Culture – Page 39 – Into the Woods

Double-bump glassware

I guess I’m just sentimental about how food was served when I was much younger — back before the days in which everything became plastic, disposable, and super-sized. While browsing in a salvage store earlier this week (I love salvage stores — you never know what you might find) I came across a box of new old-stock glasses. The label on the box called them “double bump” glasses, a term that I had never heard.

You’ll remember glasses of this type very well unless, perhaps, you’re of the millennial generation. As I recall, these glasses were used up through the 1970s and even 1980s. You might get a glass of ice water in a glass like this as soon as you sat down in a diner. If you ordered a glass of milk, it might come in a glass like this. I also think I recall that, if you ordered a small Coke at a place like a drug store fountain or the Woolworth’s lunch counter, it might come in a glass like this.

Part of what I like about institutional relics of that era is that, back then, eight ounces was considered a normal serving.

But just look at the classic design of this glass! The bumps, of course, help keep you from dropping it.

I bought only two of these glasses on the grounds that I don’t have cabinet space for more. But something tells me that I’ll probably stop and buy a few more next time I pass that salvage store.

Tearing the horn off an anvil?

When I was a young’un, a saying I frequently heard (it was particularly said of children) was that a person who was prone to breaking things could “tear the horn off an anvil.”

Over the years, I have occasionally used this saying. Often I have been met with a blank look. This caused me to realize that many people are not clear on what an anvil is, or why an anvil has a horn.

At the lawn mower shop last week, I noticed a particularly photogenic anvil. I took a picture of it in case I ever needed to illustrate the saying.

An anvil, of course, is used by smiths and other metal workers for hammering a piece of metal into a particular shape.

As for the machine below, which I also photographed because it was photogenic, I’m not exactly sure what it is. My guess, though, is that it’s for crimping metal. Notice the crimped length of stovepipe behind the machine. If my theory is correct, then this machine would let you make a stovepipe out of a piece of sheet metal.

Dumplings

When I was a young’un, I was as intrigued with the word dumpling as I was with dumplings. There was something funny, archaic, and magical about dumplings — both the food and the word. I would have guessed that dumpling is of Germanic origin, but the Oxford English dictionary throws up its hands and says that the origin of the word dumpling is obscure, though the word was first detected in Norfolk around 1600. The word dump — which may or may not be related to dumpling — has cognates in Danish and Norwegian.

In any case, most cuisines probably have the concept of dumplings. Filled dumplings are particularly intriguing. Whether you call them pierogi or pot stickers, or one of the 453 words that Italian has for filled pasta (I’m joking), it’s only dumplings that I’d particularly care to make, because I tend to be pretty bad at imitating exotic cuisines, and I always do best with stuff that is pretty traditional and old-fashioned. I do exotic cuisines only by fusing them with Southern or California cuisine.

It was the sauce that led me to dumplings for supper. The abbey stocks many types of vinegar, but one type of vinegar that I had never previously stocked is malt vinegar. I bought some English malt vinegar yesterday at Whole Foods, and I started Googling for ideas about what — other than fried potatoes — might go well with a sauce based on malt vinegar. I used to love eating pot stickers at Asian restaurants in San Francisco. Pot stickers go nicely with strong sauces. So I ended up making dumplings just to go with the dipping sauce I had in mind. I made a dipping sauce of garlic, harissa sauce (an African pepper sauce that I have learned to always keep on hand), soy sauce, honey, and malt vinegar.

The dumplings were filled with mashed rutabaga, chopped onions, and grated Havarti cheese. The dough was made only with bread flour and water. The dumplings went nicely with seared cabbage (seared cabbage is frequently served at the abbey, especially in winter). I ate the dumplings with my hands and dipped each bite in the dipping sauce.

Two random reviews: San Andreas, and The History Boys

San Andreas, Warner Bros., 2015

Readers of this blog know that I don’t make any systematic effort to review movies. Rather, my movie reviews are pretty random and occasional and reflect only what I happen to have been watching — stuff that left me thinking. San Andreas and The History Boys are about as different from each other as two movies could be.

When I saw the trailer for San Andreas, in which the front wave of an enormous tsunami is bearing down on San Francisco just west of the Golden Gate Bridge, I knew that I’d have to watch it. I’m a sucker for San Francisco movies, and San Andreas is a good one, even if an earthquake and tsunami wipe the city out.

When combined with a decent story, Hollywood special effects can be thrilling. But much of the appeal of San Andreas is in the script — though the disaster scenes and helicopter rescues are great fun. Hollywood well knows that if the plot for a screenplay involves a massive earthquake that wipes out Los Angeles and San Francisco, then you need to wrap that plot around some personal stories that get some emotion into it. Carlton Cuse’s fast-moving screenplay does this with six main characters: An earthquake scientist who figured out that the Big One was about to happen; a married couple in the process of getting a divorce; their daughter and the young man she meets in San Francisco; and the young man’s younger brother.

But oh how I love Hollywood panoramas shot over San Francisco. I haven’t been back to San Francisco since I left in 2008, so all those scenes from familiar places make me a little homesick. You can’t even visit San Francisco — let alone live there for 17 years as I did — without forming a permanent emotional bond with the place.

San Andreas is worth watching just as entertainment. It’s also a good script, with Hollywood special effects effectively used.

The History Boys, Fox Searchlight, 2006

The History Boys got so-so reviews in places like Rotten Tomatoes. I think that’s because the film goes way over the heads of most people. It’s based on a play by Alan Bennett that opened in London in 2004. I have watched this film three times, and I still can’t pick up on everything. Then I bought a copy of the script of the play and read that, too.

Probably only the English can truly follow all the snappy language and nuance. The dialogue teeters on a sharp edge between irony and sincerity, bravado and vulnerability. There is keen commentary not only on history, but culture in general and English culture in particular. The dialogue includes page after page of untranslated French. That’s a very bold thing to do — to an American audience, especially. This is a script that refuses to dumb itself down. The History Boys — both the play and the film — is unapologetically aimed at the few who have done enough reading in their lives to follow the dialogue and who can find jokes about, say, the subjunctive (whether in English or in French) funny.

I rarely use the word masterpiece, but I see The History Boys as a masterpiece of writing. Alan Bennett, in only a hundred pages of screenplay, manages to exhaust us with intellectual exercise, dazzle us with meaningful erudition, jerk us back and forth between pure silliness and profundity, and finally to break our hearts with his characters, who represent a broad range of the human condition.

I bought the film on DVD. Watching it should be an annual tradition, like the annual watching of Love Actually, at Christmas.

Lunch on the road …

Probably many of the people who eat at Jim’s Grill in Yadkinville remember when it was a hot spot in the 1950s — curb service, window trays, juke box, the works. It’s on U.S. 601, which runs north to south across most of North and South Carolina and which used to be part of a major route from points north to Florida.

I’ve had a sentimental weakness for roadside eateries for as long as I can remember. Some of them still remain along the old secondary roads. The sad thing, though, is that every time I’m in Jim’s Grill (I make pretty regular trips to Yadkin County), I never see any young people there. Younger people, I suppose, are sentimental about MacDonald’s rather than the old roadside restaurants.

One of the great things about old-fashioned fast food is that there is no waste paper, cardboard, or plastic to throw away. It’s a pity, though, that (as far as I know) they’re all using plastic dinnerware rather than the heavy diner china that they used to use.

Baltimore Road, about 10 miles east of Yadkinville

And they lived happily ever after

Note: This post contains no spoilers if you have watched the series through Season 6, episode 3.

Those in the U.K. have already said goodbye to Downtown Abbey. Here in the U.S., we have five more episodes to go. I never gave up on Downton Abbey the way some did. Sure, it’s a soap opera. But it’s a good soap opera. It’s also a fantastic period piece, a marvel of language and accents, and a visual spectacle. The characters are superb and now feel like family. Season 6 is when we get to have our long goodbye with all these characters — and, I’m pretty well convinced, see almost all of them happy.

Downton Abbey has always relied on honest, classic storytelling. I’ve started watching lots of series but stopped, usually because the screenwriters (especially in series set in the here and now, which I almost never like) tried to overcome our jadedness and boredom by shocking us, or by being quirky.

Classic, honest storytelling means that, in the end, the wicked are punished and the deserving get their heart’s desire. And this — rightly so — is clearly where the last season of Downtown Abbey is going to leave us.

For the most part, the wicked have already been punished. Some characters who served as villains for a while transformed and redeemed themselves and now should have their reward.

Let the happiness roll:

In episode 3, Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes get married. Now that their legal troubles are over, it appears that John and Anna Bates will have a child at last (though there will be a bit of trouble first). Tom Branson realizes who his true family is and comes home from Boston, grandchildren and all. Lady Edith clearly has found a new beau and perhaps a husband. Daisy will better herself through education and see Mr. Mason settled in a new home. Mr. Molesley will probably find that he’s a true scholar after all, not just a scholar wannabe. Robert and Cora Crawley will land on their feet and nobly carry on, even if it’s in reduced circumstances. Lady Mary will probably end up alone, but isn’t that probably what’s best for her? Even Thomas Barrow, who has been repeatedly rejected and humiliated, seems likely to end up happy, with the boyfriend he has never had.

We’ll remember these characters for many years, and the DVDs that we bought are DVDs that we will watch again.

Book review: a biography of Theodore Parker

American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism, by Dean Grodzins. University of North Carolina Press, 2002, 656 pages.

It’s surprising that Theodore Parker isn’t better known than he is. Parker (1810-1860), a transcendentalist, was a friend of Emerson. He inspired Thoreau. He was in the thick of things in the Boston-Concord area during his era. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. picked up some famous rhetoric from Parker. For example, Parker’s words, talking about slavery, were:

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

This inspired Martin Luther King’s famous words:

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

In his Gettysburg address, Lincoln was paraphrasing words that Parker used in a speech in 1850: “A democracy — of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.”

Parker was a Unitarian. The Unitarians had more room for Parker than, say, the Methodists and the Presbyterians, but even some of Parker’s Unitarian friends shunned Parker as Parker became increasingly heretical.

What were some of Parker’s heresies? For one, Parker pretty much threw the entire Old Testament under the bus as primitive and unbelievable (not to mention lousy even as metaphor) and dominated by a cruel and immoral God. The question of miracles, and whether miracles were important or not, apparently was a big theological issue in Parker’s time. Parker came to believe that New Testament miracles were of no importance and probably didn’t really happen, that a revelation stood or fell on its own merit. Parker believed that some of the teachings of Jesus — not to mention the apostles — was wrong and morally flawed. Parker also rocked the boat. He became an outspoken abolitionist. Even Boston churchmen during this era who disapproved of slavery were careful not to preach too vehemently against slavery, because it got people too excited. Abolitionists were expected to be discreet in genteel society.

In many ways, this book is a theological history as much as a biography of Theodore Parker. These guys weren’t just preaching sermons to their congregations. They also were carrying on a theological debate with each other, a debate that also reached into the newspapers and the many church journals that were printed at the time.

I think it would be fair to say that Parker’s heresy boiled down to this: That ultimately, conscience, not scripture, is the only reliable guide. Note that in his statement about justice, it is conscience that allows Parker to divine the arc of the moral universe. I think it also would be fair to say (nor does Dean Grodzins say such a thing in this biography) that Parker left theology behind and became a moral philosopher instead. I think it also would be fair to say the same of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who actually gave up the ministry because it held him back. As for moral philosophy, Parker certainly was influenced by Kant. Parker also read in twenty languages, and he was particularly interested in German philosophy of that era. On a year-long trip to Europe, Parker tried to visit Goethe’s widow, but she was out.

It’s a shame to lose the thoughts of people like Theodore Parker who were so far ahead of their time. It’s amazing, really, how much progress was made in the 19th Century by the intellectual elite, though very little of that filtered down to incurious common folk. The white Protestant churches preach the same old fundamentalist, know-nothing stuff today, as though Emancipation and Civil Rights and all that thought and progress never happened. One of Parker’s complaints about social injustice, actually, was that working people had to work too hard and had little time for reading and study and bettering themselves intellectually. I wonder what Parker would think of television. Congregations at the time — at least Unitarian congregations — actually followed these debates and got intellectually involved. As Parker’s fame grew, people packed large halls in Boston to hear him speak. Who buys tickets to lecture series today? Are there even any lecture series to buy tickets to?

This biography ends around 1846, about 14 years before Parker’s death in 1860. Is Grodzins planning a second volume? Or was it that Grodzins was primarily interested in tracing the development of Parker’s heresy, and that was a done deal by 1846?

The ability (and inability) to judge character

You would think that after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution as social beings, we humans would be pretty good at judging the character and intentions of other humans. The sociobiologist E.O. Wilson has written, for example, that we humans constantly study other humans and that this explains our insatiable demand for stories, or why we love to gossip. Even our pets are very good at perceiving our intentions.

And yet a sizable chunk of the American population is dangerously bad at judging character. Not only that, this sizable chunk of the population all too often sees deranged and narcissistic people as political and religious leaders and sends them money by the millions and hundreds of millions of dollars. This is one of the most frightening and unpredictable facts of American politics. I am not terribly concerned about sexual peccadillos, except for the extreme hypocrisy of all-too-many preachers. Private sexual peccadillos don’t get us into wars or prey on the poor so that preachers and millionaires can ride around in jets and avoid paying taxes.

Can the ability to judge character be tested? Are there ways of impartially establishing who is good at judging character and who is not?

As early as 1929, MacMillan published Studies in the Nature of Character: General methods and Results by some academics from Columbia University. Since then, a good bit of research has been published on how good we are (or are not) at judging the character of others. How is this research done?

The basic method, as far as I can tell from my own admittedly limited research, is to go to a group of people who know each other and to ask those people to predict how others will perform on “personal inventory” tests. There are many such personality tests that clinicians use, for example the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Then you compare people’s predictions with other people’s actual performance on the tests and look for statistically significant correlations.

What are some of the factors that correlate with being a good judge, or a poor judge, of character? Here are some of the candidates, with a rough description of what researchers have found:

• Age: Though children improve in their ability to judge character between the ages of 3 and 14, there is no evidence that older people get better at judging character.

• Sex: There no convincing evidence that men or women are better at judging character.

• Family background: This area has not been well studied, but so far there is no evidence that family background matters much.

• Intelligence: Now we’re getting somewhere. Smart people are indeed better at judging the character of others. Smart people also, unsurprisingly, are better at judging the intelligence of others.

• Training in psychology: This is murky, but it may well be true that trained psychologists are no better than the rest of us at judging character.

• Sensitivity and artistic ability: There is pretty good evidence that artistic and sensitive people are better judges of character. People with literary abilities may be particularly good at judging character.

• Emotional stability: The evidence here is scant, though it is pretty clear that people who are excessively anxious, troubled by obsessions, etc., are poorer judges of character.

• Social skill and popularity: Though good social skills seem to help people judge character, those who are the best judges of character tend to be capable of a kind of scientific social detachment. For example, physicists may be better judges of character than psychologists. Poor judges of character are more socially oriented than better judges. It may follow (though I did not find any specific research) that introverts are better judges of character than extraverts.

And finally:

• Good character: People of good character are probably better equipped to judge the character of others. It’s important to keep in mind a famous statement by Gordon Allport:

As a rule, people cannot comprehend others who are more complex and subtle than they. The single-track mind has little feeling for the conflicts of a versatile mind. People who prefer simplicity of design and have no taste for the complex in their aesthetic judgments are not as good judges as those with a more complex cognitive style and tastes.

Unfortunately I could not easily find any research that looked for correlations between religiosity and the ability to judge character. But insofar as I myself am able to judge the character of others (feel free to judge me!), I would have to say that evangelical, salvation-oriented religious types are among the very worst judges of character. As for why people send millions of dollars to preachers like Jim Bakker or Jimmy Swaggart, it helps to remember that half the population have IQs of under 100 and live pretty hard lives. Getting money and votes out of people who are not so smart and not doing very well is now a think-tank science — the smart studying the not-so-smart so as to take political and economic advantage of them. Unfortunately, that may be the No. 1 key to American politics at present.

Celestial divination

Ancient Astronomy and Celestial Divination, edited by N.M. Swerdlow. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999.

An Analysis of Celestial Omina in the Light of Mesopotamian Cosmology and Mythos (master’s thesis), by Robert Jonathan Taylor, 2006.

How did the ancients predict the future using the stars? Why do I care?

I care because, in Oratorio in Ursa Major (to be released April 1, 2016), Jake will meet characters in 48 B.C. who do celestial divination. As with all the science and history in my novels, I don’t want to just make stuff up. Research is required. A year or so ago in another post on another book, The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy, I described how the ancients knew quite a lot about the science of astronomy. They were careful observers of celestial events, they developed pretty accurate theories, and they were much better at math than we might think today.

But divination — that is, prediction — obviously went much farther than astronomy. What were their methods?

As with astronomy, much of the work that went into celestial divination was done first by the Babylonians, and from there it spread throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Kings were particularly interested in predicting the future, and kings could afford astronomers. Will the crops be good? If a war begins, who will win? Is the king at risk of dying? Those were urgent questions, and the stars were believed to hold the answers.

Books such as Ancient Astronomy and Celestial Divination are more concerned about how the ancients did the observations than the kinds of predictions they made. The master’s thesis by Robert Jonathan Taylor was a lucky find, because Taylor is less concerned with the science and more concerned with the predictions.

Briefly put, the ancients composed catalogs of omina, also called omina series. The catalogs of omina lists celestial conditions determined from observations, then tell you what the observations mean. [If … then.] These predictions were based on experience, it seems. Though no doubt there was an intuitive element and some kind of reasoning.

Here are some examples of omina (taken from ancient clay tablets that have survived and that scholars have carefully catalogued and published):

If Venus is dimmed in month I: in that month the crop of the land will not succeed, the market will decrease.

If Venus enters Jupiter: the king of Akkad will die, the dynasty will change, either a soldier will go out or the enemy will send a message (asking for peace) to the land.

If the star of Marduk is dark when it becomes visible: in this year there will be the asakku-disease.

If an eclipse begins and clears in the north: Downfall of the army of Akkad.

Eclipses were very ominous. The observations listed in the omina had to do with the moon, the planets, certain stars, the sun, and even the weather. The planet Venus was of particular interest because (since Venus is close to the sun) it moves across the sky pretty speedily. Jupiter was thought to be especially predictive of dynasty changes.

As you can see, ancient celestial divination was not really the same as the kind of zodiacal astrology that many people believe in today.

New music on Dec. 18?

My mention of John Williams’ “Leia’s theme” in a recent post got me wondering about the sound track for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” which will open on Dec. 18.

The Wikipedia article confirms that Disney commissioned John Williams to compose the score. We also know that Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill will return (somewhat older) in their old roles. So it stands to reason that the score will include the old themes. In the Wikipedia article, Williams confirms that we’ll hear the old themes, but he doesn’t say much about new musical themes:

[The old themes] “will seem very natural and right in the moments for which we’ve chosen to do these kinds of quotes. There aren’t many of them, but there are a few that I think are important and will seem very much a part of the fabric of the piece in a positive and constructive way.”

As you can imagine, Star Wars fans worldwide have been sleuthing and looking for leaks. Amazon France apparently accidentally leaked the track list for the soundtrack CD:

1. Main title and the attack on the jakku village
2. The scavenger
3. I can fly anything
4. Rey meets bb-8
5. Follow me
6. Rey’s thème
7. The falcon
8. That girl with the staff
9. The rathtars!
10. Finn’s confession
11. Maz’s counsel
12. The starkiller
13. Kylo ren arrives at the battle
14. The abduction
15. Han and leia
16. March of the resistance
17. Snoke
18. On the inside
19. Torn apart
20. The ways of the force
21. Scherzo for X-wings
22. Farewell and the trip
23. The jedi steps and finale

It sure looks like there’s some new stuff there. I have pre-ordered the soundtrack CD from Amazon. Though I have a lot of doubts about what Disney will do with Star Wars, we can surely count on John Williams to get the music right. Dec. 18 will be not just a big day for cinema. It also will be a big day for music.