The Sport Parade (1932)

Leonard Maltin mentions the lame story, the flashy direction, and Robert Benchley's brilliant screen debut, not looking as puffy-fishlike-thing-on-the-beach as he would a few years later but already blatantly inserted, as America's worst color commentator ("And it should be a great Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth game today at Yale Stadium, here in Cambridge, Massachusetts...").

True, true, all true. But it says something probably not worth saying about heterosexual hegemony and the all-male capsule review business that unmentioned goes the most eyeboggling aspect of the movie, young pre-Code Joel McCrea. I always accepted on faith that this sullen, stubborn, humorless, not-too-bright character was sexually attractive, but I never really understood why till I saw him with no clothes on.

OK, he's not completely nude on screen. But I gotta say if Jean Harlow or Myrna Loy had spent a sizable portion of a movie greased up and wearing only tighty-whities, Leonard Maltin sure as hell would've found it fit to mention.

Plus: "Skeets" Gallagher!

The Road to Son of Paleface, 2

This writer, not knowing Hope, can only conjecture what goes on inside the man. He has seen horrible things and has survived them with good humor and made them more bearable, but that doesn't happen without putting a wound on a man. He is cut off from rest, and even from admitting weariness. Having become a symbol, he must lead a symbol life.

- John Steinbeck

Bob Hope starred on radio before starring in movies.

Radio popularity is based on voice. It's an authorial role, and enjoys some of the same freedom. On the blank face of it, Edgar Bergen's radio stardom made no sense. The comic lead of the team, however, was Charlie McCarthy: a little wooden boy who'd somehow acquired the clothing, impulses, and experiences of an Edwardian roué, and was somehow always accepted in all particulars by those around him. Radio was the creature's home; filmed, he became only a ventriloquist's dummy.

Writers are drawn to radio as a medium, and purportedly Bob Hope was the first stand-up comic to openly acknowledge his stable of gag-writers. When he wanted a more spontaneous feel, he'd phone them to rush the gags. Hope's "live" performances were as anti-improvisational as Mel Blanc's: reliably on-brand and identifiable no matter how extreme the setting or guise.

Which, in turn, gave them both liberty to step away from setting and guise entirely. Tex Avery's one-shot "Screwy Squirrel" short gets special attention from theorists because the unestablished and unappealing lead doesn't ground the experiment. His self-awareness attracts the eye, whereas audience asides like Bugs Bunny's "He don't know me very well, do he?" are close to invisible.

For radio stars, there's no question about breaking the fourth wall. You've already invited 'em right into your living room. (That's what made radio horror so spooky. When I was seven years old, the prefatory whistle of "The Whistler" and the basso profondo molto legato announcement of "Suspense" provended sufficient nightmare fodder in themselves. No need to wait for the plotline.) Advertisers made the turn to the audience a routine running gag.

Hollywood's openness varied. Relieved from the need to position Hope as a romantic lead, able to give his bloat and stubble free rein, the best "Road" pictures were unusually relaxed in their anti-realism, incorporating such absurdities as talking camels and Robert Benchley without strain. You couldn't manage that with Crosby alone, but Hope loosened the reins. Even in his stiffer vehicles, moments of nonsense sometimes rip through the conventional surface. The Princess and the Pirate's highlight comes before the action even begins (which is why I don't feel terribly guilty about spoiling it):

"That's not me, folks, I come on later, I play a coward."

Buster Keaton and W. C. Fields drift mildly upwards into their personal unreal, tethered by rude tugs of slapstick and abuse. The Marx and Ritz Brothers drive reality squealing like a moneylender from the temple. Approaching sometimes the misanthropic babble of Groucho and sometimes the nightmarish openness of Fields, Hope is the first movie comedian to attain enlightenment by the road of skepticism: an absolute distrust that undercuts narrative drive, filmic convention, and his own part. On the other hand, he's not a delicate instrument; like a cartoon star, you know that if a bomb dropped on Hope, he'd be nervously wise-cracking in Hell next scene.

Only two things keep Hope's character among the earthly. First, a sensuality which distinguishes him from his colder and more self-conscious (if more consistent) disciples. I can't imagine Bill Murray or Woody Allen matching the delirious canine abandon of Hope as he applied Dorothy Lamour's hand against his face in Road to Morocco. (Allen needed a multiple-orgasm stimulator to come close.) Older burleykyoo types like Chico, Harpo, and Jimmy Durante were too goal-oriented to even notice the species of their objects of desire, much less such particulars as touch, scent, and taste.

And foremost, lack of motivating force. As blatantly untrustworthy as his surroundings and roles are, he sees no alternative.

Lacking other convictions, Hope staked his soul on glibness. If he wasn't "on", he'd vanish completely. No wonder he looks anxious.

Manifolds

(Attention Conservation Notice: As previously confessed, this three-plus-part series is a grossly distended remake of a more reasonably proportioned essay from 2013.
Some people claim Peli Grietzer's to blame, but I know it's my own damn fault.)

3. Adaptive Manifold Learning

I sometimes feel as if I've never had a single relatable experience. Like, whenever I try to tell a story, it degenerates into a series of explanations and everyone gets this face like they're doing math.

- Sandra Newman on Twitter

With apologies aforethought

Being the product of a body embedded in history, my writing frequently passes through drizzles of autobiographical asides or illustrative anecdotes. But attempting to narrate "personal life" tout court calls on an internal voice I trust considerably less far than I can throw it. I'm not fond of memoir as a genre, I think "creative nonfiction" was just a way for academic-workshop fiction to become more formulaic, and I'm not so crazy about myself either.1

Moreover, my story-as-told-by is even drabber than existence-as-lived-by: my memory maintains a spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child bias, and my greatest pleasures have been literally unspeakable. Even after trimming to what's most germane to this topic, reserving other polyps of sad-sackery for use in other cans of dogfood, the prospect remains unappetizing.

The last vivid image I retain from my father's deathbed is his reflexive wince-and-glare as I tried to reassure him. I sometimes see that expression of pained disgust on my brother's face, and I sometimes feel it on my own. Much of this draft seems to beg for the editorial query "Well, boo fucking hoo."

Still, meat was promised, and if you're willing, I guess I am. Take a an oxygenated breath from Charles Kerns's posts now and then, though.

1959 – 1964

(After all, the word "infant" means, literally, "unable to speak," and as my efforts to describe them reveal, experiences of love and art are also intrinsically nonverbal.)

- Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began by Ellen Dissanayake 1

This here particular scrap of meat was a mistake incurrable only before abortion became legal and prolongable only after doctors could prescribe effective antibiotics. (One of which permanently darkened my teeth, but hey, you win some you lose some.)

My brother might disagree, but I believe our adoptive parents genuinely (if standoffishly) cared for us. Unlike some of my sissy peers, I wasn't shipped to military school or routinely beaten at home: our mother was too clueless for homophobic panic, and our father was basically a tolerant sort. Aided by progressive taxation, they kept us fed, clothed, sheltered, doctored, and schooled; they bought Christmas and birthday presents after consulting our obsessively curated wishlists.

But despite the lengthy and thoroughly conscious labor required to adopt, neither had much feel for parenthood.

Mom came from a large rural family low on sentimentality and high on feuds. In a movie she would have played the vain sister, unwilling to do chores and coming to an instructively unpleasant end after some terrible romantic decisions. In life, after a failed marriage or two, she escaped to the Navy.

Dad's father died or disappeared early on; his "mother" (or possibly his aunt, it's all very Southern Gothic) was a vicious tobaccy-spitting bible-thumping racist; his stepfather was a physically abusive drunk. Dad ran away several times, dropped out of high school, joined a street gang, and finally lied about his age to enlist.

The Navy was good for both of them, but its training didn't include childcare. They were able to hold things together so long as I remained in the company of books and tolerant adults. Once I was forced to associate with other children, my poor brother first and foremost, they (and we) were quickly swept out of their depth.

Kindergarten was so disastrous as to call for public intervention. Nowadays such a disruptive five-year-old might be arrested or drugged or both. Instead, Mrs. Nickerson, the first of many female saviors, diagnosed my severe myopia and suggested an IQ test.

The Navy trained my father as an electronics technician and deployed him accordingly: Adak on his own; then, with us, Karamürsel, Bremerhaven, sunny Guantanamo Bay, and, on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp, Northwest Radio Station. A few years before my birth, Dad was on one of the many teams tracking Sputnik's progress and wondering what the hell the Russians were up to this time.

By scaring the bejezus out of everyone, Sputnik successfully initiated what may have been the least anti-intellectual period in American history. Well done, Commies! In 1964, New York City public schools had just decided to drop IQ testing, but interest continued to run high elsewhere. (And in some sad circles of Hell apparently still does.)

I've never felt like reexamining those early tests, but I take for granted that their makers wouldn't get far comparing five-year-olds on their retention of trivia from AP History or Chemistry. Instead, the "general" aptitude being measured likely coincided with my little pony's forever one-and-only trick.

Besides exaggerating the importance of my signature cognitive strength, such a test would tend to miss my signature cognitive weakness: a near pathological aversion to habituation. Before a single onion is chopped, I'll have veered from sous-chef to Norman Bates; language drills induce increasingly bizarre variations in grammar and vocabulary; any daily exercise regimen will be interrupted by prostration of one sort or another....

To compensate I interject consciousness; what would normally become near-autonomous actions must be continuously re-invented if they're to be kept in place. Hooky phrases fill my noggin with lint and clothe my discourse in flannel, but more "arbitrary" symbols — companions' names, historical dates, distances and measurements, the Java runtime library — simply vanish because I have no way to reconstruct them from scratch.

By Taylorist notions of efficiency, I'm not so much an Optimizing Function as sand in the gears. And so, once again, the Navy got ripped off.

But back in 1964 neither it nor I had an inkling of all this. For myself, the testing and follow-up discussions and tasks simply kept me happier than I'd been for several years. Reasonable arguments! Interesting conversations! With a lady! What sport!

The one frustration in these prized outings, the one game in which I felt the familiar shadow of a trouncing, was mathematics. The abstraction of quantity, OK; addition, multiplication, exponents, sure. But I sat slack-jawed before the Pythagorean theorem, unable to learn the trick no matter how often I requested a replay. Fractions were a mean-spirited practical joke — and the irrationals?

Between intuitive verbal logic and unfathomable geometry was a gulf I couldn't imagine crossing.

[Once we give up] the myth according to which certainty relies only on sequence matching and formal induction, then any work based on the ordered structure of numbers, on the geometric judgment lying at the core of mathematics, can go smoothly. Incompleteness shows that this judgment is elementary (it cannot be further reduced), but it is still a (very) complex judgment. [...] A mathematician understands and communicates to the student what the continuum is by gesture, since behind the gesture both share this ancient act of life experience: the eye saccade, the movement of the hand. [...] What is lacking in formal mechanisms, or in other words their provable incompleteness, is a consequence of this hand gesture which structures space and measures time by using well order. This gesture originates and fixes in action the linguistic construction of mathematics, indeed deduction, and completes its signification.

- Mathematics & the Natural Sciences by Giuseppe Longo & Daniel Bailey

Or, as revealed to a brat more precocious than myself:

Eternity was not an infinitely great quantity that was worn down, but eternity was succession.

Then Joana suddenly understood that the utmost beauty was to be found in succession, that movement explained form — it was so high and pure to cry: movement explains form! — and pain was also to be found in succession because the body was slower than the movement of uninterrupted continuity.

Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector,
translated by Alison Entrekin

1964 – 1969

And this speech the goddesses first of all spoke to me
The Olympian Muses, daughters of Aegis-bearing Zeus:
"Shepherds of the field, base, shameful things, mere bellies:
We know how to speak many falsehoods which are like verities,
And we know, whenever we wish, how to utter truths."

- Theogony by Hesiod, as translated by Shaul Tor
in Mortal and Divine in Early Greek Epistemology

A book is a projection of higher-dimensional structures onto a three-dimensional sheaf of two-dimensional planes. A handily compact thing, but decompressing that projection requires some sense of those higher dimensions.

I spontaneously began to read at age three. Unlike many hyperlexics, I also seem to have been an early talker; like most, however, I was comfortable with a certain level of incomprehension, and that level increased after I learned that the very best people were expected to speed-read.1

Like Mowgli was raised by wolves, like Estella was raised by Miss Havisham, I was raised by books. Being a Dickens character, Miss Havisham stays reliably on model; say what you want about wolfishness, at least it's an ethos. The intention of books en masse is harder to read. Sometimes I'd be convicted for not living up to the instructions laid out by Dennis the Menace 2 or Boy's Life or Robert Heinlein; other times for failing the tests of Hans Christian Andersen or Madeline L'Engle or Lloyd Alexander. And if I was so smart, why wasn't I solving crimes? Or the Four-Color Theorem? Or finding some way to not get beaten up all the time?

Why, the Bible alone provided an inexhaustible spring of fresh accusations. Should all else succeed, I could always be convicted of pride, that most pernicious of weeds.

If Doctor Aquinas had treated me to his Explanation of Everything, I would have made fine priesthood fodder. If I'd been raised Calvinist, I could at least be certain of my fate. As was — well, consider Nietzsche's normative:

The spirit's power to appropriate the foreign stands revealed in its inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, and to overlook or repulse whatever is totally contradictory — just as it involuntarily emphasizes certain feature and lines in what is foreign, in every piece of the "external world," retouching and falsifying the whole to suit itself. Its intent in all this is to incorporate new "experiences," to file new things in old files — growth, in a word — or, more precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power.

An apparently opposite drive serves this same will: a sudden erupting decision in favor of ignorance, of deliberate exclusion, a shutting of one's windows....

[It is explicitly no coincidence that placed immediately after this are several sections devoted to misogyny.]

- Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche,
translated Walter Kaufmann

Disgraceful though that sounds, what would the alternative look like? Whatever you choose to call it, "the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power" would not be prominent features. Presuming the coherence of my authorities, "studying them as if cramming for a test on how to be the most lovable child in the world," I diagnosed incoherence in myself, and prescribed the traditional course of repentance and purgation, followed by inevitable backslide.

Although this art of logic has manifold utility, still, if one is learned only in it, and ignorant of aught else, he is actually retarded, rather than helped to progress in philosophy, since he becomes a victim of verbosity and overconfidence. By itself, logic is practically useless. Only when it is associated with other studies does logic shine, and then by a virtue that is communicated by them. Considerable indulgence should, however, be shown to the young, in whom verbosity should be temporarily tolerated, so that they may thus acquire an abundance of eloquence.

- "Chapter 28. How logic should be employed"
from The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury

When caged with my brother, I bullied him without mercy and he just as mercilessly tormented me. When alone with my mother, she'd ask advice on clothes, finances, and reading,1 which was pleasant if sometimes a bit nervous-making. My father preferred to note my frauds and outrage my primness, although once, after one of Mom's elaborately sadistic jokes pitched my anxiety to the point of boycotting my own seventh-birthday party, he entered our bedroom, removed his belt, and announced, "I know you're smarter than me, but" (a hot roar flooded my ears) — that's not true! —
— how had I broken so much? —

In classrooms, I strove to reach my imagined potential until halted by overreach and collapse, a cycle which helped convince my parents to keep me on the standard academic track rather than pushing graduation forward a few years. (Given how weirdly underaged I looked, this may have been the healthiest course available at the time. When I consider high school, though, I'm tempted to second-guess.) And I remained "bad at math," which is to say better than average but not ridiculously better than average. Not a good look for a Young Scientist, and at odds with my enthusiasm for puzzle collections, One Two Three... Infinity, and Martin Gardner's columns.

From kindergarten through elementary school, fear and loathing occupied waking hours at school, home, and "playing outside" (i.e., evading my peers), and my sleep was broken by guilt-laden nightmares (I fail to save my family from fire, flood, famine, or freezing; I fail to save my family from a volcano; I fail to save my family from The Bomb). Yet life in the lap o' luxury was not complete misery.

In television-free Bremerhaven especially, the dark brown cobblestones and dark green foliage soothed eyes and mind, as did my father's copies of Playboy (watercolor cartoons! ladies with fascinatingly varied interests!). And there were Saturday movie serials, my favorites being the circus melodramas (ladies in tights! horses!), and matinee features, my favorites being the colonialist/wildlife adventures (elephants! but not enough ladies 2). One morning I opened our door and faced a precisely vertical wall of snow stretching far above my head; I was equally awestruck by the orchestra and lit scrims on my class's field trip to the opera house, and by the forest where my Cub Scout troop camped until I was demobbed by mumps, painfully reminding me (and my weary parents) of the strep throat which had curtailed the family's attempt to visit Istanbul.

More reliably, in Germany, in Cuba, and then in Virginia, there was the comfort of books — books were fine; I was a mess but books were fine — from the library, of course, and from our monthly trip to the dump (where with luck I might garner a textbook reeking of garbage-smoke), and within strict limits the twice-yearly-authorized Scholastic sale (soon replaced by careful gaming of the Science Fiction Book Club's loss-leaders, followed in my teens by gaming of the Book of the Month Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club).

Just as reliably but less explicably, there was, serially, one adult friend. By some mechanism which remains mysterious to me, the universe contrived that on each military base there reside one bookish, pleasantly disputatious Navy Wife who would be willing to host a peculiar little boy and converse for hours. Did my parents post a classified ad? Did there just happen to be that many bookish Navy Wives starved for company?

Aside from incidental bits of knowledge, these dates taught me:

1. Social interactions could provide something better than terror, hatred, or intense boredom.
2. Much as dodgeball justified terror and card games justified boredom, books could serve to justify these better interactions.
3. Intelligent, interesting, and trustworthy people were most likely to be female. (I presumed, based on the evidence of author names, that some worthwhile men — or, to be slightly less snotty, men who seemed worth emulating — must exist somewhere, but it wasn't until age seventeen and a brief audience with pixilated Wilson "Bob" Tucker that I encountered one.)

The most ardent and formative of these friendships was the first, with Mrs.— I remember her eyes and her smile (and her relentlessly friendly Siamese cat) but her name I've lost... Mrs. Kubelik? Or am I thinking of Shirley MacLaine? Mrs. K (to give her for the nonce her new misnomer) collected and lent paperbacks of science fiction and pop-science (on which ground we met), and also parapsychology, reincarnation, astrology, and UFOlogy, on which ground we debated.

I took Con, under the unwieldy banner of rationalism, scientific positivism, religious orthodoxy (insofar as the military's deistic Protestantism could sustain such a concept), law-and-order, and patriotic tolerance: Truth, Justice, & the American Way. Although I hadn't checked those terms for completeness and consistency, they carried a full load of conviction, in both senses of the word.

Elevenses : 1970 – 1973

JOHN FREEMAN: Can I take you back to your own childhood? Do you remember the occasion when you first felt consciousness of your own individual self?

CARL JUNG: That was in my eleventh year. There I suddenly, on my way to school, I stepped out of a mist. It was just as if I had been in a mist, walking in a mist, and then I stepped out of it and then I knew, I am. I am what I am. And then I thought, But what have I been before? And then I found that I had been in a mist, not knowing to differentiate myself from things. I was just one thing among many things.

- Face to Face, BBC, 1959

After seven years overseas, in 1970 we left Gitmo and landed stateside. Virginian high spring was so verdant my eyes watered.

One day that summer, doing nothing much, probably while sitting on the porch of our base housing, I felt something happen to me, in me, between me and not-me. My surroundings suddenly (it was quite sudden) snapped into focus and into depth, and I awoke, as if all I'd known until then had been a twilit coma and I'd become fully conscious. There was no other immediate revelation: only the pure sensation itself. And then I started to move and perceive.

Very slowly over the next few years I came to understand that my spirit's nosebleeds and broken toes and assflops weren't exclusively the product of clumsiness — that I'd sometimes been walking into plate-glass windows or funhouse mirrors or at any rate prison walls not strictly of my own making.1

For example, it seemed as if I might not be the only sinner so tainted as to be shunned by the Voice of God. To an alarming extent, what most adults and children professed was faith in hearsay rather than replicated experiment. Even more alarmingly, few of them felt shunned. (Ten years later, the personal touch of Jayzus would become epidemic among my people. We were better off with hearsay.)

Somewhere in there I also began to notice that the demand for truth was asymmetrical: it could be safely made by those in power but not safely reciprocated by the powerless. Which seemed, against my grain, to lend the powerless (my brother, for example; or myself, as I ventured into less approved adolescent waters) some strictly limited moral justification to prevaricate.2

Somewhere in there I also became obsessed with mid-century American depressive celebrity-wits — Oscar Levant, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber...— my introduction to our native species of Romantic Irony.3 "Teacher's Pet," Thurber's clumsy thrash against a riptide of resentful self-loathing, pushed Shock of Recognition into Sublimity of Terror. It didn't cure anything, but it surely counted as a treatment.

Somewhere in there I also learned why reading Playboy interfered with urination.

I entered sixth grade that fall. Because the Chesapeake public school was much larger than overseas base schools, or maybe because my cohort was older, for the first time I made some (three, to be precise) friends my own age. Bullying maintained its accustomed level but at least there was someone with whom to play chess and commiserate.

Also that fall, the local library received Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare, placing me in an awkward position. An Asimov completist, I'd easily downed the big-gulps of his Guide to the Bible as a summit meeting between authoritative voices. But in conversations with teachers, librarians, and Navy Wives, I'd already staked a claim that Asimov was indubitably better than Shakespeare insofar as Shakespeare had small physics and less biochemistry. Asimov's introductory tribute clarified nothing. The Little Leather Library's Tempest and Midsummer Night's Dream had always baffled me. Where was the appeal?

I used King John as the test case (why King John? beats me; I don't think my presumed bastardy played a part), refusing to move past it until I cracked the secret. And after increasingly brake-pumped re-readings, I more or less did. It turns out (stop me if you've heard this already) that patterns of sound and mouth-feel are more than disposable cartons of discovery; as portals they could be revisited, and replenish with fresh discovery.4 Moreover, this seemingly crazy, previously unsuspected reading technique could open other closed volumes, particularly volumes of poetry, and support thrift by extending their lifespans.

Also that fall, Miz Johnson made me good at math. She was the sort of teacher who transforms lives (and I do not fucking want to hear a whisper about Jean Brodie): charismatic, clear-sighted, articulate, and inexhaustible, at least by us. After a few observant weeks, Miz Johnson shifted me and one of my friends to a far back corner of the room, gave us new textbooks which included some basic proofs, and somehow contrived to guide us through high school algebra while simultaneously managing the rest of the sixth-grade class.

In the vocabulary favored by this current narrative, she demonstrated how one might approach mathematics as the exchange and extension of abstract verbal models of social reality. I was enthralled; I was absorbed. I was triumphant.

For example, if one be bird-witted, that is, easily distracted and unable to keep his attention as long as he should, Mathematics provides a remedy; for in them if the mind be caught away but a moment, the demonstration has to be commenced anew.

- The Advancement of Learning by Francis Bacon

Later that year, Miz Johnson improvised an equally powerful lesson in American political science when some kid's remark triggered an account of her path to the front of our classroom: the bribes, threats, and extortionate debts her grandparents and parents faced to retain a bit of land and a restaurant business; the extended family's decades of extended labor, waking when farmers did and reaching bed when bars closed; how their place became favored by the white elite at the cost of shucking and jiving and, when all else failed, a nails-spitting grovel only partly repaid by petty revenge served hot from the kitchen — all to grant her and her siblings a chance to work their asses off with at least a shred of dignity.5

Seventh grade brought a follow-up lesson when one of my three friends announced he could no longer associate with us: accused of acting white, he needed to spend time with his own people. Another one, my fellow algebra student, the smallest and most eccentric of us — when I first watched Rebel Without a Cause, Sal Mineo brought him to mind — vanished between semesters; military school, I heard.

By eighth grade I'd negotiated a truce with base-housing bullies through neighborhood football: although I couldn't pass or receive, and never learned the rules, I made a fearlessly tenacious tackle. Harassment stayed the norm among my academic cohort but paused for a daily bus ride to high school, where I took trig and sub-pre-introductory French. In English class I had my first lesson in writing down to an audience; in social studies, I discussed McCarthyism with my equally-Republican teacher, eventually retaining respect for him but not for the Republicans.

Then my father retired from the Navy and decided to move us to my mother's home town, Braymer, Missouri, population 880, SAAH-LUTE!