY
Quenqua points out that slang dictionaries as such are nothing new, but they used to appear at a pace that was in keeping with the natural evolution of language. Quenqua says dictionaries of slang have been around since the 18th century. I just finished reading a new book by Bernard Patenaude about the Leninist-Bolshevik Leon Trotsky. According to Patenaude, while Trotsky was living in exile in Mexico, he received from a union activist in Minneapolis a dictionary of American slang, designed to help him better understand the Americans who were a part of his security staff. In a letter thanking the donor, Trotsky wrote: “In the part I have already studied, which is devoted to college slang, I had hoped to find some abbreviations for the various sciences, philosophical theories, etc. (B)ut instead I found merely about 25 expressions for an attractive girl ….”
Quenqua’s story, which I read in The State of Columbia, South Carolina, is at this link:
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