So people are doing all sorts of
novel things to distract themselves, raise their spirits, avoid thinking about
unpleasant realities, or simply kill time during the novel virus pandemic. One of the things they are doing is to begin answering
almost any question asked of them with the word so. “So we’re just sitting
here cooped up like everybody else, but…”
To be sure this aberration long antedates the current plague, of which
it is, however, one of several linguistic analogues. It is far from clear what part of speech so is in such constructions, though it
clearly cannot be an honest conjunction.
I’d have to side with Miss Ihrig, my elementary school grammar
teacher. Words like hence, thus, then, yet, moreover, still, and so (when so
means therefore) are not conjunctions.
They are formal conjunctive adverbs….So so has about as much of a claim to be at the head of that sentence
as a razorback hog has to unemployment benefits, but let it pass. I suppose I should be grateful that it isn’t Like.
“Like, we’re just like sitting here like just cooped up…"
Living in effective isolation as we
do, we have been largely unaware of hip ways to kill time. With us it has been mainly reading, video
binging, and continuous, protracted tournaments of games of skill. Well, some
skill. We completed one cribbage
tournament, and are now well into a Boggle tournament. Modesty forbids me from reporting who won the
first or who is ahead in the second. In
my last post I described a vehicular birthday party in which we had
participated, little knowing (as I later learned from numerous emails) that the
genre was already well established and perhaps even “trending”. This past weekend we had a somewhat similar
experience.
"American Gothic" by Grant Wood and by the Goths themselves
Our daughter, a major executive
hunkered down in a Manhattan apartment--from which she conducts a wide variety
of business, including large electronic staff meetings, with virtual virtuosity--thought
it might be a morale booster for her hard-working team to sponsor a staff competition
in another trending amusement that I shall call the photographic tableau vivant. The idea here is to get yourself photographed
in a pose that invokes a famous painting.
I thought that this, too, was an original and promising idea. Left to my own devices I would have chosen
the posture of Goya’s “Maja desnuda”. It’s
a case of type casting. But I didn’t
have a choice. Katy apparently wanted to
win her own competition, and she thought she had in her two parents the raw
materials for an unbeatable rendition of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” O wad some Power the giftie gie us/ To see
ousels as ithers see us! The
photography was effected on Saturday. On
Sunday I saw in the Times a mention
of the new sport, including specifically a posed version of “American Gothic.”
I have now had the opportunity to
see the results of the contest, which are very impressive. While I think we could reasonably be
described as remaining competitive, the standard was extraordinarily high, and
we would have been lucky to show or even place.
There is a downside to hanging out with very smart people. But very wisely the Authorities decided to
invoke the Dodo-bird verdict from Alice
in Wonderland: “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.” Out of family pride I will point to one other
outstanding entry, the “portrait” of one of my delightful granddaughters (Lulu
Fleming-Benite) as orchestrated by her likewise delightful and slightly younger
sister (Cora Louise Fleming-Benite).
Alice Neel portrait / Lulu Fleming-Benite (by Cora Louise Fleming-Benite)
A few weeks ago I praised Queen
Elizabeth’s pep-talk to her countrymen.
In it she identified three qualities that in her opinion could help see
her country through the crisis. One of
them was good-humored resolve. Of course she actually said “good-humoured”.
That good-humoured resolve might
be the contemporary British version of the old stiff upper lip I will regard as one of the more benign evidences
of the international impact of American culture, for I have thought that
hilarity in the face of difficulty is more an American thing.
The playful, puckish quality clearly discernible in mobile birthday
parties and photographic tableaux vivants could serve us well if
extended throughout the lively arts. I
think particularly of the arts of the stage.
One of the secrets of success shared by creative artists of all kinds is
the ability to see and to exploit usually unnoticed similarities among
disparate data. What is the
characteristic icon of our shared situation?
I would say it is the face mask. Throughout our country skilled volunteers sit
at their sewing machines turning out masks by the gross, many of them works of
art. When our dear friend Elizabeth
Billington Fox of La Crosse mentioned to us that she was among these Singer
Sister heroines we were shameless enough to beg a pair for ourselves, and boy
are they beauties! The William Morris
motif is a graceful homage to the year we spent at the William Morris Centre in
London. And what strange accoutrement of
costume do we associate with the ancient origins of our theater? The mask, of course. Spell that masque, and you will immediately grasp the connection. The Renaissance masque was a usually short
interlude on a mythological, political, or especially moral theme, almost
always played by amateurs. E. A. Poe took a pioneering step toward a
pandemic masque in his great short story “The Masque of the Red Death.” But in that one, unfortunately, the pathogen
triumphs. I want to commission one in
which it loses, something along the lines of Milton’s Comus. This is a dramatic
allegory of chastity in which an otherwise unnamed “Lady” triumphs over the
charms, blandishments, and even the date-rape drugs of Comus, god of wassail,
revelry, and sexual promiscuity—the dramatic antithesis of social isolation
indeed.
haute couture masks by Elizabeth Billington Fox
Surely some talented reader of this
blog could come up with a brief Masque of
the Dread Slime. The cathartic
potential for the national audience would be boundless. In the medieval mystery plays the audience
was given license to vociferate execration against any of Satan’s brood and
other unpopular characters like Judas and Herod. Who could be more unpopular than Corona
Virus? Not even Cruella de Vil. There is a contemporary analogue in our elder
son’s Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, where each year a street pageant
commemorates the community’s hard-won victory over Storm Sandy in
2012, with Sandy represented by a scary float not much different from a
medieval hell’s mouth. It seems that
these days the trending epithet for a really, really awful person is scumbag, replacing the once preferred slimeball. That
would probably be different if more people knew that the principal meaning of
the Latin noun virus is “slime”.
