By Jesus' Nails

Searching for the best and most inventive of curses he could find to make a point against the visitor who had just too severely cursed his manservant, Walter Shandy settles upon the Roman Catholic form of excommunication. Explains Walter:  

"I have the greatest veneration in the world for that gentleman, who, in distrust of his own discretion in this point, sat down and composed (that is at his leisure) fit forms of swearing suitable to all cases, from the lowest to the highest provocation which could possibly happen to him — which forms being well considered by him, and such moreover as he could stand to, he kept them ever by him on the chimney-piece, within his reach, ready for use. . . .

[S]o rising up and reaching down a form of excommunication of the church of Rome, a copy of which, my father (who was curious in his collections) had procured out of the leger-book of the church of Rochester, writ by Ernulphus the bishop—with a most affected seriousness of look and voice, which might have cajoled Ernulphus himself—he put it into Dr. Slop’s hands."

              (Laurence Sterne, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent." - Bk.II, ch.II)

Bishop Ernulphus's Anathema, which Sterne then writes out in its entirety in both Latin and English, contains such passages as this:

May the holy choir of the holy virgins, who for the honour of Christ have despised the things of the world, damn him — May all the saints, who from the beginning of the world to everlasting ages are found to be beloved of God, damn him — May the heavens and earth, and all the holy things remaining therein, damn him, or her.’

 Boat Ride to the Other Side

Colorful stuff, that - a pure and unadulterated stream from a Golden Age of Cursing, surely one of the grander legacies of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. I had long been meaning to work up a helpful practicum of curses and cursing, recognizing (as must any civilized person) that the art of swearing has fallen into a sad state in the past several centuries, and wishing to add my small effort gratis to the cultural revival that must surely overtake this once-great nation. 

Stumbling on a Huffington Post story about Jesus' nails, this passage in Sterne sprang immediately to mind. "By Jesus' nails!" I thought, seeming to remember that I must often have read some such Shandean passage as: " 'Pon Our Lord's nails!" cried my father, "I would not give a fiddlestick for it!" T'was a round papish oath - my Uncle Toby blush'd." Alas, the oath appears nowhere in Sterne, though many just as fine are found there.

A moment's reading and it dawned that the report concerned no such trenchant manner of speech, nor even Our Lord's grooming habits, but a new documentary concerning the alleged discovery of some of the nails used at the crucifixion. The nails turned up most recently in the laboratory of a Tel Aviv anthropologist who is an expert on ancient bones. Science, for all its pretensions, seems to be as often an unwitting dupe to superstition as it is a font of knowledge. 

The premise of the film, "The Nails of the Cross," is that some nails were discovered in a Jerusalem tomb (supposed to be the tomb of the high priest who surrendered Jesus to the Roman authorities), then mysteriously disappeared for 20 years and were rediscovered in a Tel Aviv laboratory by a journalist named Simcha Jacobovici. The filmmaker is trying to establish that these were very likely the nails used to secure Jesus to the cross.

Several thoughts spring to mind - recall the once-brisk trade in "wood of the true cross." Historians have always scoffed at this phenomenon by pointing out that enough of the true cross exists in the reliquaries of the faithful to build an armada of ships. It seems a reasonable corollary to suspect that there is also ballast enough in the crop of extant holy nails to sink the entire fleet. The Church wisely forbids the sale of these holy relics.

Nonetheless, the curiosity for relics is immemorial in the species - and in truth it seems a natural urge to want some connection to those we regard with particular veneration as especially wise, holy or good. Hipbone connected to the thighbone, thighbone connected to the legbone, legbone connected to the footbone - close is good enough in the veneration business. But, as Thoreau famously (and somewhat mystifyingly) remarks, "Some evidence is circumstantial, like trout in the milk." Even circumstantial evidence would be strong by comparison with the speculations that typically afix the provenance of a relic, Jesus' nails being no exception.

 The Radius of St. Ulna

But just as important, relics have been a part of our language for milennia - they are the very stuff of oaths. Our forefathers have sworn by the bones of St. Hilarion, or by the chains/keys/watchfob/spectacles/truss of St. Peter, or by the chasuble of St. Chrysostom or the nickers of St. Bridgid. 

A good oath belongs to any person of imagination touched with a gift of the logos - it should enter the conversation like an aged cheese. Here, as a foretaste and advertisement of my intended "Panopticon, Thesaurus and Amanuensis to the Ancient and Revered Art of Swearing Like a Bloody Gentleman (Classical Method)," I have included a handy exercise - see if you can replace the sample captions with oaths riper, more penetrating and memorable.

 "By the ballocks and braces of Pitt the Elder." 

 "By all the mystical appurtenances of St. Cunagunda."
 (This isn't as easy as it seems)
 

"Ministering saints and angels of mercy preserve us!"

Critic's Notebook: 'The Wrong End of a Woman'

"Methinks, brother, replied my father, you might, at least, know so much as the right end of a woman from the wrong . . . . Right end of a woman! — I declare, quoth my uncle, I know no more which it is than the man in the moon!"

    - Laurence Sterne, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent." (Bk.I, ch. XXXII)

In the age of social networks, when women stream live videos of their home deliveries on Facebook, share sonograms, breast feeding tips and cervical dilation data to the millimeter (mm), it's entirely likely that you may happen upon the "wrong end of a woman" while surfing the Internet or the wilderness that is cable. Marni Kotak has just upped the ante for overshare. Kotak is a performance artist who intends to give birth before an audience on the stage of a Brooklyn art museum. 

(Probably should have had it in the woods)

I have no particular difficulties with this intended act of public spawning - after all, it seemed an inevitability, given our cultural impetus towards the sort of personal "transparency" that too often collapses into vapidity. And you can attend or not, depending on your interest and whether the event corresponds with one of the lacunae on your astrological, lunar or standard (Gregorian) social calendar. If it turns out that you can make it, I'm sure it was meant to be.

Her motives, whether narcissistic or gender-empowering, don't pique my interest so much as her rationale for choosing to make the birth a public spectacle. It is, she claims, an artistic moment: “Giving birth is the most direct expression of the creative life force, and, therefore, the highest form of art. By giving birth in public as a work of performance art, I am making the statement that everyday life is art, just as it is.”

These two sentences bear some scrutiny, the first being incomprehensible and the second being just wrongheaded. For starters, the idea of a "creative life force" has the ring of profundity and spiritual gravitas that masks its lack of any sense. It's fun to confer ontological ballast onto our grand words and overheated phrases, but aside from a world of living breathing creatures all capable of doing animal things like procreating, we'd look long and hard for something else besides - a "life force" driving all these acts of creation here in the sublunar dirt. As though one were to watch all the whirls and frolics of a dancing child and then wonder, "But where's its 'dance'?"

Furthermore, "Everyday life" is not art - it's what the garbageman does while riding the garbage truck, what the clerk at the convenience store does while ringing up your corndog, what the janitor does when the office has cleared out for the day. I'm not saying these things can't be done artfully, with a certain individual panache, with a sense of style or flair or joie de vivre or personal elegance, but they're just not art. Even things that can be done artistically, like applying makeup or dressing store windows or hanging draperies, aren't art - to claim that they are is to allow too broadly, to permit that even the cheesy drapings of the workmanlike Christo comprise art, which is plausibly open to dispute.

Art about art

Art, even "realist" art, necessarily involves artifice. It can represent the world as it appears, someone's perception of the world, a sentiment about the world. Art is intentional in the sense that artistic works necessarily have an object (even if no more substantial than a psychic state) - something beyond the artistic object which gets expressed in some act of representation. It's also intentional in the sense that it's deliberate. Giving birth (beyond some indefinite point at which natural process is no longer choice) becomes biological inevitability, neither intentional nor unintentional. (This has no bearing on whether an "artist's intentions" are relevant to judging a work.)

But giving birth in public is just giving birth in public - just that and no more. It isn't the "direct expression" of anything at all - no more than a phallus is a "phallic symbol." It may be wonderful for all concerned, but it isn't a "performance" of something else, it neither expresses nor represents something beyond itself nor transcends everyday living to say anything about anything.

Art about life

In short, everyday living isn't art, and childbirth is part of everyday living for many of us carbon-based types. A counterexample here may be both helpful and fun. Suppose that some "artist," humbly obscure or otherwise, decides that his loo is now his studio, and begins to take commissions on his output. Does that make him an artist? or transform his performance of an everyday and inevitable function, however beneficial to himself or advantageous to the larger society, into "Art"? 

 

The answer by now should be at least as clear as mud.

Name It, You Can Have It

[My father's] opinion, in this matter, was, That there was a strange kind of magick bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly impressed upon our characters and conduct. . . . How many Caesars and Pompeys, he would say, by mere inspiration of the names, have been rendered worthy of them? And how many. . .who might have done exceeding well in the world, had not their characters and spirits been totally depressed and Nicodemus’d into nothing?

   - Laurence Sterne, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent." (Bk.I, ch. XIX)

The sports section in yesterday's New York Times features a reflection on Ted Williams's 70-year-old record .406 batting average, a neat tribute to Williams's prowess as "baseball’s greatest hitter." 

The Swing

What caught my attention, however, was this: "His batting average stood at .39955 with a season-finale doubleheader to be played the next day [Sept. 28, 1941] at Shibe Park, home of Connie Mack’s Athletics." That particular sentence stood out because, driving home through Denver a day or so earlier, I passed by Sports Authority Field, formerly Invesco Field, the home stadium of the Denver Broncos. (Sports Authority, since there's no way for most people to know this bit of trivia, is a Denver-based chain of sporting goods stores which purchased the naming rights to the stadium last month in a 25-year deal at $6 million per annum. Obviously, Invesco needed the dough in these troubled economic times.)

Where is this?

Anyway, reading this sentence, the name "Shibe Park" came back through the mists of a half-century, a nerdy kid glued to the radio listening to Yankees or Dodgers or Giants baseball games. Everyone in those palmier days knew where Ebbetts Field or the Polo Grounds were, and which teams played where. Comiskey Park and Fenway Park, Wrigley Field and Forbes Field, Briggs Stadium - the names of the venues went with the names of the teams. Some were obvious - the Indians played in Cleveland Stadium. 

But who on earth plays at Progressive Field? Or MetLife Stadium? The Packers still play at Lambeau Field in Green Bay - but who plays at M&T Bank Stadium? The 49ers play in Candlestick Park. Who plays in Qualcomm Stadium? Even a casual fan can probably tell you who plays at Soldier Field ("da Bears") or Coors Field. But Safeco Field? PETCO Park?

 Soldier Field (with classical neo-fascist facade) 

Admittedly, corporate sponsorship is nothing new. . .

"It's your coliseum, Boss . . . "

But - and not wishing to belabor the point - on the time-honored premise that sport is a metaphor for life, I've come up with a few of my own ideas for naming opportunities. I suspect these have already occurred to someone, but try them on and roll them around on your tongue.

 . . . the Frito Lay/Toys-R-Us 112th Legislative Session of the State of Texas

. . . the Nabisco/Hellman's Real Mayonnaise Presidential Bodyguards

. . . the Budget Rent-a-Car/QuickLube Presidential Motorcade

The high-stakes sponsorships, of course, are already taken.

The Koch Industries/Time-Warner-Disney Supreme Court of the U.S.

 The Cargill/ADM Senate of the United States

The Goldman Sachs Chair of the Federal Reserve

No, I'm not even going to think about it. Could never happen . . . .

"The Lip" By Any Other Name

[I]n respect to the choice and imposition of christian names, [my father] thought a great deal more depended than what superficial minds were capable of conceiving. His opinion, in this matter, was, That there was a strange kind of magick bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly impressed upon our characters and conduct.

          - Laurence Sterne, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent." (Bk.I, ch. XIX)

There is "magick" in a name, magic particularly in a nickname - though admittedly not much in a nickname like Magic. But imagine having a loose football in your possession on the near and urgent approach of someone named Bronko Nagurski. Or Night Train Lane. Imagine trying to catch a running back named Hopalong Cassady or Crazylegs Hirsch. Or The Refrigerator (Perry).

Bronislau "Bronko" Nagurski

Gone, it seems, are the great nicknames of yesteryear. Where are the Night Trains or the Hacksaws? Where Crazylegs, Bronko and the Bird, Babe and Yogi (named for his penchant of sitting the bench with legs drawn under him and crossed like a yogi's)? Where Wilt the Stilt, Doctor J and the Pearl, the Joes (Shoeless and Joltin'), Peewee and the Duke? Where Dizzy and Daffy, Tank and Bulldog? The great Yankees of the 1920s boasted a Babe, a Bubbles and a Dusty, besides the labial loudmouth Leo "The Lip" Durocher (his mediocrity at the plate memorialized by Babe Ruth's own nickname for him, "The All-American Out").

Leo "The Lip" Durocher

The White Sox fielded Jiggs Donohue, the Happys Felsch and Foreman, a Woodie, a Dummy, a Bubber, a Bump and a Mule. The New York Giants of the '50s boasted two Roseys (Brown and Grier). Not to mention any number of Reds and Docs, Patsys and Paddys, Dutches and Frenchies, Chicks and Kids, Fuzzys and Buzzys and Bibbles (Bawel). Even (in a less ironic time) a Queenie (O'Rourke), who played baseball back in the day for the forgotten New York Highlanders. University of Minnesota teams of the late '20s fielded a fullback named the "Owatonna Thunder," a localized meteorological commonplace generally accompanied by snow.

Admittedly in more recent decades there is "Goose" Gossage, that son of Colorado famed for his architectural facial hair. Not a bad nickname at that.

 "Goose" Gossage in Yankee uniform

Still, lest anyone dismiss all this as mere nostalgic lament, I urge in defense of this screed that "studies were done." The New York Times reports in today's edition that "there is widespread agreement that the use of nicknames across American society has steadily slipped" - most notably in professional sports, where such data is most available. "In an age of A-Rod and D-Wade, when nicknames rarely conjure imagery beyond a corporate logo, it can be easy to bemoan the loss of another slice of simpler times."

One possible reason for the diminishing frequency of the colorful nickname is simply that nicknames are nowadays less useful, given the trend toward less-common names. Kobe Bryant doesn't need a nickname; his father, Joe, was more memorable as Jellybean. And what else would you call someone named Carmello?

Another possible reason is that nicknames were once awarded to remark physical attributes. Lefty or Whitey are harmless enough sobriquets, but gone are the "simpler times" when a chap could boldly go as Fatty.

Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle

The loss is lamentable because it is also a loss of imagination. All things considered, "The Lip" by any other name would have been just another loudmouth . . .

Jim Boeheim (Syracuse Orangemen)

On Lamarck (Get Set, Go)

It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates everything to itself as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand.

               - Laurence Sterne, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent."

It appears that, in a recent post to this blog, I dealt with the great biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, if not unfairly then perhaps with a levity unbecoming in me and undeserved by him. Yet even his few devotees (among whom I humbly number myself) admit that he was "largely ignored or attacked during his lifetime [and] never won the acceptance and esteem of his colleagues . . . . Today, the name of Lamarck is associated merely with a discredited theory of heredity, the 'inheritance of acquired traits.'" (My admiration for Lamarck is an intellectual variant of what the Bike Snob calls "salmoning," i.e., riding against the prevailing current of traffic, opinion, etc.)

Lamarck believed that organisms did not originally occur in their present configuration, but were slowly altered over time by adventitious environmental forces; these changes devolved genetically to their offspring and thus became part of the catalog of physical characteristics of any species. Lamarckianism is caricatured in popular stories recounting how animals came to acquire certain marks - there is, for example, a 19th-century poem in American Southern dialect explaining that one of the passengers on the ark, out of utter boredom, shaved the possum's tail to string the first banjo. Pure malarky, of course, but instructive as an impure version of Lamarck.

Lamarck had been long discredited, until now. An interested reader has unearthed recent evidence, buttressed by genetic theory, that Lamarck was not entirely. . . well . . . off the mark. On the contrary, he was on to something - call it 'genetic memory' or more properly, epigenetics. Researchers at the University of Bristol (UK) and the University of Umea (Sweden) used 19th-century records of harvests and food prices to identify times of famine and plenty in an isolated rural community in Sweden. The researchers tabulated three generations of 300 families and found that the health and lifespan of the grandchildren was linked to their grandfathers' access to food while in early adolescence. 

University of Bristol Genetic Research Team

Children tended to live longer if their grandfather endured food scarcity during this time of life. The team concluded that these genetic effects are a short-term genetic modification that allows a forebear's experiences to be 'captured' in his sperm, enabling subsequent generations to respond to periods of scarcity and famine like those experienced by parents or grandparents. Hence, genetic features are not entirely inherent in the genetic material. They can be altered in a generation or two by external factors to answer recurring environmental fluctuations - just what Lamarck originally proposed.

Lamarckian sperm (before 'capture')

This research has vindicated my lifelong admiration for the genius of Lamarck and my own proclivity to find a connection between a person's appearance and their propensity (for example) to write fiction or live a life of voluntary simplicity. And while I concede that his vindication required a more sophisticated understanding of genetics than Lamarck himself possessed, nonetheless I knew he was right from the start. That is the beauty of a spanking good theory, that it assimilates every appearance to its own rule and, try as a man may, he will ride him like a hobbyhorse to destruction or enlightenment, whichever comes first. I might have been badly thrown. I count myself lucky this time.