July 2007 Archives

Regarding my last entry, it's hot, and I don't think very well in my hibernation season when I have to force myself outdoors.  So obviously I forgot one huge area that has always influenced American culture, comic books, and a new mutation, the graphic novel.  We have had TV and movie series for Superman, Batman, now Spiderman.  We have gone through several Batmans recently--Adam West, Val Kilmer, Michael Keaton, George Clooney, my pick being the latest, Christian Bale, in the gloomy Batman Returns.  Major stars played the cartoon villains, Danny DeVito as the Penguin, Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, Jack Nicholson aptly as The Joker, Jim Carey as the Riddler.   The newest superhero always generates headlines, as with Iowan Brandon Routh in Superman Returns and shortly the sequel, and Heroes, the TV series, is a major hit. As we all know, the accountants love sequels for any successful movie, despite few sequels equal to the originals.  TV cartoons also become movies, of course, and have since Disney's Steamboat Willie and the debut of Mickey Mouse in 1928. The list includes The Simpsons, The Flintstones, Scooby Doo, major movies for Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, not just shorts.  As the comic books and TV series grew darker, we got Mutant X, Blade: The Series, Marvel Comics and DC Comics providing many of these with such artist-authors as Frank Miller, Batman:  The Dark Knight Returns, Elektra, Daredevil, and, undoubtedly the most notable movie translation of Miller's graphic novels, Sin City, brilliantly designed and relentlessly gory, with an all-star cast.

Frank Miller is one of many creating a hybrid called a graphic novel, often in hardback, often dark and violent.  He made his version of the famous Spartan stand against the Persian invaders with The 300, the movie makers stepping up the gore and violence.  I have Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan:  The Smartest Kid on Earth and Daniel Clowes' Ice Haven.  It's too easy to call them books for people who hate books.  They are book-length comic books with complicated plots, adult themes and language, the most famous of which is probably Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale, based on his father's Holocaust experiences, winning a 1992 Pulitzer Prize.  I've also noticed how the group of anime manga versions keeps expanding at Borders and, curious, listened to two teenagers arguing over the merits of which to buy.  Anime, a Japanese word for animation, is a drawing style of streamlined futuristic large-eyed characters, reminding me of a Sixties craze for Margaret Keane's huge-eyed children.  Manga is Japanese for comics or cartoons.  It isn't difficult to separate the American from the Japanese. 

Nor is it difficult to see the youthful orientation of all that and the money generated.  We come to another area I'm very uncomfortable with.  I need to deal with horror, having dutifully watched Dark Shadows in the Sixties, more recently Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Forever Knight, sometimes Night Stalker, familiar with vampire movies from Bela Lugosi's Dracula (1931) forward, including Murnau's silent Nosferatu (1922) and Werner Herzog's scary 1979 remake, both German.  The same goes for werewolves, from Lon Chaney's The Wolf Man (1941) to An American Werewolf in London/Paris, The Howling, Silver Bullet, and, most notably, Wolfen, which I watch every time I surf onto it, fascinated with the eerie plotline, special effects, and beautiful wolves, almost the same oddly true for Blade:  Trinity, which I apparently like for the smart-ass dialogue and zippy cast.  As an American saturated in popular culture, I have the same familiarity with zombies, witches, and ghosts.  My favorite for the latter is the hilarious Topper comedy series, smartly begun in 1937 with Cary Grant and Constance Bennett as the ghostly sophisticated Kerbys tormenting Roland Young and Billy Burke as Cosmo and Clara Topper, more famous as a series from the Forties into the Fifties with Robert Sterling and Anne Jeffreys giving Leo G. Carroll fits, the catch being that only Cosmo Topper could see and hear the Kerbys in their ghostly mischief.

That all said, I don't really like horror and generally avoid Stephen King or the latest in the Halloween/Friday the 13th/Nightmare on Elm Street series (after seeing the first two or so of each) or anything similar, not believing in most supernatural horror, knowing, for instance, that British authors Bram Stoker invented Dracula and Mary Shelley Frankenstein (Lord Byron is sometimes credited with creating the vampire idea).  Despite George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) and all subsequent imitations, including 28 Days and the comic Shaun of the Dead (both of which I've seen), it's fairly well known now since the 1985 The Serpent and the Rainbow book that the so-called zombie state was/is created in Caribbean voodoo by very powerful toxic drugs, e.g., tetrodotoxin and hallucinogens, no real dead involved but a kind of eerie drugged slavery.  Men have often wrongly blamed wolves for evil deeds, but wolves are among my favorite creatures, the highly intelligent and highly wary ancestor of dogs, after all.  So folklore lycanthropes are more base superstition.

Let me jump to video games, justly accused of fostering raging violence.  I can still remember being appalled at the arcade versions played by my nephews, beheadings, spurting blood, large body counts, killing being the way to winning.  (I'll steer clear of the sexuality, the inclusion of naked women, whores, even a game in which Custer rapes a naked Native American woman.)  Studies have amply demonstrated perverse influence on children and teenagers.  I think the games have led to torture porn, joining with horror films for the hybrid psychotic series of Saw, The Hills Have Eyes, and Hostel.  In an essay by a survivor of Northern Ireland violence, Jenny McCartney, writing in the August 3 The Week, she says "these films depict rape, evisceration, and protracted torture in . . . gloating, graphic detail."  One features "a topless cheerleader bouncing on a trampoline, until she suddenly descends on a carving knife through the vulva."  In Captivity a shower head spurts acid, melting a girl's face.  In Hostel:  Part II a "young girl [is] bound and hung naked and upside down" while a "woman slowly slashes her to death."  The original Hostel featured "rich American businessmen pay[ing] to torture captured American backpackers . . . abducted from a Slovakian hostel."   Supposedly the main target audience is young males.  The films have grossed--apt word--millions worldwide.

What all this does to young minds and what the rest of us have to deal with accordingly is beyond my solution, but defending such profiteering is, clearly to me, indefensible and prime reason for my fussing about youth having taken the cultural reins and throwing money in these directions.  Culture is serious business, light or dark or anywhere between.

In today's Sunday comics, Luann's mother was lamenting that, now Luann was a teenager, she knew nothing about her daughter.  The next cel has Luann walking through with her cell phone, saying, "Yeah, I Googled him last night.  Did you see his YouTube vid?  LOL!  I'm gonna text him about his MySpace blog."  The last cel has both parents mystified at that computerese.

In The Week's new  issue is this item:  "Sales of dolls, action figures, and outdoor toys are down sharply, while electronics sales to children are up 16.6 percent in the past two years.  So toymakers are combining conventional toys with electronics.  Mattel's newest Barbie doll, for instance, doubles as an MP3 Player.  The Wall Street Journal."

When I was still working, I hooted when my boss told us how he and his wife had severely grounded one of their sons, confining him to his room for a month.  Would I have been so lucky when I was a teenager.  That room had a computer, a CD player, a telephone (this was before the cell phone craze), video games, and I'm sure much else of the expensive electronic toys with which we indulge our teenagers.  Add cars and more necessary things like brand-name clothes and sportswear, all expensive, as I know from my nieces and nephews.  And I probably should mention teenagers' adamant fast food choices, making certain franchises rich while driving parents--and uncles--crazy.  Which has replaced the hamburger with pizza, I'd guess.

That is what I meant when I wrote how Tab Hunter had emphatically described how teenage money has captured the marketeers' attentions, since that time especially in the new electronic technologies that supposedly mystify anyone over, say, 40, which is why we have constant references in the comic strips to baffled parents depending on children and teenagers to program the cell phones, to use the DVD player and burn new CDs by downloading, as they do their iPods, their digital cameras, other gadgetry.  Teenagers may not know who Chopin or Poirot or what the Magna Carta or Machu Picchu is, nor do they care in their noisy insular worlds at booming volumes, epitomized in one of my very favorite comic strips, "Zits."  Jeremy Duncan is the quintessential teenager at 15, peer-driven, anxious about Image, a guitarist in a rock band, often sullen especially mornings, indolent, insolent, a slob, an eating frenzy, contemptuous of his "old-fashioned" parents, Walt and Connie, in their clumsy technological skills and efforts to communicate with him, as he even texts his mother at the table, programs his father's phone, and is somehow endearing for all that.  Most recently he downloaded Walden for his iPod so he could listen to it for an assignment while he played video games.  I LOL'd (text message acronym for "laugh-ed out loud").  Thoreau's famous journal is the American bible for individualism, not to mention that his Civil Disobedience inspired Mahatma Gandhi and India to kick out the British Empire by sit-ins and peaceable obstructionism, which returned to us a few decades later with Martin Luther King and the South sit-ins.  But Walden was just a necessary temporary distraction, if that, for Jeremy.  The creators of this strip are brilliant at the contemporary family with a teenager. 

And Dennis Haysbert's somber new Allstate commercial would not be so affecting if it were not about 6,000 teenagers killed annually in auto accidents (300,000 injured), the leading cause of teenage death.  (For some perspective, Car-Accidents.com claims in 2005 that 6,420,000 auto accidents cost us $230 billion, injured 2.9 million, and killed 42,636, 115 daily, one every 15 minutes.  Our car-crazy culture is clearly crazy, like a war against ourselves.)  And yet what teenager would be willingly without a car?

So I understand well enough why accountants aim at teenage demographics and cash burning in their designer jeans, ready to make millionaires and billionaires out of rock stars, treating the rapidly evolving technotoys as necessities of life, pandered to by TV and Hollywood.  We went from Father Knows Best to Saved by the Bell and Happy Days to Beverly Hills, 90210, The O.C., and One Tree Hill, as Superman goes to high school in Smallville, Texas football gets free advertising and becomes iconic in Friday Night Lights, and Dawson's Creek infuriates me because its very simple gimmick is role reversal of the adults and teenagers, the adults willfully self-centered, superficial, irresponsible, even irrational and dangerous, while the the teenagers ooze serious caring and sharing responsibilities.  (I am aware that we have thousands of working teenagers not pampered, barely managing, but they aren't the targets of the CPAs and corporate seduction.)

Puccini's La Boheme--what teenager would willingly attend an opera?--becomes Rent, as tuberculosis mutates into AIDS.  Jane Austen's Emma becomes Valley Girl Clueless, as her Pride and Prejudice becomes that again in 2003 set in California with a college student as Elizabeth, the sisters turned into roommates, or Bridget Jones's Diary, and a new version with Keira Knightley comes out (though one of the most interesting is Bollywood's Bride & Prejudice, brilliant with India's colors and musical choreography).  O (2001) is Othello set in an Ohio high school with a basketball player as the lead.  A kung-fu version of Romeo and Juliet with Jet Li is Romeo Must Die, and Leonardo DeCaprio, still playing a teenager, and Claire Danes starred in a sensationally splashy Romeo + Juliet.  Of course, Zeffirelli had made that change way back in 1968 with actual teenagers for his Romeo and Juliet, with Leonard Whiting at 18 and Olivia Hussey at 17.  One of my favorite made-for-teenagers Shakespearean revisions is 10 Things I Hate About You, a witty version of The Taming of the Shrew, far better than the notorious Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton Shakespearean movie, though I have to add that Cole Porter's adult Kiss Me, Kate outdoes it.  (I just like anything Julia Stiles is in and should add that she was also Ophelia in a curious modern corporate Hamlet set in New York's business world.)  The 2006 TV movie High School Musical is Disney's megahit, selling a million DVDs in less than a week and still drawing huge audiences as well as now going on the theater circuit.  Grease is still out there too, and Hairspray is earning rave reviews.  I didn't mention all those awful beach movies  like Beach Blanket Bingo or the American Pie series lowering the standards of American Graffiti.  I don't have to wonder why BBC America chose a Robin Hood looking way too young to have been to the Crusades with Richard the Lion Hearted and Showtime a young, handsome, slender Henry VIII, who was neither, though he did ascend to the throne at the age of 18.  (If I understand correctly, Luke Skywalker became active with the Jedi at 19.)

The list of examples is very long, and it is hardly a secret why young people are orienting themselves to music, sports, entertainment, with the preposterously huge salaries now offered for young talent, another way the CPAs have bought into and influenced our youth-oriented culture.  Roman bread and circuses.   I just needed to stop to think about all the ramifications of what the manufacturers and advertisers have been up to--down to?--culturally, the magnitude inundating us.  Small wonder fat women with pierced navels and ugly tattoos are wearing low riders, showing their thongs, and Viagra has become part of the drug scene, and men still play cars, and both sexes like a little Nip/Tuck, eh?   And it's a nice irony now that the music business is disintegrating as youth refuses to buy albums when single songs can be downloaded, causing current uproar in the CD world.  (When I was growing up and we bought 45 rpm singles, we always knew the song we wanted, Side A, would be paired with a song we didn't care about, Side B.  Likewise, most albums even today have a few hits, lots of dross.)  Sometimes pandering bites. 

Bob Fischbach, my favorite local columnist-critic, had this passage in his "Cartoonish blockbusters fail to enlighten" in the July 12, 2007, Go section of the Omaha World-Herald: Referring to an interview with Richard Walter, a co-chairman of the UCLA film school screenwriting program, "In the old days, he said, studio moguls were cantankerous but believed in stretching, taking chances, being creative [in making movies].

"But today? 'Franchises are testimony to the craven cowardice of movie studios. These guys are all accountants. They have a business plan instead of a screenplay. If you can get a franchise up, you don't have to be creative anymore. People come because they know they will get what they expect.'

"Copies, in other words. And sadly, Walter said, expectations appear to be lower than they used to be. To him, Hollywood's obsession with franchises is testimony to that lower expectation. What he expects of a franchise is for it to rise to its own level of failure. . . . To Walter, the most hazardous thing you can do in art is to play it safe. 'And that's bad news for those who love movies that touch us, move us and change our lives forever. As a viewer, I want to take chances.' "

I referred to the CPAs sinking our culture to reap the profits, and that seems testimony for my side. I began thinking about this not just because TV profiteers do about everything possible to annoy us. Programming dwindles for more and more ad breaks of more and more commercials, the leading cause for our shorter and shorter attention spans. Obnoxiously mocking an extremely obnoxious Head-On ad carries their actual message about as acidly as possible. Advertising at the end of programs and movies is more important than running the credits, so that I squint at the tiny fast roll now to one side, unable to decipher who was who in the cast. Most recently, distracting coming-attraction pop-ups jump into the lower screen corners, large enough to cover part of the picture. I can mute what I don't want to listen to and have a pop-up blocker for my computer but not one for the TV, alas. And I'm still aware that over here, as opposed to, say, Europe, those invisible radio and TV waves freely circulating around us were given to corporations to make millions and billions from, and, gee whiz, do they! A Super Bowl ad costs $2.4 million for 30 seconds.

It is silly to carp about the cultural corruption of business, even as the debacle of Enron and its cronies cost me somewhere between $35,000 and $45,000 in pension funds (others lost everything and much more). I have other cause for complaint, and I've been on the trail since I began worrying about the state of classical music, fan of detection that I am. Coincidentally, a newspaper editorial recently considered that classical music lost its audience when composers went too modern in 12-tone experiments and atonal dissonance and jazz lost its audience for the same reason in bop and fusion experiments in the mid 20th century, all too wild for the general public. True, but not even close to the real reason.

Of all places to make me realize the magnitude of what had happened in my beloved Fifties, it was Tab Hunter's gossipy autobiography, Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star. Most people would be interested in the gay gossip of those years when Rock Hudson, Farley Granger, Montgomery Clift, Rory Calhoun, Anthony Perkins, and Tab himself led double lives, but I found myself confounded by the rapid cultural expansions, like the waves from a boulder dropped into a frog pond, of the unexpected huge recording success of Hunter with 1957's "Young Love," #1 for six weeks, a popular culture phenomenon which success launched Warner Brothers Records and six more record hits in the top 100 over the next few years. That huge success was based solidly (and, of course, ironically) on teenage girls, as Hunter was the first teen idol packaged and sold by sex appeal specifically to teenagers, leading the way to special teen magazines, teen programs, special appearances, that huge musical niche of adolescent music, anything for the shrieking teenagers, a magic new market tsunami that has since simply swept aside everything. I was there, I should've known. (Yes, I know, generalizations, simplistic stereotyping, but....) Teenagers have the most disposable income to spend freely, hugely controlling in commercial marketing, and the most desirable demographics are for the 18-34 crowd, though most movies now are allegedly made for teenage boys, Fast and Furious-ly. And so it is that we end up with their radio, their TV, their movies, their music, which tastes they carry with them into their middle ages. What a juggernaut to flatten out all the old standards I grew up with! The economics of the adolescent, inexperienced, undisciplined, emotional pubescent. (Brain studies have controversially suggested adult responsibility does not develop until around 26.) Swell, Isabel, swell.

The Week of July 27, 2007, included Ron Charles' "Potter's success isn't helping other authors": "Despite all the hysteria, the Potter books haven't affected our society's declining interest in books one bit. Today, most high school kids never read for pleasure, and adults aren't much better: More than half won't read a single novel this year. The books that do sell, by and large, are self-help tomes, memoirs about dogs, and poorly written trash."

Despite the kind of "que sera, sera" acceptance Buddhism suggests, I am more interested in the tight webs it insists weave us all together, visibly or not. The disappearance of species and global warming in the ecological tapestry are two instances. At the moment my concern was about classical music, but the real subject keeps being the CPAs pandering to the democratic dregs at the bottom, leading to the general dumbing down, as it is usually called. A blatant example is (T)Videocy, as with news.

Consider the length of the sound bites in your daily, local newscasts. Add them all together. They still do not add up to the information contained in the daily newspaper (I am thinking of our World-Herald), especially when I consider that the first section is national and international, the second is regional and local, and the sports has a whole multipage section too. This doesn't include the business section or, in Omaha, "Living" section, referring to entertainment, the comics, TV programs, eating out, and the like. The poverty of TV newscasts is instantly obvious, not to mention that often the local radio and TV stations here crib their leads from the newspaper.

You can argue about the convenience, a few sentences and a few pictures, saving you all that time, but you cannot claim you're well-informed. You're just illiterate--or, rather, too lazy to read. Otherwise, you'd never trust Fox News on anything about this administration, as its members have traveled back and forth between working for Bush and lying on TV (I don't know that there's a difference), often being caught with factual errors. Instead of being self-satisfied and self-centered, you'd know more about the world in general over a wider spectrum of data from fossil finds to the formally undeclared war in Iraq. You'd cover more news more quickly with your eyes reading the newspaper in approximately the same time than watching the few heavily edited, often emotional sights and sounds of the newscasts.

Is anyone seriously interested, for too obvious examples, in drunken, drugged celebrities? Who cares about Anna Nicole Smith, whoever she was, or the tedious Hilton or Lohan brats or J-Lo's bad temper or Whitney Houston's drug habit or Mel Gibson's drunkenness and bigotry, none of which qualify as news except for malicious and empty lives wallowing in shallow swamps of gossip. I'm to be interested in helicopters following O.J. Simpson's SUV around for days?? That celebrities are products to be sold daily has nothing to do with my world as I live it.

Why am I staring at the house of a victim, a criminal, whomever? Is it an historic site? Did the house have something to do with the accident or death? Yet reporters station themselves at addresses regularly and then thrust rude microphones into stricken faces: How does it feel to find your three-year-old butchered and half eaten? How does it feel to have lost your whole family in the fire? Or, less negatively and more inane than disgustingly shameful, how does it feel to win an Olympic gold medal? How does it feel to be first to the moon? How does it feel to win $74 million in the lottery? I am to waste my time listening to crudely intrusive, trashy interviewers?

A word about that picture being worth a thousand words. Centuries ago in classical Greece, Aristotle, who shaped our Western sciences and philosophy, wrote the Poetics, a very complex treatise on drama and poetry. Of the elements most important to tragedy, the highest dramatic achievement--and with a much different meaning than "very sad" as with auto accidents and losing the farm--plot and character were at the top, spectacle at the very bottom. Gory murders and flashy effects were to be wisely kept from the stage, because they pandered to the base instincts of the audience, the oohs and aahhs rather than the brain. One could see Oedipus with his bleeding eye sockets after he blinded himself with his mother-wife's brooch but not view the act itself, because it was too emotionally distracting. One could see Medea standing over her children murdered by her but not watch her kill them. Meanings, not cheap--or expensive--stage effects.

That could be, should be applied to our visual media generally, but I'll save movies and porn gore for another entry. How wrenching to see horrible accidents and wounded soldiers, and how emotionally manipulating that is. Consider the difference between reading about an event and witnessing the steady diets of catastrophes that pass for newscasts. (Actually much of the most important news, such as the legislation that raises your taxes or keeps you from smoking or brands you as illegal, is done by talking heads of legislators and city councils, no fun to watch at all, downright boring for those of you hyped up on porn gore, though extremely important, especially if done secretly.) That happy newscasts have failed in experiments merely proves Aristotle was right. Spectacle panders to our basest instincts, our strongest emotions. Not reason. How reasonable is your news?

Ah, but it is quick, easy, time-saving, convenient, all those reasons you went to Wal-Mart and killed off the independent businesses and small towns. Well, you get what you pay for, and it's too cheap for me. I want my newspaper, and I hate it when you're too lazy to agree.

Despite my artificial knee, the best way for me to lose weight is to walk, which I do in more pleasant or cooler days on a small part of Omaha's extensive trail system along the Big Papio. I try mantras to focus and lose my hyperactive brain in coasting as I did once as a runner, achieving a kind of automatic happy blankness, but the biggest obstacles are my senses. I notice the patches of brilliantly deep yellow birdsfoot trefoil are almost gone, turning a pastel salmon orange before dying, as the moonwhite bindweed trumpets its territorial triumph across the burnt grass. (Strange that we valued the larger, fragile morning glories on our porch and at the end of our clothesline in those innocent Fifties before knowing about their hallucinogenic seeds.) On breezy days the accursed brome seedheads stir like Van Gogh's wheatfields and landscapes alive with restless energy like colored sonic booms exploding out of the frames, the grasses invisibly stirred in our usual winds. I smell the peculiar sunburnt pine scent reminiscent of mountain hikes on hot afternoons, this time merely a row of pines by the nearby ballfields, or the oily dampness of the Interstate underpass.

Mostly, though, I am sunk in sounds. I hear always the whines, thumps, hums of tires on I-80 or under F and L Streets, the clanging mustard-with-red-accents (technically called Armour yellow) Union Pacific trains crossing the trestle, metal-screeching stops, the pronounced Doppler effect telling us what sounds are approaching, which moving away. I hear the children splashing and yelling in the Westside pool, a secretary on a loudspeaker calling men working in the industrial areas the trail curves through, their tools banging and hissing and sawing on auto wrecks and trucks. Jets roar across the sky as small planes buzz like giant insects below them. Other trail users greet me--well, when it's in the morning when people seem cheerier. The afternoon sorts seem more sullenly silent.

I also hear the tlonk and rasping chirr, like the rolled Hispanic r I cannot master, of the red-winged blackbird nesting along the creek banks, the dropped pingpong ball of the field sparrow, the song sparrow's staggered notes with a different kind of buzzing chirring, the high ti-ti-ti-zeer slurred downward of the kingbird, the increasingly rare state songbird, the melodious western meadowlark, and, of course, the familiar robin. (When is a robin not a robin? When it's the American robin.)

I suspect the question first came up in college, for collegians are prone to worry over such futile questions like dogs worry over meaty bones: If you had to lose one, which would it be, eyesight or hearing? As a music major, I had a readymade bias then and figured I could always learn Braille or listen to book tapes. Now I would find it more difficult to give up my art, both my drawing and painting and seeing art in books or museums, also to give up my reading anything I choose, most material not recorded. Actually, at my age, one worries legitimately over the question of losing both, whether presbyopia is going to progress to macular degeneration, whether hearing will gradually worsen to alienated silence. (I already have a problem with a nephew's low register and low voice, just as Dad had with mine.)

What fascinates me walking is simply one of our taken-for-granted human amazements. That atmosphere of sound layers I walk into is all separated into known components, pitch, volume, timbre, identified, sorted, and stored through our magic ears funneling nothing but invisible vibrations into the quivering eardrum on to the tiny vividly descriptive middle-ear parts--hammer, anvil, stirrup--to the snaillike cochlea and semicircular canals to the inner ear secured within our hardest bone, where soundwaves converted to physical mechanics are finally altered to nerve impulses fired into our brains. Instantly. It is all this world of sounds bathing me in the humid air that disrupts my attention, my mantra efforts. A cause for wonder and gratitude. True focus for meditation.

One of the consequences of aging is settling into passive entertainment like TV. So I levered myself off the couch this morning and went to the Doorly Zoo, our biggest tourist draw besides the Iowa casinos on the Missouri. I knew this was to be the most pleasant day this week after our summer of 90s, certainly the coolest, even though I usually choose Monday regardless, knowing that Monday is the best day to go anywhere except museums, almost universally closed then. I also knew I had to be there at opening, 9:30, because I would be wading through hundreds of children, which I wouldn't mind at all except that we are a nation of indulgent parents, which is why the number of "Do Not" signs grows every time I go, even though they are largely ineffective when a young mother allows her three-year-old to crawl over a fence and start over a hedge separating visitors from the penguin pond by the giraffe complex before retrieving him. Several of the new little warnings resulted from a recent event out at the Wildlife Safari halfway to Lincoln, allied to Doorly, when a mother and her youngster (four, I think) climbed over the low barrier fence and the child stuck his fingers through the steel net fencing and got some fingers chomped off by a wolf. (Some of the new Doorly signs specifically warn of being bitten.) I would guess the mother wants to sue or will, though such chutzpah deserves to be chucked out of court summarily and the mother somehow fined. And children still insist on pounding on the glass, yelling, and standing precariously on ledges and rocks at the Doorly, their parents in another dimension apparently. The zoo is building a new Butterfly and Insect Pavilion to open next May. Having been astonished by the fluttering beauties of Iowa State's Reiman Gardens' Butterfly House, I cannot imagine the Doorly hordes trooping through with a 1,000 butterflies, even if the news item said these fragile palettes live only a few weeks. Perhaps it won't be too bad, though children were forcefeeding the allegedly 400 parakeets, cockatiels, doves, and quails with the dollar wooden food-glob sticks sold at the entrance of the new Budgie Cage. I think if I were an animal/bird at Doorly, I would want to flee to Madagascar too. And I also fault adults, such as those use flashbulbs in the Kingdom of the Night. A Homer Simpson "Doh!" to you all.

Regardless, every time I go, I have new pleasures, as the zoo constantly improves its landscaping from the gardening lush despite our June of .36 inches of rain to the waterfalls that more and more creatures have, like the tigers and the bears, water splashing everywhere to mute the noise. And I have the chances for all kinds of new observations, noticing how the polar bear looked as if it were backstroking but was really using a paw to push off the vertical steel supports between the heavy glass panes on its pool or how the flamingoes made perfect calligraphic esses with their necks when they reared their heads back or how the giraffe looked as if it were wearing kneepads and walked with the two legs on a side, i.e., stepping forward with the right front and back legs and then the left front and back legs.

My favorite exotic animal is the fossa, a mongoose cousin that looks very much like a long, low cat creature, nocturnal and hence in Kingdoms of the Night where I started. It was asleep, but I was pleased in the American Swamp section at the size of two beavers, probably the biggest I've ever seen (and we've had beaver ponds built around Center on the creeks) so that I understood why the West was explored and settled by trappers when beaver pelts made the most fashionable men's hats. Nothing of interest in the Nursery, unfortunately. The old Cat Complex (we are getting a new one of those, though the cheetahs are already in a small outdoor area by the giraffes) had some supremely bored lions and tigers and some lively fisher cats, which look very much like our feral cats times three in size, where three tiger cubs cavorted the last time I visited. A tiger (my Oriental zodiac sign) was playing with a large blue rubber ball in a rectangular pool in an outdoor area, so much for superstitions about cats not liking water. Unfortunately, I am most aware of how zoos are preserving endangered species when I see the cats, annihilated throughout the world, including the extremely elusive snow leopard, the subject of one of Peter Matthiessen's best, most moving, spiritual books.

A magic animal for me, particularly because it's a surprising member of the weasel family, rather like the only white sheep among a herd of black sheep, is the highly intelligent, playful, tool-using otter, of which I made a large drawing I have in my living room as a kind of House Spirit. For once the two river otters were moving around--it's always an I Ching moment on whether animals will be asleep or not--and their only competition in the pool is the penguin, as the one otter seemed effortlessly jet-propelled on his back without any polar bear pushing-off or other back strokes. Later I hurried through the aquarium, much too crowded, when I did stop to watch the penguins, seemingly electrified by their audience or else full of Viagra or Starbuck's strongest or some other stimulants, for they've never seemed swifter, hurtling up into the air while swimming or slingshotting through an ice hole to land standing. Unhappily, I didn't see the aquarium's most intelligent creature, the octopus, whose documentaries have made me a huge fan.

I did go through the Garden of the Senses, always intoxicated by the brilliant parrot colors as they sit squawking on their garden perches like technicolor extravaganzas of saturated colors Matisse loved, only the brilliantly blue and raucously noisy big hyacinth macaws caged. And I certainly went through the big Aviary where I saw the dozens of fledglings in the nesting trees of the egrets, scarlet ibises, roseate spoonbills over the flock of flamingoes. I also saw a new bird I couldn't find any identification for, and a docent demonstrating various feathers to children knew what I was talking about but didn't know what it was either: the size of a green heron or a boxy partridge, a peculiarly beautiful off-white with black wings and a black band extending from the wings so that it looked as if it were wearing an opera cape tied by a broad ribbon at the shoulders. Talk about the curse of always wanting to know: I spent the afternoon patiently looking at Internet bird photos and going through my several birding books, of the world and of the U.S., never able to find it. Doh!

Nebraska has legislated its country schools into oblivion and thus many of its small towns. Efforts to prevent the final shovel on the grave are proceeding, futilely. This means certain hardships for, say, ranch families with young children. It has long been the practice of rural high schoolers to board in town during the school year or during bad weather: Mom did light housekeeping in exchange for her board and room through the week in Bloomfield (she graduated in 1933). Local control has been crucial for keeping rural families with grade schoolers intact and has had other social consequences. The schoolhouse within sight of the farm Up West, meaning the original Peters homestead north of Newport where both Grandma and Grandma and Earl and Audrey lived at different times, was not just for school programs and the annual end-of-the-year picnic but also for school board meetings (virtually all meetings are open to the public in Nebraska), card parties, reunions--important when towns were far away and hard to get to in bad weather. Of course, bureaucracies want their tyranny of centralized control, so much more efficient, particularly with technological advances, Orwellian Big Brother times. So everyone of every age must go to a centrally consolidated school now.

I was reminded of country schools when I had a brief note back from Vernon (Duke) Carlow, after I had sent him and his second wife birthday greetings on their joint 85th celebration, expressing his sympathy in JaVee's death and continuing that he had always liked our family, since Dad had been such a sportsman (Duke played baseball for Dad when Dad managed Center's town team and also pitched against us) and Mom was his first teacher at Cottonwood School east of Center a few miles. I have various snapshots of Mom with her pupils along the side of a schoolhouse or at the school picnic. I officially started school in Center but actually would go along with her, for she taught country school not only before I was born but for several years after and much later took health and safety films around for the County Superintendent's office. That's one of the reasons I learned to read so early and, according to the Zieglers, could write my name upside down and backwards on the blackboard as a pre-schooler. Country schools were excellent for the younger children, exposed to all the grades above them in one big room where privacy or solitude didn't exist. Of course, seldom were there children in each of the eight grades, but still the younger ones had to listen to the rest just as the older ones had to listen to the starters. Teachers couldn't specialize, like their pupils becoming generalists perforce, and, knowing the whole room was a captive audience, could capitalize on that, not just in matters of discipline. Education was mandatory through the eighth grade--or the age 16--which could be tricky with farm boys who had to drop out to help their dads or were slow, meaning that the teacher had everyone from six-year-olds to teenagers. Dad had to quit school after the eighth grade to hire out in order to support his family, his father a drunk and gambler, though he clearly had the grades and the imagination and intelligence to have gone on, I'm sure. One of those proofs is a sleek automobile design, his idea of the future car, when he was Grandma and Grandpa Koftan's hired man. His story wasn't that unusual in the Twenties and Thirties.

But back to country schools. I actually went to Mom only in my sixth grade year, so I have just a year's actual experience, though I did go along with her at times before and after. The two most distinctive memories I have are the smell and the activities. A country school always has an anteroom at its front door with benches and wall hooks for coats, a big water cooler with spigot, a washstand with enamel basin, towel, and soap. Lunch pails were under the benches where the pupils sat to pull off or put on overshoes or caps, scarfs, coats. While there was a general lunchroom aroma, mostly it was oranges, whole or peeled, their zest perfuming that little room indelibly.

As for activities, no shirkers out there in the outdoors. The only way to play ball was if everyone played, and the same went for other recess games, second graders teamed up with fifth graders, all kinds of unlikely combinations--again, undoubtedly helpful, if stressful, for the younger ones. Fox and geese in the snow or ante-i-over (supposedly named for the school's anteroom) or hide and seek aren't really age discriminatory. The weather had to be really bad before we stayed inside. The country schools had area track meets that culminated in the county track meet, a very Big Deal, usually held in Center, with such events as the ball throw, the three-legged race, and the high jump, the three I won in the preliminary round to get me to Center. We all had to practice all of the exercises, the long jump, the dash, whether we were winners or not. Consequently, I was probably in the best shape that year ever out of my whole grade school experience.

The teacher's job was very difficult and the pay poor. Mom drove daily, for the schools were generally within six to ten miles, but I can't remember what happened in the bad rains or the blizzards except that tractors were always crucial in our area--any rural area--as proved at the end of this April when my cousins high-centered themselves on a bottomless unmaintained sand road and my nephew had to pull them out with my brother-in-law's tractor. Anyway, Mom had to be the janitor, cleaning and sweeping the building, washing the windows and their curtains, starting the fire in the coal or oil stove in the morning, seeing that the outhouses had toilet paper. Anything that needed fixing she did, like door hinges or broken window panes. There was no electricity, so kerosene lamps were on wall sconces with metal plate reflectors (like pie plates) and had to be filled for gloomy days or the rare night occasions like the Christmas program. The big ceramic water cooler with spigot for drinking had to be filled from the pump in the schoolyard. (I don't remember any inside pumps in the anteroom, though I remember the washstand with its metal basin, towels, soap.) She was the school nurse, taking care of any injuries; the school scientist, identifying the snake in the yard or the birds nesting in the toilet or using the schoolyard or nearby farm for handy field trips. Schools didn't have telephones, but all the nearby farms did for emergencies. She handled the PR, sending out notices to the families; the art teacher, maintaining the cutouts decorating the many windows and the area above the blackboards, hectographing off coloring pictures for the lower grades.
NOTE: The hectograph was the copy machine of the time, a gelatin mat on which hectograph ink designs or writing could be imprinted, so copies could be pressed off until the ink wore away. The Internet has various recipes for making one's own and outlets to buy the special iridescent ink. Mom usually had at least two, 8 1/2 X 11, also requiring a wet sponge to moisten the paper for copying.
She had to make sure all the children had supplies, even if she occasionally had to buy a box of crayons for someone too poor to afford them. She was musical, so at least her pupils knew how to sing, and she planned and prepared her own programs for holidays, especially the Christmas program. That required some extra preparation, treats for all the children, sometimes for the patrons, a special staging area set off by a wire or rope with sheets as curtains, the backstage being the anteroom of the orange zestiness, a visit by Santa Claus as the climax. Students practiced their individual pieces, songs, and little playlets for weeks before so that everyone knew everyone else's piece or part, sometimes leading to unpredictable cuing for the forgetful, say, a second grader hissing the word the sixth grader was stumped on. I don't know who supplied the Christmas tree or decorations, but I think the local scratchy eastern redcedar tree was cut or someone contributed a store-bought tree, because I remember school boards as being very stingy, for Mom worked in her first years for $35-$40 a month, if I recall one of her early letter contracts. She definitely earned her meager pay!

I was one of the little ones benefiting from listening to and learning from the older pupils when I was very young, three on, though I mostly stayed at home with a babysitter-housekeeper of sorts in my first years. In my sixth grade when I went to Northview with her, I naturally became part of the help, cleaning erasers, cleaning off the hectograph ink, sweeping, dusting, washing, emptying the wastebaskets, all the usual chores. On lucky nights I got to leave early to start walking home with the Poppes, two families who lived a couple miles along the road, Mom picking me up in the car then. It was one of my better years.

As noted in the last entry, I am passionately a logophile, a word lover, with Shakespeare and Joyce my votes for the two top celebrants of our language. I am also mostly a liberal from my college teaching days, though 25 years of court work tempered those tendencies and gave me an equally passionate detestation of street language, not at all the authentic nitty-gritty but the illiterate, dull boredom of the, uhm, word challenged. Which is why I was particularly interested in The Week's summary of Daniel Henninger's Wall Street Journal editorial on a recent court ruling involving the FCC and sudden profane/obscene utterances on, say, MTV award shows, rockers and rappers being excessively prone to poor language skills (page 12 of the 29 June 2007 issue of The Week). Henninger chided the "leftist"--why not "literate"--print media for still mostly refusing to print the offending words, using asterisks or that hodgepodge of symbols banged at random from the top row of a typewriter. His point was "Vulgarities debase language and express nothing but the speaker's lack of imagination and self-control. They offend. They're in bad taste." Which last two sentences explain why they're wielded as weapons.

As an ex-college English teacher, I am fussy enough to make the distinction between those two categories, profane referring to the sacred or religious, obscene referring to physical body functions. And I have wielded both kinds, before my language piety is impeached, as Cheney should be. I was teaching in Illinois in the late Sixties with several students from the Chicago area in my classes, a riproaring decade with the Vietnam War (another of those undeclared debacles we slid into), like the notorious alleged Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." During the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, infamous for Daly's strong-armed response to protesters, I got eyewitness reports, and even downstate WIU had sit-ins and the SDS churning campus politics. It was a curiously exhilarating, exhausting decade.

One of the most inflammatory topics was, of course, freedom of speech, meaning mainly the use of the F word, which had the same quaintly incindiary power as long hair then. Other than the strategy of deliberate provocation and boring repetition, my major objection to the word remains the same today, almost 40 years later: the very sound is as brutal as the act the word describes. I know it has been in our language a long time--since somewhere between 1400 and 1600, according to usual source efforts--and I know there are those like a very good friend who make creatively funny variations on it, the way super got -califragilisticexpialidocious added to it, as well as hippy sorts like Dharma's parents who view/use it so commonly as to make it inocuous. Except that it's not inocuous, and I still remember the startling boredom of a defendant who used it and its variants, none creative, 47 times, as I recall, during a plea, which plea was around 15 minutes perhaps. I also know its brutality is why it's such a potent swear word, a favorite of violent men for a reason. That reason is best summed up by Pocahontas in Matthew Sharpe's satirical Jamestown when she's describing "ceremonial state-sponsored log sculptures that surround the fire" of "the pre-hunt pep rally," especially "hunting-type face" #3, and then skips the rest: "The one with semi-closed eyelids, red flared nostrils, parted lips, scratches on its flushed face, and tousled hair damp with perspiration is the sculpture of just made love to the wife of my enemy in the dirt against her will while her husband lay freshly murdered not ten feet away." There's your F word in any warfare right up to our present.

So that is why I actually quit subscribing to HBO, not just because of its frequent program repetition but mainly because its "acclaimed" shows like Deadwood and Entourage lard their scripts with the F word and its variants so heavily, the writers could be accused of cholesterol abuse. My ears and brain are automatically programmed to shut down at the F word, like the cell phone dead spaces causing anxiety in the Vonage commercials. I would also declare Deadwood historically inaccurate as to its language, but that makes no real difference. It's all that dead space of the F word. You can imagine how little I hear of rap and hip hop and what movies put me to sleep, including most recently The Departed.

Take your lesson from Falstaff (I Henry IV 2.5.226-229): "Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat's tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stock-fish--O, for breath to utter what is like thee!--you tailor's yard, you sheath, you bowcase, you vile standing tuck--"