468 COVID-19: How New Yorkers Cope

BROWDERBOOKS

I have just signed with E.L. Marker, a hybrid offshoot of WiDo Publishing, to publish Forbidden Brownstones, the fifth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York.  It will probably be published early next year.  "A hybrid?" you may ask. "What's that?"  It's a set-up where the author gets the services of an established small press for creating and marketing his book, but the author has full control.  This is what they offered, and it is just what I want.  My current small press will probably terminate me when the contracts for my two books expire on September 30, in which case  all rights will revert to me.  So be it; I'll make other arrangements.  But with a hybrid contract, no one can terminate me but me, myself, and that's now how I want it.  I have full control.  

Next: two more historical novels in the series, and then the big one: Metropolis (that word again!), a vast, sprawling, kaleidoscopic work, four novels in one, covering New York City from 1830 to 1880.  But don't hold your breath, as it may never get published, unless I publish it myself.  And will I even have time, given all my other projects?

I will soon do a media release announcing (at last!) my new website, with links to the most interesting (and sometimes controversial) posts in this blog over the years.

        COVID-19: How New Yorkers Cope

New Yorkers have always congregated on stoops and fire escapes, and in the street in front of their apartment building or home, to communicate.  In other words, to gossip, to chatter, to blab.  Not all New Yorkers, to be sure.  Nineteenth-century middle-class New Yorkers lived in handsome brownstones and would never have been caught sitting on their steep front stoops.  Those stoops set them off from the hoi polloi, and were to be used by family, visiting ministers, and other callers of distinction; tradesmen, deliverymen, and servants were relegated to the basement entrance beneath the stoop.  And all the other city residents?  They usually didn’t have stoops, but they communed on rooftops and later, once such fixtures were mandated, on fire escapes.

      When, en route to Europe, I first came to New York in September 1951, I walked west on West 43rd Street to the docks, to do some pre-voyage business with the French Line, whose pokey-slow liner the de Grasse would get me to Le Havre in less than record time.  Going down the street, I was amazed at the crowds of working-class women and their kids gathered on and near the stoops of the houses.  A child of the suburban Midwest, never had I seen so many people crowding around the entrance of a building.  And they were loud.  I recall one mother yelling to another that one of her kids was doing something he shouldn’t be doing, causing Mom to immediately intervene.  The husbands were of course at work.  And the fact that these residences had stoops bears witness to their having come down in the world.  In this neighborhood, at least, gone were the days when the middle class called them home.

      So the stoop and the nearby street have always been a part of New York living, and today they characterize both middle-class and working-class neighborhoods in all five boroughs.  But this is the time of COVID-19.  With the city in lockdown, and people in masks maintaining social distancing in fear of the virus, are the stoops and fire escapes and sidewalks deserted?  No way!  They are a vital part of New York living, and are chronicled as such in a two-page spread in the Sunday Times of June 14, 2020.  Featured are short accounts from all five boroughs of how New Yorkers of all classes are coping.  Specifically, how they are communicating with their neighbors.  For instance:

• Early April: a man living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, on the second floor of a building facing Central Park West, chats from his window with friends passing by, including a gifted decorator, a cyclist who rides in the park, and a neighbor walking her dogs.  He also waves to a friend and her husband en route to Mount Sinai to give birth (it was a son).

• A Puerto Rican man living in the Port Morris section of the Bronx, near the Bruckner Expressway, reports hearing planes taking off from La Guardia Airport, and also steady traffic on the expressway in spite of the lockdown.  But he also hears his neighbors outside joking in Spanglish or salsa playing.

• St. George, Staten Island: A woman asks the couple next door if they need anything, and half-joking, tells them not to ask for toilet tissue.  Later that afternoon she finds on her stoop a six-pack of toilet tissue and two rolls of paper towels.  “We have extra,” her friends next door explain.

• Late April: A woman in Manhattan’s East Village lives in a deserted building, her neighbors having fled the city.  But when 7 p.m. comes and New Yorkers celebrate first responders by making noise or music from their front windows, she welcomes the music from a tenement across the street, and a sign that two women there hold up: HOW YOU DOIN'?  And when those windows go dark, she hears an electric guitar playing the Star-Spangled Banner, Jim-Hendrix style.

• A woman in Jamaica, Queens, tells how every day a bunch of men, a few masked but most of them maskless, gather on her block to drink beer and chain-smoke on the sidewalk in front of their building, leaving the pavement strewn with cigarette butts.  A few years ago their habitual catcalling so annoyed her that she confronted the main culprit, shook his hand, and asked him not to do it; after that he waved to her regularly and said hello.  Now, when she walks by the same bunch in a mask, one shouts, “Keep the corona away!” and then adds, “But have a Heineken.”

• A longtime super in a building in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, tells how his building, once alive with baby showers, barbecues, and baptisms, is now strangely quiet, as the residents stay indoors. Most are undocumented immigrants who lost their full-time jobs and have trouble paying the rent.  But when a woman in her 70s gets sick, neighbors leave food by her front door.  “For undocumented people,” the super’s wife says, “there’s no stimulus package.”

• In a big housing project for low-income people in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the lockdown has made people tense.  Then a shipment of 20,000 pineapples from Costa Rica arrives, donated by a container terminal down the street.  Two women volunteers rent a U-Haul truck, load it with pineapples, and deliver them to nonprofits and low-income housing projects.  People respond with photos of themselves drinking piña coladas and pineapple tea.

• In Parkchester in the Bronx, a Latino piano player living in a two-story apartment building owned by his parents plays his piano on the front porch every morning at 11, after seniors’ privileged time at the local stores; even the mailman stops to listen.  There is no tip jar, so neighbors leave bottles of wine on the porch.

• In Manhattan’s Chinatown a volunteer neighborhood block association team of young men patrols on Mott Street as a deterrent to anti-Asian hate crimes.  Says one volunteer: “It’s good for the soul.”

• In Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, a third-generation Puerto Rican American and her children chalk inspirational messages on the of the stoop of  the house where she lives with her grandparents.  A photo shows the stoop and its messages:

HEY BROOKLYN

LET’S MAKE SURE

WE LISTEN, REFLECT

TEACH OUR YOUNG (AND OURSELVES)

KEEP A KIND HEART

JUST DO BETTER

IN DARKNESS WE TRANSFORM

IN LIGHT WE GROW

      After each rain, a new quote appears.  

• June: On 28th Street in Astoria, Queens, front-line workers and others gather every night on the street, masked, for a beer, a smoke, or a chat.  When a physical therapist tells of rotating  hospital patients on ventilators, a doctor hands her a loaf of homemade sourdough bread, and the therapist offers him some fresh-picked rhubarb.  Sharing experiences and food, they realize they’re all in this together, and prepare themselves for further challenges in their grinding daily work.

        So it goes in New York today.  I have ZOOMed now with friends three times, twice with New Yorkers and once even with friends in Lincoln, Nebraska: another way to communicate safely in the time of COVID-19.  And strangers in the street greet me and wish me a pleasant day -- normally unheard of in New York, where there are simply too many strangers to acknowledge.  But this is different: we're all in it together.  New Yorkers are coping, and so, I'm sure, is everybody else.

Source Note:  The content of the preceding 
post is drawn from the article "There Stays the Neighborhood" in the Metropolitan Section of the  New York Times of Sunday, June 14, 2020.

Coming soon:  In all the world's art, myth, and literature, by my count there are only five basic stories, maybe six, endlessly repeated with variations.  Can you guess them?

©  2020  Clifford Browder

467. Hot Mama: Goddess, Mother, Virgin, Whore.

BROWDERBOOKS

For a lively three-star Reedsy Discovery review by Jennie Louwes of New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, go here.  

And for my other books, plus summaries and reviews, go here.  

An aside:  Those who follow this blog know what love I have for Goldman Sachs, the vampire squid of Wall Street, second only to my love for Monsanto, whose storied name, linked to diverse controversies, will now disappear, following its acquisition by Bayer in 2016.  But to get back to Goldman: I have just learned that it has been involved in a scandal with 1MDB, a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund, whereby $2.7 billions in stolen funds were spent on luxury apartments, yachts, and diamonds.  I will say for Goldman that even in its most dubious and nefarious dealings, it aims high: not $2.7 million, but $2.7 billion.  And now, as usual, it is trying to avoid admitting fault, even though a former executive has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the authorities.  If Goldman is forced to admit guilt, it will be a shining first, for in all its dubious dealings in the past, it has never done so.  And this is the outfit that has provided so many executives to administrations both Republican and Democratic; scratch our  federal government, and you will almost always uncover a Goldman exec or two, usually in significant positions.  For example, Steven Mnuchin, Trump's Secretary of the Treasury, who is still with Trump, though other Goldman alumni have left him, following disagreements in policy.  Will the vampire squid at last be forced to admit guilt?  Stay tuned.  (For more on Goldman, see post #340 and scroll down; my apologies for the missing illustrations.)

And now at last:

                       Hot Mama

       Goddess, Mother, Virgin, Whore

The gods are still with us insists the Italian scholar Roberto Calasso, one of whose highly acclaimed books I am now reading in translation, and I’m inclined to agree.  For him, it’s especially the pagan gods of ancient Greece and Rome.  I can grasp this, in a certain way.  When we undergo a sudden rash infatuation, we’re at the mercy of Venus, or Aphrodite.  If we feel the urge to make war and kill, Mars, or Ares, has hold of us.  If a writer suddenly finds the needed words of a poem pouring into his head, Apollo and the Muses must be at work.  Without believing literally in the existence of the gods, we can see and feel them as real in sudden moods and urges not otherwise explained.  They are triggers in our psyche, murky motivators that sneak or wiggle or explode upon us.  They explain things otherwise inexplicable; they are a part of us, mysterious but essential.

Am I visited by this pantheon of urges?  Yes, like anyone, but the most basic and omnipresent of my gods is Hot Mama, of whom Venus or Aphrodite is only one of her many faces.  Hot Mama takes many forms, all related; you can’t have one without the others.  Where do I encounter her?  In sudden moods and urges?  Not really.  In my dreams?  Not that I’m aware of.  Where, then?  In my writing, especially, alas, poesy.  (My preference for this word instead of “poetry” indicates a deep suspicion, verging at times on hostility, regarding the whole enterprise — a hostility that I in no way feel toward prose.)  So let’s have a look at the many faces of Mama.

She is mother and goddess.

Here is Aphrodite or Venus, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, and Ceres or Demeter, the Greek goddess of harvest, fertilty, and agriculture.  Also Freia, the Norse goddess of love, fertility, and beauty, and doubtless many more.

Venus before the Mirror, Rubens, 1612-1615.
That's Cupid holding the mirror.

Venus/Aphrodite appears in Western art as naked, sensual, and seductive, often on the hefty side, as in Titian and Rubens, that being the ideal of the day.  But those hefty Venuses turn me off; their vast proportions could envelope you, smother you.  “Aha!” a captious critic may declare. “You’re gay, so you must hate women!”  Which on his part would be stupid, and ignorant as well.  Gay men get along fine with hetero women, once sex and romance are ruled out, for that makes room for friendship.  Romance lasts a year or two; friendship can last a lifetime. When Bob and I were together those many years, we had more women friends than men, and most of them were hetero.  As for Venus in art, if the hefty ones turn me off, I find Botticelli’s Venus, seen in his marvelous painting The Birth of Venus, vastly appealing; svelte and modest in her nakedness, she is less Mama than Virgin.  But for me, I repeat, vastly appealing.

The Birth of Venus, Botticelli, 1484-1485.

The mother goddess is a most necessary deity, given our need of fertility and harvests and grain.  But she can be a great mischiefmaker as well, as witnessed by the Trojan War.  When the goddess of discord hurled into a gathering of the gods an apple marked “For the fairest,” it was claimed by Heres, Athena, and Aphrodite (Juno, Minerva, and Venus), who asked Paris, the Trojan prince, to decide.  Heres offered power, Athena offered wisdom, and Aphrodite promised him Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world.  He went with Aphrodite, who helped him to abduct Helen, the wife of the Greek ruler Menelaus, thus provoking the ten-year Trojan War and the destruction of Troy.  Let’s hope that Helen made him happy … for a while.

She is fertility and growth.

 

For me, spring and summer are closely associated with gods.  Spring is a naked young god flaunting his erection and causing buds to open, flowers to bloom, and roots to suck juices from the earth; he is brazen, fearless, and provocative.  No particular traditional god, but any of them who matches this description.

Summer, on the other hand, is feminine: the mother and seductress, enticing, enveloping, smothering.  I sense her in hot, muggy August, when many plants usually labeled “weeds” — white sweet clover, coneflower, burdock, pilewort, ragweed, and mugwort — grow rank and thick in fields and tower over me.  Unless stopped by the cold weather of autumn, they seem about to take over the world, to embrace and suck and smother me.  Just as, when hiking, I have seen them creep over abandoned cars in remote parklands and fields and ravines, where they embrace and smother them, reclaiming them for a relentless, insidious, and triumphant nature.  This is Mama beyond nurturing and feeding and fertilizing; she can be cruel and lethal — an aspect that cultures other than our own have emphasized, as we’ll soon see.  

So do I hate the summer?  God no, I love it.  I love its berries and harvest them.  I love its weeds with their smooth or prickly stems and intoxicating fragrances, and the peppery or lemony or bitter taste of their leaves.  I have come back from late-summer outings sunburnt and tired, thorn-scratched, my skin itchy with rashes, my whole being drugged with the fullness, the luxuriance, the too-muchness of summer.  Summer entices, summer gluts, summer chokes.

She is violent, lethal, and horrifying.

      It is cultures other than our own who plumb the dark depths of Mama.  Those depths are seen in Coatlicue, the Aztec earth mother, with her necklace of severed human heads.  Her name means “Serpent Skirt,” and she is seen as having a skirt of writhing snakes. She is the mother of the sun, the moon, and the stars, as well as of gods and mortals.  As such, she is associated with the earth as both creator and destroyer, and the legends about her are full of violence and murder.

Coatlicue, National Museum of Anthropology
and History, Mexico City.
El Comandante

Akin to her is Kali, the dark goddess of India, who has been worshiped over time as the Divine Mother and the Mother of the Universe.  She is associated with sexuality and death, as well as with motherhood and mother love.  Variously visualized, she usually has many arms and a dark or blue skin, her eyes red with rage, her hair disheveled, with fangs sometimes protruding from her mouth.  She often wears a skirt of human arms, and like Coatlicue, a garland of human heads.  If Coatlicue comes off as a bugbear and boogeywoman of nightmares, Kali is not someone you would want to meet on a lonely road at night.  Yet her worshipers also see her as a benevolent mother who protects her children and devotees.

Kali, a 1770 print.   Here she has four arms,
and stands on her consort, Shiva, which
shows who's boss.

Somewhat differnt is Pele (pronounced PEH-leh), “the woman who devours the earth.”  The Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes and fire, she dwells in the drizzle-shrouded crater of Mount Kilauea on the island of Hawaii, leaking smoke from fissures in the earth.  Then, when she so chooses, she erupts with earth-shattering violence.  Setting forests ablaze, she sends streams of lava down her slopes to make thousands of residents abandon their doomed houses and flee, until her lava pours into the ocean amid caustic fumes laced with fine specks of glass.  “Pele is coming down to play,” say the Hawaiians.  She is their grandmother, the creator of their island in all its stunning beauty, and must be indulged, appeased.  She can appear in human form, so if you see her hitchhiking, be sure to pick her up, and since she has a weakness for it, offer her some gin.  Like her descendants, she enjoys a little mischief, so if she destroys your home, shrug it off and build another.  (For more on Pele, see my post #380, “When Grandma Burns Your House Down," and scroll down past another mischievous female, my partner Bob's onetime significant other.)

The goddess of fire, Pele, meets the goddess of the sea,
Namakaokahai, as lava flows into the ocean.
Photo taken from a helicopter, July 31, 2018.
Anton

This fiery goddess does not trigger the horror inspired by Kali and Coatlicue.  In my opinion, every people gets the gods that they deserve.  The Jews of the Old Testament wanted a jealous and wrathy god, and they got one.  The Aztecs and the people of India wanted a fearsome mother goddess who bought both life and death, and who filled humans with horror.  But the Hawaiians are too gentle and too mischievous to worship such a deity; they got Pele instead: a loving but capricious grandma whom they can relate to.  They worship her, fear her, respect her; she is primordial, yet of their own time and all too immediate.   She cannot, must not be ignored.

She is lewd.

How could she not be, as the goddess of fertility and growth and too-muchness?  Fertility is not concerned with morality and restraint, only with procreation, with the endless and unlimited increase of life in all its forms.  “Increase and multiply,” God tells Noah and his sons (Genesis 9:7), and in this one matter my lady is true to the Bible.  She is the wantonness in all of us, uncurbed and unashamed: sexuality, overt or hidden, without any need of Freud and his analysis.  She is, in fact, inexplicable.  She does, she never thinks; consequences are not her thing.  A life-affirming, life-degrading slut.

She is virginal.

State one side of her, and its opposite pops up.  Yes, she is a virgin too, the Madonna of Christianity, giving birth to the Savior who will redeem humanity from the curse of the temptress and enticer Eve, who, as Adam’s mate, is yet another mother of us all.  The patriarchal early Christian church had no room for women, those temptresses and seducers, but the people did, and in time forced the cult of the Virgin on the Church.  If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em, and that’s what the fathers did.  Christ will judge us on the day of Judgment, sending some to heaven amd some to hell, but she will be there to plead for us and save all whom she can.  She is wise, accessible, compassionate; she understands.  How could a troubled and sinful humankind not worship her, praise her with litanies, light flickering tapers before her shrines, and build great Gothic cathedrals with exquisite stained-glass windows, and flying buttresses to lift their vaulted ceilings skyward.  Don’t try to puzzle out the Virgin Birth, a theological conundrum devised by the fathers of the church, those logic-chopping explicators and system multipliers.  Madonna needs no such guck.  She is the holiest of mothers, our glory, and our hope.

Madonna of the Book, Botticelli, 1480.
Like Rubens, Sandro preferred blondes.

So there you have it: my Hot Mama, who is goddess, mother, virgin, whore.  Can you blame me for being obsessed with a figure so many-faced and complex, so deliciously ambiguous?  She appears in my recently concocted poetry manuscript “Hot Mama and the Big Sneeze,”  a morality play on steroids.  Just as, in the old morality plays, heaven and hell fought for the soul of Everyman, so in this work Hot Mama, the First of the Red Hot Mamas, contends with the Big Sneeze, who may or may not be God, for control of the Hero, who has flat feet, wears glasses, and may or may not be Siegfried, Mickey Mouse, or us.  But don’t worry, you won’t have to unravel these ambiguities, since no small press will be so foolish as to publish so reverently irreverent a mishmash of alleged poesy, especially when there is plenty in it to offend believers.  

      So now I've told you about my Red Hot Mama.  What gods or goddesses do you have, and how do they affect your life?  And don't say you don't have any, because we all do.  So tell me, who do you worship?  I dare you.  But of course you won't: too busy and maybe too scared.  It would say a lot about you, probably too much.

Coming soon:  Maybe how New Yorkers communicate in and out of lockdown.  Stoops, fire escapes, the street.

©  2020  Clifford Browder

466. Blood

BROWDERBOOKS


For a lively three-star Reedsy Discovery review by Jennie Louwes of New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, go here.  

As always, for my other books, go here.  



                           BLOOD

“Blood!” exclaim Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, uttering their newfound watchword, in anticipation of a midnight foray into a cemetery where they will, in fact, witness a murder. (This, at least, is how it was in a children's theater version of the story that I saw long ago.)

Blood:  The word conjures up all kinds of meanings and associations, some pleasant and some the very opposite.  It can mean heredity.  “Le bon sang ne ment pas” (good blood doesn’t lie) is a saying in French, used by the old nobility to talk up their superiority to commoners (i.e., you and me).  

  Blood is one of the four humors of medieval medicine, a notion that originated with the Greek physician Hippocrates (460-370 B.C.), considered the founder of modern medicine.  The perfect balance of the four — black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood — supposedly guaranteed health.  Furthermore, an excess of any one humor determined a person’s personality.  Black bile made people melancholic (sensitive, artistic); yellow bile made them choleric (full of vitality, but quick to anger); phlegm made them phlegmatic (calm, open to compromise); and blood made them sanguine, meaning joyful and optimistic — a meaning that survives in the word today.  So according to Hippocrates & Co., a bit too much blood isn’t a curse; what’s wrong with being joyful?  If “blood” has a bad press, it’s not his fault.

Growing up, I was told by my parents to eat meat, because meat builds red corpuscles, and red corpuscles make one strong and healthy.  I remember blood swabs recorded in the family doctor’s office, little splats of color smeared on cards year after year with a date.  As I grew up, mine progressed from pink to deeper pink to red.  But not because of red corpuscles, I suspect, for I loathed meat, wouldn’t eat it, was left alone at the lunch table for up to two hours at a time, staring at the cold chunks of meat that, even when warm, repelled me.  My solution: I hid the uneaten bits of meat on a small ledge under the table and later removed them to my knicker pockets and from there to the trash.  But once I forgot to empty my pockets, and my mother, preparing to send my knickers to the laundry, was amazed to find the pockets full of stale chunks of meat.  

Blood is red, and the color red suggests fire and violence, an association reinforced in me more than once, upon seeing a whole building (not my own) engulfed in flames.  Violence often means bloodshed, the taking of life, which in most people inspires a feeling of horror.  One major exception: hunters view the shedding of animals’ blood as normal; it’s simply part of the game.  My father was a hunter, and he explained to me that hunting is an instinct, stronger in some people than in others.  He was a hunter; I was not.  He taught me at age sixteen to shoot a shotgun, but the gun's recoil gave me a shoulder ache, and I had no desire to kill the blackbirds flying overhead, or the rabbits scampering through brush, that were the targets of our shotgun outings.  I didn’t even relish fishing, and winced when my father occasionally caught a fish that then flopped about in panic on the floor of our rowboat, until he bashed it against the side of the boat.  No blood, perhaps, but violence nonetheless.

In the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks were designated “Reds,” and in fact were quite willing to shed blood, to kill, if they deemed it necessary.  And not just the Czar and his family, but even fellow revolutionaries, if they challenged Lenin’s authority.

The French Revolution found a means of executing efficiently en masse: the guillotine.  It shed blood, but ended life with one quick stroke, therefore was deemed, in its way, humane.  But the horror of the revolution’s violence is well summed up in prints showing the executioner holding up the severed head of Louis XVI to a cheering mob.  Scenes such as this inspired Tennyson, very English and very conservative, to deprecate “the red fool fury of the Seine.”  Ironically, the king’s failure to hold the revolution in check at an earlier stage was due to his refusal to have his troops fire on the people; he abhorred bloodshed.

Robespierre's death by Madame
la Guillotine, July 28, 1794.
His death marked the end of the Reign of Terror.
A French engraving, circa 1799.

Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine  (the Church abhors blood) was a tenet of the medieval Christian Church, but that didn’t keep the Inquisition from sentencing heretics to death.  Granted, death by fire — by being burned at the stake — might not involve bloodshed, but the Church avoided the violence of executions by handing its victims over to the secular authorities, who nursed no such hypocritical reservations.  And merry bonfires there were, and well attended, with the victims sometimes crying out, “More fuel, good people, more fuel!” in hopes of speeding up their death.  If the wind was wrong and the fire burned slowly, what was usually a half-hour torment could stretch out to a full two hours.

Chained heretics burned at the stake.
Date and source unknown.

Yes, bloodshed is abhorrent.  The ultimate in horror is attained when a psychopathic killer drinks his victim’s blood.  Yes, such acts have been recorded, and the offender isn’t a fictional creation like Dracula; he’s very real.  (Yes, usually a man.).  But these are individual psychopaths, not typical of society.  And yet, in wartime one may wonder.  Wartime films rarely survive into peacetime.  I recall a film from World War II in which an Australian civilian showed his righteous rage and patriotism by choking a Japanese soldier to death.  I can’t imagine it being shown in peacetime; it would be … yes, abhorrent.

But what if a whole society thinks that its survival depends on drinking human blood?  Such was the Aztec belief.  Only the sacrifice of human blood gave strength to the sun; without it, the sun would be overtaken and destroyed by the pursuing forces of darkness, causing the extinction of the human race.  On prominent display in the National Anthropology Museum of Mexico City is the Aztec Calendar Stone, also known as the Aztec Sun Stone, a heavy circular stone close to 12 feet in diameter and 39 inches thick.  When I saw it there many years ago, I was overwhelmed.  Thinking that maybe, on this very stone, human sacrifices had once been performed, I felt both chilled and fascinated..  This may have been my overwrought imagination at work, but the stone is certainly linked to sacrifice.  In its very center is a god holding a human heart in each of his clawlike hands, his protruding tongue in the shape of a sacrificial knife.

Rob Young

Depending on the state, in this country we allow the death penalty for certain crimes, but in modern times we don’t want blood to be shed.  Too gross, too icky.  So we shun the guillotine and try everything else: the electric chair, which sometimes has the victim twitching in agony; hanging, which sometimes leaves the victim likewise writhing in agony; and the gas chamber, a ”scientific” contraption that also lacks the quick finality of Madame Guillotine.  No matter how you go at it to avoid the shedding of blood, it’s messy, and often downright cruel.  I hadn’t anticipated ending on this note, but here indeed we are.  Messy as they are, the guillotine and the stroke of an ax are mercifully quick and definitive.

Coming soon:  Hot Mama: Goddess, Mother, Virgin, Whore.  Not, in any conventional sense, a hymn to motherhood.

©  2020  Clifford Browder

465. Americanisms

BROWDERBOOKS

For a lively three-star Reedsy Discovery review by Jennie Louwes of New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, go here.  (But it's too late to see her review as a video; that's over.)

As always, for my other books, go here.  



SURVIVAL

The latest development in New York City survival:  Stores are covering their front windows with panels of wood.  I see this up and down Bleecker Street, where all the designer clothing stores are shut.  Why the wood?  In case rioters come by and start throwing rocks at windows.  Riots have plagued the West Village also, though my Eleventh Street block has been quiet.  

New York City police ready for rioters, June 3, 2020.
Janine and Jim Eden

The famous Magnolia Bakery is still open and without wood panels, and announces that it is baking to celebrate 2020 graduates, home, Mom, doctors, nurses, teachers, neighbors, prom, and just about everyone and everything else.  Their gooey goodies are obviously necessary to our well-being and the economy.  

Another unforeseen development:  The city is so quiet, the streets almost empty, and the parks unvisited, that the birds are reclaiming habitat and serenading us with song.  The peak of the spring migration is over, but this is the nesting season, when males sound off to attract a mate and claim turf, and they can be heard now better than when the city emits its usual rumble and roar.  The red-winged blackbird, flaunting its bright red shoulder patches, is livening the cattails with its vibrant konk-la-reee. 

Andy Reago and Chrissy McClarren

The common yellowthroat, a warbler, is repeating witchety witchety witchety in clumps of shrubs and grasses; the wood thrush, its breast boldly spotted, is giving out its haunting three-note call in the brush of the Central Park Ramble; and the long-beaked willet is calling out its name -- will will willet, will will willet -- over the ponds in the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.  These are all old friends of mine; hunting them, I often trekked these habitats.  Welcome back, songsters, and may your music lift our spirits; we could use a lift.


                     AMERICANISMS

These are expressions that mark the speaker as an American, or as someone trying to speak like an American.  Some were uttered by persons of note, and others just came into existence, who knows how or why.  But they all say something not just about the speaker, but also about the speaker’s country, its mindset, its mores, the way it intentionally or unintentionally presents itself to the world.  

By way of contrast, when I was in England long ago, I remember signs saying KEEP  BRITAIN  TIDY.  I cannot imagine such a sign in this country.  America is just too big, too diverse, and too feisty to aspire to tidiness.  Cleanliness, maybe, but tidy never.  

And the Brits want to keep their language tidy, too.  They cringe at Americanisms like “gas” for “petrol,” and “pants” for “trousers,” as well as some of the items listed below.  Their language, they complain, is being “colonised” or even “killed” by Americanisms, though some of the words they disparage are actually English, not American, in origin.  And the “stiff upper lip” so associated with the English is in fact an Americanism.  Language plays tricks on us all.

So here, in no particular order, is my list of Americanisms, with my personal comments thrown in.  I invite readers to make some additional suggestions of their own.

I feel like a million dollars.  A French-born friend of my mother’s used this and other expressions to show how she was completely at home in American English.

Make the world safe for democracy!  A World War I slogan, but the impulse persists, with both desirable and disastrous consequences.

Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable.  Inscription on the base of a bigger-than-life statue of Daniel Webster in Central Park, expressing his views in the famous Webster-Hayne debate of 1830, when Webster, a senator from Massachusetts, debated Senator Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina.  Webster believed in a strong federal government, whereas Hayne upheld state’s rights, including the right to secede from the Union.  Our Civil War (1861-1865), at a cost of over 618,000 lives, settled the issue, though Texas likes to forget this.

Simeon87

Lafayette, we are here.  Attributed to General John J. Pershing, commander of the American forces sent to France in 1917, but actually spoken by a subordinate.  Lafayette had helped us get our independence; now we would help his country in its war with Germany.

Pike’s Peak or bust.  Sign on covered wagons heading west in the 1840s for Colorado and beyond.

I have seen the elephant.  Sign on covered wagons coming back from the West in the 1840s, indicating disillusion with what they had found.  Probably inspired by early circuses and road shows that displayed an elephant.

God’s country.  That beautifully satisfying locale that you once saw and hope to return to, or that exists in your imagination.  Implies a country where people travel a lot and get displaced.  Also, a people who dream of better.  Inevitably, a magnet for hope and heartbreak.  Years ago when I was a graduate student at Columbia, I often had a beer (or two or three) at the West End bar on Broadway.  There, entertaining us with his tales of “making out” — seducing every woman in sight — was an amusing young dude who found in the rest of us the audience that his ego and libido required.  He was from somewhere in the West, and one night, referring to it, said quite seriousky, with a touch of nostalgia, “That’s God’s country.”  His momentary seriousness astonished me, but he soon resumed his tale of penile successes.

There’s a sucker born every minute.  Attributed to Phineas T. Barnum, the nineteenth-century showman and circus impresario, and prince of humbug.  He displayed fake freaks and exotic animals to a seemingly naive public (“suckers”), some of whom knowingly went along for entertainment and the joke.

The business of America is business.  A saying of Calvin Coolidge, U.S. president from 1924 to 1928.  So dull, visionless, and reticent a man that he became legendary.  But let’s face it, America is devoted to capitalism and the work ethic.

Keep your shirt on.  Stay calm, don’t get angry or excited.  Possible explanation: In the nineteenth century clothes were expensive, so many men owned only one or two shirts.

Beats me.  I don’t know, I don’t understand.  Origin unknown.

That gets my goat.  To make someone annoyed or angry.  Origin unknown.

It isn’t over until the fat lady sings.  Don’t presume to know the outcome of an event still in progress.  I always thought it came from vaudeville, but it’s a newbie and relates to  --  of all people -- Richard Wagner.  His interminably long but sporadically brilliant Ring cycle isn’t over until Brünnhilde, often sung by a buxom soprano, has sung her last note.  Probably first used by U.S. sportscaster Ralph Carpenter in a 1976 interview, referring to a tight basketball game or season, though other explanations abound.

Fuhgeddaboudit.  Brooklynese for “forget about it,” meaning it’s unlikely.  Another newbie, attributed to the 1960s TV show “The Honeymooners,” set in Brooklyn.  But I wonder if it didn’t originate much earlier.

Baloney!  Nonsense, claptrap, bunk.  Dates from 1922.  Linked to the bologna, a large smoked meat sausage typically made from leftover scraps of meat.  

He struck out, It’s the ninth inning, A curve ball, Touch base, A whole new ballgame, etc.  From baseball, the most American of sports, and in my opinion, the dullest.

Normalcy.  That’s where Warren G. Harding, U.S. president 1920-1923, wanted us to return, though it should be “normality.”  Since Harding was another of our least brilliant presidents, and surrounded by crooks when in office, I avoid his creation and  insist on “normality.”

Okay.  Totally American, though now understood worldwide.  Long ago, when a friend and I were bargaining for serapes in the open-air market of Oaxaca, Mexico, after a long haggle we failed to get our price and started to walk away.  Faced with the loss of a sale of three serapes, the Mexican vendor, a shrewd little man whose gold fillings twinkled in the sun, rushed after us and said, “Okay.”  There are many stories about the expression’s origins.  Probably came from “orl korrect,” a humorous misspelling of “all correct,” circa 1840.

To go the whole hog.  To go all the way, to do something.  Possible origin: Butchers used to use every part of the animal.  The skin was tanned for leather, and the hooves were pickled.  To go the whole hog was to use every part of the animal.

To face the music.  To accept the consequences of one’s actions.  Possible origin: A disgraced military officer was “drummed out” of his regiment.  Or: An actor going onstage faces the orchestra pit.  Dates from the 1830s.

To keep one’s cool.  To stay calm, not be upset or angry.  This use of “cool” as a noun dates from the 1950s or earlier.  It may be significant that in the 1940s Miles Davis called his music “cool jazz,” to differentiate it from the “hot jazz” that originated in New Orleans in the early 1900s and came North.  (And if you want to start a passionate debate that has no end, just ask the origin and history of the word “jazz.”  There are many answers, some of them deliciously naughty.)

Americanisms that are no longer (thank God) used:

• “Bone pit” for cemetery.
• “Tooth carpenter” for dentist.
• “To give someone the mitten” for “to throw someone [a boyfriend or suitor] over.”

To which I'll add another: "gay deceiver" for "skirt chaser," a man who aggressively pursues women.  Our current use of "gay" obviously complicates things.  And as mentioned in Tennessee Williams's play The Glass Menagerie, "gay deceivers" once also  meant padding that young women inserted in their bodice or bra to plump out their figure.  A reminder that language is never static; it is constantly changing.  

Coming soon: "Blood."

©  2020  Clifford Browder