Eccentrics

Last week’s essay concerning the vanishing jalopy didn’t attract any public comment, but I had a small blitz of personal email about it.  Only some of the messages concerned automobilia; the larger theme was cultural erasure or amnesia generally—things that used to be around, but seem to have disappeared, or that we have simply forgotten.  Most of these were material: 78rpm-records, blocks of ice delivered by guys with huge tongs, glass milk bottles, that sort of thing.  But whole tribes of human beings also vanished.  Two Jehova’s Witnesses came to my door last week.  They were the first in at least a decade, probably two or three decades, and the exception that reminded me of all the people who don’t come anymore, especially Fuller Brush salesmen.  If the term “Fuller Brush Man” is meaningless to you, it simply proves my point.

            One terrible impoverishment of American culture is the general disappearance of eccentricity.  Where have all the eccentrics gone?  The demise of my last two beloved aunts, who both died within the last decade, deprived me of my last vital familial connection to genuine eccentricity.  These two marvelous old ladies lived together for much of their long lives in a ramshackle farmhouse built by one of their brothers (and my uncles) following the directions in an old set of Audel building guides.  Although they were voracious readers of public library books, these volumes, along with a large Bible, some nineteenth-century Masonic and Freethinking stuff deriving from my grandfather, and what seemed to be the complete works of O. Henry, made up the core of their highly eclectic permanent home collection.

            Once when I was quite young and all their other, elder siblings were still around I picked up one of the soiled infidel tracts, a laudatory biography of Voltaire.  Among the many reasons the author found to admire the famous philosophe was that he had publicly ridiculed “the cult of the prepuce of Jesus Christ.”  With a large family group gathered around the dinner table, I asked my Aunt Mildred, now long gone, “What’s a prepuce?”  She turned bright red, but said only “Johnny!”  When years later I found out I was more struck by the erudition than the prudery.  I noticed that book still on the shelves in 2006, at the time of my Aunt Louise’s funeral.

Baxter County, Arkansas, 2004; Aunt Louise at the computer; in the background Aunt Edith, aet. 90

          
They generally dressed in what appeared to be the unsold items from a really scruffy yard sale.  Their eyes were so weakened that they seemed never to notice that there was about a quarter of an inch of dust on everything—everything but the Scrabble board, that is, which was in daily use.  Their hearing was also impaired, so that all communication, including that emanating from the television set, was at a level somewhere between a shout and a bellow.  I rather imagine a conversation between Hardy and Lord Nelson on the quarterdeck during a typhoon.  To cross their threshold really was to enter an alternate universe.             

            It was a delightful realm, of course.  For there is all the difference in the world between an authentic eccentric and the very strange people one sees in the subway.  An eccentric is not a weirdo, a wino, a sicko, or a psycho.  Eccentricity is not pathology, but self-confident and unaffected individuality developed to a remarkable degree.  It was from my Aunt Louise that I must have inherited the journalistic impulse.  For many years she published a column in the local newspaper.  It was aptly entitled “A Little Off Center”.

            The chief cause of the decline of wholesome eccentricity is not difficult to identify.  It is the general homogenization of culture.  The more we text and tweet and generally do our thing the more like everybody else’s thing it becomes.  The current paucity of eccentrics is a result of historical changes long underway.  The Golden Age of Eccentricity was probably the period between 1750 and 1900 or so.  Among the old books in my own library into which I dip from time to time is a wonderful volume by John Timbs, English Eccentrics and Eccentricities (London, 1875).  Since this is an anthology of English eccentrics, domestic animals naturally make frequent appearance.  We are all familiar with the little old lady who leaves everything to the cat; but all this pales in comparison with the habitual behavior of the Rev. Henry Egerton, the son of the Bishop of Durham, and the eighth Earl of Bridgewater.  

 The Earl of Bridgewater

            This learned and bibliophilic nobleman took up residence in Paris, where he became an expert collector of early French literature.  (The Egerton manuscripts in the British Library are today among its notable medieval collections.)   His lordship preferred canine to human company and was wont to give elaborate dinner parties for his numerous dogs, all of them sumptuously appareled and seated at his dinner table.  “If he be lent a book, he carries his politeness so far as to send it back, or rather have it conveyed home, in a carriage,” writes one contemporary observer.  “He gives orders that two of his most stately steeds be caparisoned under one of his chariots and the volume, reclining at ease in milord’s landau, arrives, attended by four footmen in costly livery at the door of its astonished owner.  His carriage is frequently to be seen filled with his dogs.”

 milord Egerton's dinner party

           

Demise of the Jalopy

 Norman Rockwell celebrates bloguiste's fourteenth birthday

“Don't it always seem to go,” asks our great philosopher Joni Mitchell, “That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?” But things are even worse than that, because once it’s been gone long enough—whatever it may be—you don’t even know that you once had it.  Especially in ages of rapid social and material change like our own, large swaths of human experience can be erased in a decade or less.

            Take, for example, the jalopy.  One of the things that still strikes me as odd whenever I am in a large open parking lot at an airport or a shopping mall is that all the cars, practically without exception, look new.  When I was young half the cars on the road were genuine jalopies.  Industrial statistics prove that there were lots of cars made in America in the 1950s.  They cannot all have been exported to Cuba.   Yet you hardly would have known that in the rural enclaves where I used to hang out.  Median vehicular age seemed to be about seventeen years, four months; pre-war models were by no means unusual.  

 a Dorothea Lange classic

            Many of the jalopies were mongrels, the product of some shade-tree jerry-rigging involving somebody’s uncle and a transplantation of  a fortuitously acquired Mercury transmission into a Chevrolet.  These cars were always breaking down, which meant in turn that their owners were always fixing them.  And here’s another thing that’s gone.  There was hardly a kid in America who could not take apart and reassemble any car Detroit made, and a sizeable proportion of our national youth seemed to devote a sizeable proportion of their time to doing exactly that.  Some years ago, after I had been living in my affluent New Jersey college town for a couple of decades, I realized with a start that I had never, no not once, seen a teen-aged boy constructing or deconstructing a jalopy  in the family driveway.  Needless to say I haven’t seen once since then, either.

            There are other interesting and related things that I have not seen.  For example, at no time in the quarter of a century I have lived in my nice neighborhood of expensive houses set upon largish lots amid expansive lawns has any young native speaker of the English language knocked on my door to inquire whether I would like to hire him to shovel my walks, or mow my lawn, or rake my leaves, or clean out my gutters.

            This is only in part a grumpy geriatric’s complaint of O tempora, o mores!  It is actually an index of a serious economic problem in this country—a problem that in another mood might provide the materials for another essay.  But I raise it here in relation to the demise of the jalopy.  Youngsters of my generation did a lot of low-level job hustling of that sort with the practical aim in mind of buying a car.  Because if you were single-minded, you could in fact save enough to buy one with the gleanings from paper routes and hedge-trimmings.

 Green energy of yesteryear

            Of course you get what you pay for.  I am sure that Joni Mitchell must say that somewhere, too, even if I cannot remember exactly where.  Naturally for two hundred bucks you don’t get a car that actually runs.  Getting ahold of a wheel base with something like a chassis on it was merely the first step on a long journey toward actual automotion.  Your jalopy would then demand of you a few hundred hours of sweat equity, cutthroat negotiations with the sometimes unsavory tribe of junkyard proprietors, and nearly endless “trading” with other jalopy builders.  I use the quotation marks on the word “trading” because the ratio of actual goods-exchange to inconsequential schmooze was pitifully low.  Everybody wanted to tell you about the car they were constructing.            

            I deduce from the national press that the prospect of gasoline at four dollars a gallon presages the end of civilization as we have known it.  I know that orthodox existentialism demands that we live in the moment, but could we not on occasion be allowed just the tiniest peek back over our shoulders?  When I entered high school the average cost for a gallon of gasoline was 38¢, and the minimum wage was 75¢ an hour (it’s now $7.50).  So it now requires a whole half an hour of labor to purchase a gallon of gasoline, whereas in the good old days it only took half an hour.   But as I never knew anybody in the South who paid the minimum wage for casual labor, I felt lucky when I could command 50¢.  That was with a hand-powered mower, of course.  Even the meanest jalopy required many hours—so many that I and many of my friends never achieved more than a time-share on tires.  But it did mean that the cultural diversity of the vehicles on the road was conspicuous.

            When I began writing this essay I had no definite knowledge that there was a Norman Rockwell cover that covered it, but I did know there had to be one, if you grasp the distinction.  People like myself are often chided by the politically advanced for buying into the fantasy world called “Norman Rockwell’s America”.  I do have to say that when it comes to fantasy Americas, Rockwell’s is awfully good; but if I had my choice of nostalgias I’d probably choose to live in “Albert Bierstadt’s America” or maybe Mary Cassatt’s.  Unfortunately the political mood of post-modernism requires most of us to live in “Roy Lichtenstein’s America”.  He’s the comic book guy.

           

Bloguiste Completes Swook, and World Trembles

    
     


This post will be the self-indulgent celebration of the bloguiste’s recently achieved swook.  The reader can take it or leave it.

 

          I am inspired by the word blog itself, which is an abbreviated form of web plus log.  Everything about the cybernetic world is rushed and breathless.  One must do what one can to avoid disyllables, which by the very laws of thought must take twice as long to enunciate as  monosyllables.  Swook—a vocable of my own invention that fills the much needed gap separating swim (n.) from book--achieves a wonderful economy.  For by a most extraordinary concatenation of serendipities I yesterday brought to completion two mighty works.

            The first is the manuscript of a book provisionally entitled The Dark Side of the Enlightenment.  The second is my swim from Bar Harbor, ME to Redondo Beach, CA.  Neither of the projects was completed on the day it began, needless to say, but neither was the building of Rome, roughly comparable accomplishments.  Furthermore, the swim part might be regarded as slightly allegorical.  From a consultation of Google Maps I discover that the shortest driving distance between Bar Harbor and Redondo Beach is 3283 miles.  That’s if you are willing to go by I-80 and pay some tolls.  Believe me, I’ve paid my tolls.  For the last eighteen years I have tried to start every morning with a swim, and I have succeeded in doing so at least seventy-five percent of the time.

            I am convinced that even by the most conservative reckoning—so conservative that it is probably even honest--I have now completed the 231,123 twenty-five-yard lengths of the Dillon Gymnasium pool needed for a metaphorical crossing of the North American Continent.  To tell you the truth, I was amazed at the discovery.  I thought I was still fighting off sharks somewhere around Saint George, Utah, but statistics don’t lie.  Much.

 Brrrr Harbor, Maine

            Moving on to the bibliographical side of my swook, the manuscript I have just completed is 140,480 words long.  This seemed plenty long to me while I was writing it, but in fact in the great scheme of things it is at best a moderate production.  I’ve produced a few more words that Dickens did in A Tale of Two Cities (135,420), though Fenimore Cooper aces me out at 145,469 in The Last of the Mohicans.  These titles also have a happy symbolism about them.  I wrote some of the book in Paris, and as to the last Mohican, nothing more need be said.

Redondo Beach, California: the Pier

            As for the real big boys, I simply cannot compete.  My manuscript falls between a quarter and a fifth of the length of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the only book I can think of at the moment that seems to provide a fair parallel for literary quality and likely impact on world consciousness.  War and Peace logs in at 587,267 words, though I must admit that I don’t know whether that refers to the original Russian or to the English of the wonderful “Inner Sanctum” translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude published by Simon and Schuster in 1942.

       
Note the date.  One of many great features of this edition is its patriotic character, reflected in the fine introduction by Clifton Fadiman and even more tellingly in its end-paper maps, which show in stark comparison the advance of Napoleon to Moscow in 1812 with the advance of the German army to its furthest point on November 27, 1941.  Think "Stalingrad".   If we take the starting point of Napoleon’s campaign as Köningsberg in Prussia his army had to march—always on its stomach, remember, which is very like the Australian crawl—780 miles each way!  But of course he had to get to East Prussia from Paris in the first place, which would have added another 1053 outward miles to his trip.  In other words I long ago outdistanced Marshal Ney.

       
All of this is vaguely relevant, because the last chapter of my book is about Napoleon—sort of.  It is entitled “Did Napoleon Exist?”  My contract does not allow me to reveal trade secrets in an uncopyrighted format, so that I am forbidden to reveal the answer in this venue.  You will have to read my book to find out.  I will point out, however, that the opening scene in War and Peace is a cocktail party in Saint Petersburg in 1805 in which certain characters are discussing whether on not Napoleon is the Antichrist.  I shall further note that the entire round trip distance between Paris and Moscow is three thousand, six hundred and sixty-six miles!  Need I say more?  Let history judge.

       
For all its exhilaration an achieved swook does bring with it its own anxieties.  What next?  Alexander could weep for the want of new worlds to conquer.  My problem is of a different sort.  A septuagenarian standing before the pier in Redondo Beach has to wonder whether, at a rate of roughly three hundred miles a year, there is much likelihood of ever getting back home.  However, I am planning a slightly more northerly route, beginning at the point where the California-Oregon line hits the coast and swimming eastward along the 42nd parallel to Plymouth Bay.

           

Educational Train Wreck

The question that was fluttering the pundits was “Who will win Ohio?”  I presume that the results of “Super Tuesday” mean that we can start waving  goodbye to Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, though we’ll have to wait until November to say goodbye to Mitt Romney.  It’s been a real squeaker, but the Republicans, against daunting odds, have managed to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory.  Mr. Santorum self-destructed just before the Michigan primary when a series of merely unusually bizarre statements encouraged the press to dig out some of his really bizarre statements of yesteryear.  It turns out there is no operative policy of Too Weird to Fail.  Who knew?

            One of his Parthian shots related to a subject I actually know something about, higher education.  Mr. Santorum, who has two postgraduate degrees, said that President Obama is a snob (indeed, “What a snob!”) for saying that all Americans should go to college.  President Obama never said that, but what people actually say has so little to do with the spirit of this campaign that the issue seldom arises.  The President has suggested, several times, that Higher Education is a good thing, and some of his followers are now talking about it as a “right”.  So the question is worth considering. Would universal higher education be good for America?  I don’t think so.

            Among the legends of bureaucratic inanity is the story of a European governmental commission tasked, early in the twentieth century, with investigating an alarming rise in railway accident deaths.   Statistical analysis revealed that most people killed in train accidents had been sitting in the last car of the train.  The recommendation of the commission was simplicity itself.  Just remove the last car from every train!

            Agitation for a “right” to universal higher education here is of similar inanity.  What do you do if the last car in the train of your public education system—that would be public high school, if you grasp my allegory—what do you do if this car keeps derailing?  I would respectfully suggest that what you do not do is add another car.

            Our high schools are a mess—not all of them, of course, but far too many.  The mess is not one that governmental policy has directly created, nor one the federal government can directly address effectively.  While American public education is a somewhat more relevant topic for discussion in a presidential race than contraception, it’s on the same continuum.  And before the educational crisis can be addressed, it has to be convincingly identified.  If secondary education is broken, we need to try to fix secondary education, not winch the problem up to higher ground.  A generic high school diploma that cannot guarantee so much as real literacy is worthless as a professional credential; but the diploma was not always worthless.

            The notion of universal public education financed by the public purse is based in a forgotten contract.  Citizens of the Republic have an obligation to become active contributors to its social health and vigor.  The Republic has the responsibility to provide its citizens with with the opportunity to gain certain fundamental skills of citizenship.  But that forgotten contract was itself founded on something yet more forgotten: the assumption that the young would be prepared for their state education and supported in its pursuit within the context of a wholesome and caring household.

            There is a good deal of outrage about what has followed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision—to wit, torrents of fat-cat money mainly used to finance thirty-second political attack ads on television.  I share the outrage, but if we need to be protected against our own freedom I’d first look elsewhere.  I have heard no outrage, none, that even without the Supreme Court we seem content to have an electorate that casts its votes on the basis of an education gained in the commercial breaks of televised athletic matches.

            The latest in our endless series of school massacres was perpetrated by a certain T. J. Lane, aged 17, in the high school at Chardon, OH.  I don’t know what courses Mr. Lane or his victims had been pursuing.  Not long ago, however, I read the beautifully written memoirs of General William Tecumseh Sherman.  Sherman, who you will recall really won Georgia, was born in 1820 in Lancaster, near Columbus, when Ohio was still largely wilderness.  When he was five he entered the school there, a school like most in the early Republic entrepreneurially established by one educated man or woman who was often the entire faculty. 

             Sherman wrote: “I continued at the Academy in Lancaster, which was the best in the place, indeed as good as any school in Ohio.  We studied all the common branches of knowledge, including Latin, Greek, and French.”  That was when he was eleven or twelve years old.  At sixteen he left to become a cadet at the Military Academy.  “During the autumn of 1835 and the spring of 1836 I devoted myself chiefly to mathematics and French, which were known to be the chief requirements for admission to West Point.”  How many high school students today devote themselves “chiefly” to anything taxing and academic?  The relevant question about Ohio might be who lost it?