#52 Nashville/Music City Footnote II

Nashville ... 'tis a silly place. It's Camelot and, pace Monty Python, Spamalot both at the same time. Two separate but equal kingdoms. Wonderfully schizoid. On the one hand there's the city as the "Athens of the South," with an actual full-size replica of the PARTHENON in Centennial Park to prove it. (Another Greekism, hubris, might also come to mind here.) There it is, right across West End Ave. from Vanderbilt University. But the latter is only one of literally dozens--think Boston or the NC "Triangle" hereabouts--of higher-learning institutions dotting the landscape.

The crown-jewel, my doctoral alma mater, was founded by steamship-mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt, the "Commodore"--a strictly honorary title like chicken-mogul Harlan Sanders' Kentucky "Colonel"--in 1873. Might as well have been called "Vanity" U, because once he had bought up the little Methodist college on the west side of town; had donated his money and his name; he and his family had little to do with it after that. Unlike those other trickle-down tycoon-clans like the Carnegies and Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts have never been great philanthropists, even unto "poor-little-rich-girl" Gloria. For example-- sort of a "NEWS FLASH!"--the Obamas just visited the spectacular Biltmore House this weekend on their romantic getaway to Asheville. They were doubtless the only ones who got in without paying the pricey entrance fees. That monument to gilded-age excess nearly bankrupted that line of the Commodore's progeny, which has been trying to catch up ever since Biltmore was almost but never quite "built" to this day. They were always good at spending, not giving.

The University is most noted today for its top-ranked MEDICAL SCHOOL/med-center--two Nobel laureates (seven total, incl. other departments)--and its #1 ranking (last week's USNews) in grad-school EDUCATION, due in large part to the purchase and full incorporation a couple of decades ago of the venerable Peabody College for Teachers next-door. A long-time partner. Tipper Gore got her M.A. there; Al was Vandy Law. But in my day it was ENGLISH. It was the home of the still-influential New Critical School for the study of literature (Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren), and the "Fugitive Movement" in poetry, producing three U.S. Poet laureates: Alan Tate, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Penn Warren again. "Red" Warren is the only author, in addition, to win the Pulitzer for both poetry (twice) AND fiction: the novel, All the King's Men (1947). My "convention-buddy" James Dickey, Pulitzer-prized poet and movie-star-manque in his novel-to-movie, Deliverance, hailed from those heady environs too.

Let me pause over the former. He was no crowd-rouser like John Forsythe, but Robert Penn "Call-Me-Red" Warren was a hit nonetheless when we were able to bring my fellow Vandy alum to our little college in the late 70s. Still active, he was then working on a libretto ( !) for a collaborative operatic version of his famous novel (truly a man for all genres). Called Willy Stark, it was presented on PBS a few years later, and is now on DVD. During his visit to campus, we were able to screen the original, Academy-Award-winning movie-adaptation of All the King's Men (1949) with Broderick Crawford (Best Actor winner) et al., as yet unsullied by the disastrous re-make of several years ago, with Sean Penn (relation?) in the Willy Stark/Huey Long role.

As for my association with wild-man James Dickey, it'll have to wait for a later post. As for the luminaries on the other side of town--Nashville's Spamalot, if you will--I need to get back to the great clash/crash of cultures that occurred on that fall morning in 1968 where driveway + sidewalk + street met in near-deadly triangulation for the two people involved. And so I shall, right now. (more).
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#24 Celebrating Bjarni ... IV--The Place

This is Leif's settlement site on "The Cove of the Jellyfish" at the very northern tip of Newfoundland. It was named first by French fishermen as L'Anse aux Meduse (Medusa-like jellyfish presumably there abound), a toponym that the later colonizing Englishmen appropriated, but folk-etymologized to L'Anse Aux Meadows. This incredible archaeological discovery sits re-covered today, preserving (as usual in these cases) what already has been done, while awaiting further developments in archaeo-technology before going at it again. But go at it they did in the 60s and 7os after the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his archaeologist/wife Anne (talk about Hollywood!) found the place. It was the capital city of Vinland.

Extensive excavation and precise carbon-dating proved it to be a little Norse village occupied for at least several years and dating from the year 1000. Everything fits. There can be little doubt that this was the New World home and commercial staging-area for Leif Eiriksson and his siblings, and other of his successors there. Eight buildings were uncovered, including the long-house and workshops for iron-working and carpentry, along with a few discarded tools and implements. There was an area for boat repair. Vinland, Inc. was evidently a going enterprise while it lasted. It was a real homestead, too--a broken spindle and an intact sewing-needle indicate definitively the presence of women. No surprises here. All of this is just what the sagas had been telling us all along.

And the Ingstads listened. Just like Sigurd Stefansson, Helga and Anne took the saga-writers at their word, and Sigurd's map, too. Really, it was all too easy. What's truly incredible is that it took 500 years to discover the site. All the clues were there. After Leif's first stop at rock-bound Baffin Island, he proceeded to Labrador, which may have been what Bjarni saw--"low-lying hills covered with forests"--ready for plunder but maybe too densely-covered for easy settlement. It was only spitting distance farther south to the tip of Newfoundland--unlike Bjarni, who turned back in mid-misadventure, Leif and his smallish armada were in full explorer-mode--and what did they find? An idyllic little cove filled with peaceful jellyfish, surrounded by semi-pastoral headlands abundant in grapevines. Where better to set up shop? The place would be convenient to the woodland treasures of "Markland"/Labrador just to the north, which in turn would be on the way back and still a very short distance to the "market-central" back in Greenland.

Even so, diminishing returns seemed to have set in. According to the sagas, in-fighting among the settlers, and especially out-fighting with the natives, doomed the the colony eventually to failure. In contrast to later colonization of, and migration to, the Americas, there just weren't enough white-folk. The displaced Greenlanders were, of course, vastly out-numbered--without much prospect of more on the way--by the indigenous Skraelingar. For long periods their relations were peaceful, however, even involving trade and barter between the parties. But in times of un-peace the battles were fierce. For example--and what follows from The Saga of Eirik the Red will have to be our lone excerpt from these remarkable works of historical fiction--here is Leif's pregnant sister, Freydis Eiriksdottir, on the sidelines of a pitched battle with the "skin-people," where they currently have the upper hand and her fellow Vinlanders are retreating--

Freydis came out and saw how they were retreating. She called out, "Why run you away from such worthless creatures, stout men that you are, when, as seems likely, you might slaughter them like so many cattle? Let me but have a weapon. I think I could fight better than any of you." They gave no heed to what she said. Freydis endeavored to accompany them, still she soon lagged behind, because she was with child; she went after them into the wood, and the Skraelingar directed their pursuit after her. She came upon a dead man, Thorbrand, Snorri's son, with a flat stone fixed in his head; his sword lay beside him, so she took it up and prepared to defend herself therewith.

Then came the Skraelingar upon her. She let down her sark and struck her breast with the naked sword. At this they were frightened, rushed off to their boats, and fled away. Karlsefni and the others came up to her and praised her zeal. (c. 1300)

What a woman. I'd run too. She may have given birth right then and there. I would have. But we DO know that out of all this struggle and strife came a wife who was able to deliver the very first European baby in the Western Hemisphere. Move over Virginia Dare. From the Groenlendinga Saga we learn that it was a boy, Snorri, born to that same Karlsefni above, and his wife Gudrid.

But after about ten years from Leif's momentous (except to the rest of the world) landfall at lovely Jellyfish Cove around the turn of the first millennium--everybody quit the joint ... never to return. And it only took another thousand years for all of this interesting footnote to history to fully come to light. Happy Columbus Day! (end)
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#23 Celebrating Bjarni ... III--The Maps

Here's another map, limned by a young Icelandic teacher and hobbyist cartographer named Sigurd Stefansson around 1570 at the bishopric of Skalholt near modern-day Reykjavik (note ancient residue in last syllable). Sigurd's map gave a much more accurate picture of the northern latitudes of the New World, believe it or not, than the earlier Waldeseemuller world map, by now the standard, and the one that had forever immortalized Amerigo Vespucci at the expense of his fellow countryman, Columbus. For the scholarly Sigurd had done his homework well. He relied on the sagas.

His map had zero impact at the time, of course, but that little capital "A" down in the left hand corner would have enormous influence on the archaeological rediscovery of the true "discovery" of America ... some five hundred years later. Sigurd followed the sagas faithfully in piecing together the land-and-sea-scape provided in mainly two of somewhat lesser literary worth, but abounding in historical value: the Saga of Eirik the Red and the Groenlendinga Saga (not taught in my class, but pointedly and often alluded to).

Sigurd the Mapmaker read an incredible story ... one eminently suitable for Hollywood adaptation. But also true. Harrowing sea-voyages. Frontier Indian fighting. Near starvation. Birth of first child on North American soil. Sound familiar? Nope, its not Massachusetts or Virginia. All this happened more than a half-millennium earlier, on and around that magical year 1000, and on and around the places depicted on Sigurd's map.

Here's what the sagas told him: there was the Icelandic merchant Bjarni's first sighting--those "low-lying hills covered with forests"--when blown off-course on his way to the Norwegian outlaw Eirik the Red's Greenland colony. Eirik's opportunistic son, Leif, picked up the challenge 15 years later ("forests" meant timber, of which tree-depleted Greenland, despite its P.R. moniker, was in dire need) by setting sail in in the very same long-ship that Bjarni used, along with several others. (Note: I have seen these big, clinker-built, dragon-prowed, more-than-seaworthy knarrs "up close and personal." It was during my "quest for the Beowulf poem's Heorot" in 1973, when I visited Roskilde, Denmark, site of the Viking Ship Museum. See DM # 139.)

He took a safer route than that of Bjarni's wind-blown ride across open waters, however, and this was important for Sigurd's map. Leif took a "coastal" course, staying as close as he could to land masses that HAD to be there, if Bjarni was telling the truth. They were. In fact, it would have been a miracle if these itchy Viking sea-hounds had NOT discovered the northeast coastlines of North America. Just look at the map. Or check a modern one. These guys already had the nautical-tech to sail Columbus-like across vast ocean-distances if necessary, but they didn't have to. "Vinland" is right in Greenland's backyard ... literally: as mentioned earlier, they share the same continental plate.

Curiously though, Sigurd doesn't use Leif's "Vinland" to label his promontory in the lower left of his map (actually the island of Newfoundland--he also generously attached his own Greenland to "mainland" North America. Even in 1570, nobody had yet circumnavigated the forbidding extent of that massive, ice-bound island). His other designations are right from Leif's expedition: In late fall or early winter of 1000 A.D. they first make historic landfall--Leif would be the #1 European to do so, and he would hang on to that record for five centuries--on what he named Helleland (= "flat-rock-land," present day Baffin Island); next they arrive on the shores of heavily-forested Markland (= "wood-land," today's Labrador), farther south and much more promising for Leif, at least commercially, as reflected in the name he gave to it; and finally the voyagers land and set up camp on the inviting coast of Bjarni-country. On the "low-lying hills" he finds grape-vines. And upon them vinber = Old Norse for "wine-berries." (It was the Medieval Warming Period; the Little Ice Age was not to strike these latitudes for another 350 years) Here was the place to be. They all stayed the mild winter, and Leif named the place after the grapes.

But as you can see, Sigurd doesn't label this seeming New World Eden "Vinland"--as Leif would have it, according to the saga accounts. He names it after Leif's name for its aboriginals: the Skraelingar (O.N. "skin-people"-- for wearing/trading skins or being half-naked). My speculations are that perhaps the 16C Icelander was (unduly) skeptical about all that grape-business (the Little Ice Age had long since taken effect across the northern climes), or that he was trying to be cartographically accurate as to the true inhabitants of the place, since his Viking kinsmen had long ago abandoned it. For all he knew, the Skraelings might have had a thriving nation going in 1570; the English and French hadn't really gotten started yet.

Whatever the reason, Sigurd's map unwittingly verifies the root cause behind the FAILURE of the Norse colonization of America ... Americans. Native ones, that is. The Indians drove out the white-eyes for once. And only time. After ten years of struggle, Leif Eiriksson's original settlement--right near that little capital "A" on the map--was abandoned forever. Today it's the community of L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, and they speak primarily English. A smattering of Eskimo, but nary a word of Icelandic. (more)
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#22 Celebrating Bjarni ... II--The Sagas

Now that my lazy "Columbus Day Fortnight" is over, and the days of November are already hard and dark upon us, alas ...

Until the 1960s we had only the word of the Norse sagas that any of this Viking exploration and colonization of America took place at all. Our school-kid fantasies of the swashbuckling Viking adventurers who got the jump on Columbus by 500 years had remained the stuff of myth and legend for as many more, for most everybody. Until: Mr. Leif Ericsson's summer home in the Canadian province of "Vinland" (okay: modern Newfoundland--more appropriately named, however, than its later namers could have known) was discovered. And archeologically verified.

More of that later. But lets talk about those Norse sagas for a minute, and about some interesting missed opportunities in the realms of history and literature. My background in Medieval Lit (and especially as Anglo-Saxonist and Beowulf scholar) put me in close touch with Old Norse/Icelandic works of poetry and prose. In fact, I taught an inter-term, special-topics course called "Northern Saga" (with a couple of Old Irish epics thrown in) at my college for several years. Fuggetabout your Quixote or Gulliver or Pamela as candidates for the first modern NOVEL in Western Literature--it was the Icelandic Brennu-Njalssaga, only one, the best, out of a half-dozen more that could be chosen. And written down some 300 years before! (Those ancient Scandians discovered more than just clinker-built long-ships and continents.) But they were entirely ignored and thus completely non-influential until relatively modern times.

First--and I promise not to "re-schedule" a college course here--the sagas were ignored as true belles lettres primarily because nobody read them. Outside of the shared-language audience of Iceland and Norway, that is. (And then by very few; after all, they were first in medieval manuscript, like the page fom Njalssaga above, before the age of print, which in itself helped spur the "modern" novel. The sagas were that much SO far ahead of their time.) Written down in the late-13th and early-14th centuries, they were simply NOT part of the Western Literary Tradition really until the Penguin people got to translating and distributing them in earnest some 50 years ago. Pity, for among the 30 or more sagas extant are three or four that could stand comparison with Hemingway.

The most gifted of the anonymous saga-writers didn't know they were writing novels, of course. They were writing history, preserving notable past events (theretofore passed on orally) by putting them into readable prose. Luckily for us, they took liberties--never with actual events, but with the character of the characters behind them. In short, they added psychology. The true measure of the true novel. There is for example no greater portrait of complex womanhood--the good and the bad--than Hallgerd in Njal, nor of flawed heroism than Gunnar in that same saga. Also, and I don't know quite how they managed it, the real historical events follow a coherent novelistic structure, right along with character exposition. The "story of the burning of Njal" is the epitome and triumph of these unsung novelists, but look for some great "modern romance" in the Laxdaela Saga, some rousing action-adventure in the full-length sagas of Egil and Grettir the Strong, and some tightly-knit short-stories (yes, they seem to have discovered the modern version of that, too) in such as the "Hraefnkels Saga" and several others. If you have the time.

Second--the sagas were ignored as true history until, again, virtually modern times. And again luckily for us, the events described are exactly right. For whatever fortuitous reason, the saga-writers chose events that occurred right around the end of the first millennium: from about 95o to 1050, a period involving political and religious turmoil in Norway, its subsequent colonization of Iceland and Greenland, and the first European settlement in America. Exciting times. What's interesting is that it took another 200 years or more for the Icelanders to write it all down. Even then, as history, not much attention was paid. Nobody in Britain or the Continent was reading Old Norse then, or even 200 more years later when Columbus et alia were contemplating a trip west across the Ocean Sea. The Great Northern Route to the New World never entered their minds. Of course the idea of a "New World" never entered the mind of Columbus even after he "discovered" it--even unto his death. Poor guy. That's why, ironically, the German cartographer Waldeseemuller gave first-name credit to travel-writer and quondam explorer Amerigo Vespucci on his influential 1507 Universalis Cosmographia. The map-maker's toponym stuck. As we all know.

The biggest irony, though, is that for five centuries before all of this, most everybody who could speak the North Germanic dialect of Indo-European already knew where the johnny-come-lately "Amerigoland" was, and who discovered it. (more)
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#25 Two Books by Steven Berlin Johnson

Saw this pop-science/pop-culture author last March on "The Colbert Report," promoting his latest book, The Invention of Air (2008), ambitiously subtitled, "A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America." It's really all about Joseph Priestley, who has been a hero of mine for a number of reasons, and for a goodly number of years. Long library waiting-list. Just got it a couple of weeks ago, and a review is to follow in the fullness of time.

Meanwhile, I got hold of his earlier book, Everything Bad Is Good For You (2005), subtitled, almost as ambitiously, "How Today's Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter." Johnson's study of what I'll over-simply call "techno-culture" and it's effect on our collective gray-matter IS good for you, and will make you smarter and--this is most important--less guilty about the time you and/or your kids spend on playing video-games or watching television.

Johnson's got some science to back that up, but first, he got me hooked early on when he explains his central thesis by coining a metaphor from a Woody Allen movie!--

... popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years. Where most commentators assume a race to the bottom and a dumbing down--"an increasingly infantilized society," in George Will's words-- I see a progressive story: mass culture growing more sophisticated, demanding more cognitive engagement with each passing year ... making our minds sharper, as we soak-in entertainment usually dismissed as so much lowbrow fluff. I call this upward trend the Sleeper Curve, after the classic sequence from Woody Allen's mock sci-fi film, where a team of scientists from 2173 are astounded that twentieth-century society failed to grasp the nutritional benefits of cream pies and hot fudge.

That's the author's only reference to the movie--he assumes probably correctly that most of his readership would've seen it, or at least heard about that "classic sequence." However, it's just too good not to share more fully with the Myriad Readers. Sleeper (1973) is perhaps my favorite from Allen's early, "mainly-funny-with-some-social-satire" period. Here one of Woody's trademark "schlemiel" characters, Miles Monroe, is brought back from an accidental cryonic state 2oo years into the future. His former diet was a regimen of all the hippie food-fads of the day; in fact, to hammer the point home unmercifully, Allen has him working at a health-food store! After thawing him out, two scientist-doctors discuss the morning after, all the while puffing on their cigarettes:

--For breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey, and tiger's milk."
--Oh yes [chuckling]. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
--You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or ... hot fudge?
--Those were thought to be unhealthy ... precisely the opposite of what we know to be true.
--Incredible.

Or later when, after they advise him to be sure to inhale deeply on a proffered cigarette, Miles confronts them with his confusion:

--Where am I anyhow? I mean, What happened to everybody? Where are all my friends?
--You must understand that everyone you knew in the past has been dead nearly 200 years.
--But they all ate organic rice!

This is the author's Sleeper Curve. Video-games bad? Nope. Turns out they're good for you after all. They are only one aspect of an intellectually rich, high-tech landscape through which a modern 10-year-old navigates: "shifting effortlessly from phone to IM to e-mail in communicating with friends; probing and telescoping through immense virtual worlds; adopting and troubleshooting new media technologies without flinching." That last was written before likes of Twitter and FaceBook (etc.) came into prominence, which can only further his point. Compare all of this to the rather simple-minded recreational toys and games of the past, and again you get his point. New stuff make brain good.

Public classrooms may be overcrowded and teachers underpaid--traditional test scores continue to go down--but outside of school kids' brains are developing sophisticated problem-solving skills. And IQ scores continue to go up. That's right: over the past 50 years Americans have improved by about 15 points, half of that in the last couple of decades. Johnson believes the paradox is solved when we look at what IQ tests test: problem solving, abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, spatial logic--a sufficiency of all of which is to be found in modern media technology. Q.E.D.

Even prime-time television has become more intellectually rigorous over the last couple of decades, Johnson believes. And I like his take on it. Ever since Hill Street Blues, he says (to paraphrase), a story-arc with multiple plot-threads has been de rigueur for the most successful sitcoms--popularly and critically--from Simpsons to Seinfeld to my current favorite, Scrubs. (Though I might contend that it really got started with shows like All In the Family and Mary Tyler Moore.) No longer "present tense" from one episode to the next, where the bare-bones "situation" was enough for the viewer to "get" the joke--Three's Company, Home Improvement--the newer shows require external references, an accumulated context that the audience must draw upon in order to be in the know. (That's why they're so popular in reruns: the viewers already have their ready-made "insider's playbook") Johnson points out Sam's past drinking-problem in Cheers, for example, or George Costanza's made-up character/entity "Art Vandelay," who appears in several episodes of Seinfeld. And I'll add the notorious "Master of My Domain" episode which keeps coming back in the form of "self-denial" in-jokes throughout the rest of the series.

Finally, and incidentally, my kids came up and along a bit before the monster techno-media revolution--somewhat ahead of the Sleeper Curve--but the author cites various fantasy and role-playing games as possible precursors to that revolution. One of those he mentions is Dungeons and Dragons, to which my first three sons were devoted player-aficionados. As far as I know, they never gave it up. I guess that's why they're so very, very smart. Or not.
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# 24 Bunuel and Defoe--a Footnote

Little did I know ... a favorite movie from my youth turns out to be the work of none other than Sn. Luis Bunuel: The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1954). Despite the poster, Dan O'Herlihy spoke English, I'm pretty sure. All his Mexican co-players were dubbed, I assume, but that would probably have escaped an eleven-year-old. Haven't seen it since I sat down to watch it--probably one of a double-feature--at the old Avalon movie palace in Chicago (see DM for earlier references--way too many of them for a healthy childhood). What a shock it was to discover, in looking over the director's corpus last week, that he played a then-anonymous part in my formative cinematic years and beyond. I had either read the book before or soon after the Avalon, but at any rate I felt at that young age I had a real fix on Defoe "academically," long before I caught up with his if-not-better-works: Journal of the Plague Year and his true classic, Moll Flanders--later in life.

You may have noticed a rather conspicuous gap in the Spanish auteur's career, as I have presented it anyway, between the 1929 Dog and his breakout Mexican/French films of the 60's--amazingly, that figure also represents his age! Briefly: after his exile from his homeland, he did menial dubbing and editing work in Hollywood for awhile, before settling in Mexico permanently, where for a couple of decades he ground out essentially B-movie, commercial fare of little consequence at all. Except for Crusoe. It was released internationally to some acclaim--again, much of this comes as late-breaking news to me--with the Irish-born O'Herlihy in the lead, for which he got his one and only Academy Award nomination. (The actor, a good one, was a man of few significant parts, it seems, though I did recognize him when he appeared later in a major role in Fail Safe (1964), and in many more less-major ones over a long career in film and television.)

Crusoe came out at just the right time, at least for us kids. It was an era of Saturday matinee swashbucklers and desert-island adventures like Treasure Island and Swiss Family ROBINSON, and you can tell from the poster that Bunuel's movie was advertised as such. Moreover, that's the only way I can remember it.

HOWEVER: now that I know that the film was/is a "Bunuel," let me just speculate a review, from a grown-up perspective. We are "musing," after all. Right off, exile and castaway would be the perfect subject-matter for the expatriate and, even more importantly, existentialist director. Here we've got total free-will (except for Friday the "willing" slave), unencumbered by the superficial constraints of bourgeois society that the writer-director satirizes so unmercifully. And, wow, couldn't Bunuel nail this theme definitively when Crusoe finally grants his "man" the gift of complete freedom. Conveniently, Friday's "phantom of liberty" is quite literal, but enslavement in any form to anyone or anything would be Bunuel's idea of the worst crime imaginable, and he probably allows this to play upon his hero's psyche. Why probably?--because I DO recall several nightmare dream-sequences (of course) involving mainly Crusoe's father (a potential Freudian wonderland) in the course of the movie. But I no doubt ignored their thematic significance at the time. They would have been getting in the way of the "aventuras."

And what about Bunuel's trademark imagery? When I revisit the film I'll look for lots of ANTS. They pop up in almost every one of his movies as a symbol of one thing or another, and what better place for them and other scary mini-creatures than a desert island? Here the very real would translate easily to the surreal, and vice-versa. (Incidentally, his collaborator on Dog, Salvador Dali, loved the little fellows too--check out the ant-riddled clock in the lower-left corner of his most famous painting, "The Persistence of Memory.") And I know I'll find nature's sufficiency of Bunuelian megafauna--both the quick and the dead.

But then again ... Netflix notwithstanding, I may just leave his Adventure of Robinson Crusoe as a very pleasant childhood memory.
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