Crazy Doctor Sangrado

One of the amusing episodes in Gil Blas concerns a charlatan doctor named Sangrado. When he sees a patient with gout and learns that the patient regularly eats large meals consisting mostly of meat and drinks large quantities of wine, he suggests that the patient’s diet may be aggravating his gout. He advises him to eat moderate meals consisting mostly of vegetables, legumes and baked apples, and says he should drink water instead of wine. In fact, the physician believes that everyone should follow this diet.  He doesn’t agree with the prevalent belief that wine is necessary to prevent indigestion, and he thinks people should stop eating before they are stuffed, even if they can afford to eat more.

This doctor is portrayed as a fool who kills his patients and makes Gil Blas sick through denying him wine. Isn’t it funny how medical advice which now is now so mainstream that it seems obvious was in the past seen as self-evident lunacy?

 Of course, Sangrado also says that no one really needs blood to live, and advises the patient to have himself bled as often as possible.

Women and cooking

I have finished a book called Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century.

Fascinating to learn that in the last years of the nineteenth century, foods were thought healthy in proportion as they were easy to digest. Vegetables and fruits were thought to be near valueless, and when vegetables were served, they were boiled into submission; the authorities recommended that cucumbers be boiled for twenty minutes, celery for half an hour, green beans for one to three hours! and beets for twelve hours. After which, vegetables were nearly always served covered in a white sauce made of flour, milk, butter, and usually no other flavorings. This is the dainty, aspirational cuisine of Edith Wharton.

The female authorities on cooking were not exactly feminist rebels--although they tried to introduce scientific and businesslike methods into the kitchen, they showed no resistance to certain common prejudices--for instance, the belief that women don't really know what it's like to be hungry--if not reminded to eat by their husbands and children, they might go for days without nourishment. Even female cooks bragged about the smallness of their appetites.

Even today, although women would seem to be associated with food, too often they have kept themselves apart from culinary hedonism. Recipes in women's magazines are described as cheap, low in calories, and most importantly, simple and easy to prepare. Most often women are given snacks rather than full meals. Men's magazines, on the other hand, offer us flavorful, spicy dishes with exotic ingredients and generous amounts of meat. Men's cocktails are made of expensive whiskey and arcane kinds of bitters. Women's 'cocktails' are pomegranate-mango juice with--if you must--a 'splash' of vodka.

And, while articles on restaurants and bars are a staple of men's magazines, there is no suggestion in women's magazines that these establishments even exist--well, except the constant warnings that a woman who drinks will probably get herself killed. How annoying.

There is also classism to laugh at; for instance, the bizarre assertion that, when people have different tastes in food, it shows that they have "not enough other interests besides that in eating and drinking". If people were enlightened and exercised enough, all personal preferences would disappear, and the Southerners, Negroes, Irish and Italians would all adopt the diet of bourgeois Bostonians.

the Donner Party

Have you ever heard of the Donner Party? Everyone has, yet not many have read the real, fascinating story! Intellectually fascinating, I mean, because an intellect such as my own would never be attracted to the mere sensational story of cannibalism and death. The book I refer to, of course, is Ethan Rarick’s book Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West. I kept a list of the fifty or sixty members of the party and crossed them off as they died!

The patterns of death are fascinating. The many children (some born along the way) died in droves--they were fed well, but were very susceptible to infectious disease. Married men did fairly well; single men, however, almost all died. I was surprised to learn that a young, unfettered single man at his physical peak actually had a worse chance of survival than a middle-aged widow with many young children to feed.

In general, the women (almost all married) fared better than men. Among those who were in their twenties, only one woman died, while only one man lived. Of course, women need fewer calories than men; moreover, once their bodies run out of calories, they have more body fat to draw upon. But I suppose that having the moral and practical support of a family made a big difference.

This story also illustrates one of my favorite maxims--that man can get used to anything. Take a look at this journal entry from a 12-year-old girl, describing her night spent on the salt plains in Utah, miles from shelter of any kind--it sounds like typical adolescent hyperbole, until you realize she is telling the literal truth.

It was the couldes night you ever saw. The wind blew and if it haden bin for the dogs we would have Frosen.

Now, what happened, to be clear, was that the Donner party got stuck in early winter a few miles below a pass in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The pass became impassable just before they got there, and they were forced to winter in the valley, in jury-rigged huts, sending up the occasional expedition to check on the pass. Ultimately one of these expeditions succeeded and brought back several different rescue parties--but before that, there were long months of waiting. So the cannibalism wasn’t a momentary act of desperation--it became a routine for them. They ate their cattle, sucked the marrow out of its bones, ate their pets, and drank soup made from their boiled shoes. But after all of those expediments failed, they started eating dead bodies. Again, after having to contemplate the possibility of cannibalism for weeks and months, they were capable of talking about it in blasé tones. Here is the first mention of cannibalism in their journals:

Mrs Murphy said here yesterday that thought she would Commence on Milt & eat him. I dont think that she has done so yet. It is distressing.

Yes. Distressing.

It might be relevant to point out here that, since the ground was frozen and snow-covered, and the gravediggers weak with starvation, no one who died in the valley of whatever cause received what used to be called a Christian burial. Instead, typically, a few of the stronger people dragged the corpse outside, only a few feet away from the huts, and covered it with a few shovelfuls of snow--if that. Naturally, the bodies never decomposed in the cold. Thus, as more and more died of starvation and disease, the pioneers were unintentionally creating a sort of meat locker outside their front doors. This makes it easier to explain how, almost on impulse, a person might eat human flesh.

When people turn to cannibalism, they follow a certain pattern. (There are studies, you see.) When a body is fresh, the warm blood of the jugular is most prized. The arms and legs provide meat, but the most nutrition comes from the inner organs. The hips are a good source of fat. The head and hands, being the most identifiably human and personal parts, are only rarely eaten. So you see, even in cases of cannibalism, there is an etiquette to be followed. The real distressing part came when this etiquette was violated--after the rescue.

After a few of the party (known as the Forlorn Hope) finally got through over the pass, they still hadn’t reached civilization. They reached only one farflung outpost--a fort almost a hundred miles from the nearest town. The men at the fort immediately got together all the supplies they could and all the men who willing to go, and set out to hike over the snow-covered pass. Three different rescue parties arrived, and brought out with them all the people they could; the younger children could be carried, but the adult survivors would have to hike out. But when the fourth (and last) rescue party arrived at the camp, they had to leave behind the few adults who were lame or too ill to hike--and only a minimal amount of supplies could be spared for them.

I can only imagine how wrenching it must have been to get through the entire winter, finally witness the arrival of the rescue party, and have to watch them hike away again. They promised to return in spring.

When spring came around, the men of the fort returned with ample supplies. They found the camp covered with blood and guts. A number of bodies were lying in the open, ribcages ripped open. Skulls were stewing in a cooking pot. Of the five pioneers left behind, four had died and been eaten. The one man left was a lame German named Louis Keseberg. He bragged about his cannibalism, talking about which parts of the body he considered most delicious, and sounding glad that he had so many bodies to choose from. When given beef and bread to eat, he rejected it, saying he preferred human meat to any other. One supposes he must have been a little deranged after his ordeal. Ultimately, unlike any of the other survivors, he was put on trial for his actions. (He had never been very sociable and, remember, this was during a period in American history when Germans were still considered dangerous foreigners.) However, since there was no firm evidence that he had killed in order to eat, he was acquitted.

In the end, it could have been a lot worse. Of the original 87 pioneers, 39 died and 48 survived. With the possible exception of Keseberg, there was only one incident in which the pioneers killed someone in order to eat him. This was during the passage over the mountains--and even then, they did not kill one of their one, but rather their Spanish-Indian guide. Here is the author on the remarkably law-abiding behavior of the early pioneers in general:

[People] quit the United States when they crossed the Continental Divide–the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase–and so technically they were no longer subject to American law. Nevertheless, the developing credo of the western migration was one of remarkable commitment to legal procedure. When crime struck, emigrants typically formed courts to try the defendant, often with a rather elaborate legal structure that included a judge, jury, and lawyers for the prosecution and defense...Nor were these show courts. Emigrants took great pains to ensure some element of fairness, often recruiting people from other companies to act as judge or jury so as to gain greater impartiality. In some cases, even though the wagons were racing against time, parties halted their progress to find suitable jurors in other companies or spent precious hours tracking down suspects or investigating a crime scene.

The Sixties

The Sixties, by Jenny Diski, has remarkably little to say about the Sixties as such. Most of the book is a personal meditation on the nature of youth--and one of the best such I’ve read, for instance this passage of realistic psychology:

I was sure, the first time I sucked on an LSD-soaked sugar cube, that it would be the end of me. I knew my depressive tendencies. I had had bad trips even on cannabis. The ether and the Methedrine had turned nasty. I was certain that my chances of becoming irredeemably psychotic on acid were very high. I said a serious goodbye to myself as I put the sugar cube on my tongue.

Nonetheless, I took it. Was it because taking a risk was worth the marvellous insights I believed I would get if the trip went the other way? Or, more likely, because risk was by definition good, or at any rate, necessary? There was no choice but to take whatever risk was on offer.

In the last two chapters, the author uses three of my favorite sixties and seventies theorists--Ivan Illich, R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz--to explore guiltily how “liberation got confused with libertarianism” and the Sixties became the Thatcher era.

The author describes radical teaching practices in the sixties, echoing some of the criticisms her political opponents make today:

We tended devotedly to the lower end of the ability spectrum but paid little attention to the more able. They were us, after all, and we were quite ashamed of our privileges. It got to the point where in some sense we punished the brighter kids for not being underprivileged...The radicals couldn’t always cope with education actually having an effect. If the oppressed stopped behaving like the oppressed, we ddin’t really like it.

Diski’s work as a teacher was influenced by Illich’s ideas, which she now says were both more radical and more right-wing than she had realized. Here’s a sampling of Illich, the author of “Deschooling Society” and the man “too radical for the radical generation”:

The existence of schools produces the demand for schooling. Once we have learned to need school, all our activities tend to take the shape of client relationships to other specialized institutions. Once the self-taught man or woman has been discredited, all nonprofessional activity is rendered suspect...In fact, learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.

Even the seemingly radical critics of the school system are not willing to abandon the idea that they have an obligation to the young, especially to the poor, an obligation to process them, whether by love or by fear...

Illich seemed like a leftist at the time, but in fact, when his sort of libertarianism is opposed to paternalistic statism, Diski and her generation are usually on the side of the state.

The majority of the activists in my generation were never as interested in individual liberty as we were in finding ways to implement our own ideas of how the world should be. I’m not sure, on Illich’s still startlingly strict definition, if we were interested in liberty at all...

Illich could well have joined Thatcher and Reagan’s theoretical advisers. I’d resist the claim that the Sixties generation were responsible for the Thatcher years, as I would resist the notion that the Jewish community in Germany were responsible for the advent of the Nazis, but sometimes I can’t help but see how unwittingly we might have been sweeping the path in readiness for the radical Right...

I will refrain from comment on the supposed Thatcherite/Nazi connection. Perhaps if the author were American, she would realize the Right gets a lot more radical than Margaret Thatcher.

Anyway, a less pejorative way of describing Sixties leftists is to say that they were concerned with caring for people rather than simply leaving them free to take care of themselves as best they can. Here’s where Szasz comes in--Diski, a former mental patient, rightly criticizes the author of “The Myth of Mental Illness” for being more concerned with the rights and freedoms of the so-called mentally ill than with their happiness and safety. (Although Szasz would probably point out that the nature of happiness and the value of safety are highly subjective.)

[Szasz believed that] the State had no business interfering with matters of the mind, or even supposing that Mind existed...He refuted the concept of madness in order to refute any claim for civic responsibility towards others...Everyone made their own individual choices: the rich, the poor, the mad, the sane. That was their problem.

Szasz also suggested that when the so-called mentally ill cause real social problems (by stealing, committing violent crimes, or just being a public nuisance) they should be prosecuted like other criminals. Diski takes this suggestion as a sign of Szasz’s lack of compassion for suffering. In fact, Szasz thought that the mentally ill would be protected by being treated like criminals, since those accused or convicted of a crime have many rights and privileges those accused or convicted of mental illness don’t have. (Tangent: an accused criminal has the right to counsel and the right to a fair trial (usually by jury). Most of those convicted of a crime are given a specific, limited sentence, one that cannot be extended indefinitely for the same offense and one that does not depend solely on the discretion of their jailors. From within a prison, prisoners can teach themselves the law, appeal their cases, sue, complain about their treatment. A person accused of mental illness or incarcerated in a mental asylum has none of these advantages.)

Despite this misreading, Diski, in characterizing Szasz and Illich as ‘radical’ ‘far right’ thinkers is pointing to a real and unresolved tension between the idea that people should be free and the idea that society should care for its members (whether they like it or not). The school versus the market, if you will. In the Sixties, the author thought that communitarianism and liberty were naturally joined in leftist political theory--after Thatcher, she knows better, and seems quite willing to abandon liberty along with libertarianism.

Tune in next time for a discussion of Marxist theories of human nature, why Asian people don't understand sidewalks, and, of course, Proust!

An essay on how reading leads to drinking and drinking leads to reading.

This is how addictions begin, subtly and then suddenly. Soon I found myself devouring every hard-boiled word of Chandler’s. And then I read them again. I started talking in similes and metaphors. One day I told a dear friend that he had a face like a collapsed lung. I couldn’t help myself. A progression took hold. Chandler led me to Hammett and from Hammett I staggered to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald led me to Hemingway.

I personally am unable to read even the most indirect reference to Dorothy Parker without craving a martini.

Why I can't enjoy film

Reading in our world has a sort of old, sedate, peaceful, slow image, while TV and movies are perceived as fast, exciting and youthful. Many people think that TV is shortening our attention spans! The truth is precisely the contrary: my attention span is too short to do anything but read. With 98% of movies, I get bored after about 20 minutes and start to multitask. Even with the few really good movies, I prefer to watch in 30-minute installments.

Think about it: how many words do you take in per second? Quickly testing it with a fairly easy nonfiction text, I found I read 7-10 words per second. That means that, several times per second, something is happening. In nonfiction, an argument is being presented or an example given. In fiction, even if nothing is happening in the plot, there’s a description, a philosophical aside, or a thought-provoking word choice to focus on.

(N.B.: This assumes you are reading an actually good book. If you are one of those people who read books for their plot, you might as well just switch to TV. I will not miss you.)

If I think the book is going too slowly, I can just read faster. Alternatively, I can skip forward, reading a few sentences every few pages, and see if anything more interesting promises to come.

With film, skipping forward is impossible. Watching TV or a movie in a theatre, there is no way you can figure out what’s going to happen--you have to make an absolute yes-or-no decision about whether to stay and watch. With a DVD, you can of course skip scenes; but that never gives you as much information as skimming through a book. You can skip to the beginning of the next scene, but that might not be the most interesting part. In order to see if it is, you have to watch the whole scene! It’s slavery! You can fast-forward, but all you’ll see will be vague moving shapes; you might be fast-forwarding past the best dialogue in the film, without knowing it.

Moreover, everything moves more slowly in filmed media. Things happen in the superficial sense, but anything interesting takes forever! A ton of any movie or TV show--even the good ones--will be taken up with shots intended to establish the setting or the time period--with shots showing you the characters’ clothes 0r houses or bodies or faces--with shots of their movements or observations--with fistfights and sex. Even in scenes containing dialogue, the actors speak incredibly slowly, compared to the speed at which you would read their words. If you’re familiar with the written text, it’s painful to watch the words dragging and halting by (compare reading “The Importance of Being Earnest” to watching the, nevertheless good, movie!).

I admit that there are certain respects in which the visual image can be more effective; but these are all relatively shallow areas of experience. The sex scene which might arouse male viewers--the sight of an emotional face which appeals to the sentimental--the skeleton jumping out unexpectedly which makes me jump. Anything deeper than these effects which a movie wishes to convey could probably be done as well or better in print.

The exception is comedy, which is actually easier to do in film. With a good episode of “Seinfeld”, for instance, something funny or at least attention-catching is happening every few seconds. (“Seinfeld” also illustrates the fact that in a comedy of whatever kind, all or most emotion must be leached out in order to maintain the comic mood and keep an audience’s interest.) Animated comedies are especially easy for me to appreciate, since their creators usually realize we aren’t interested in lengthy shots of clothes, faces or emotions belonging to animated figures.

I do think, however, that an authentically funny creation is a rare, virtuoso performance, which even the masters can’t keep alive for more than, say, 30 pages or twenty minutes. I honestly can’t remember any non-animated full-length film which I’ve enjoyed for the comedy!

There are other, vaguely personal reasons why I can't enjoy film--but, basically, if I refuse to watch a movie with you; it's not you, it's the entire cinematic tradition.

The universality of literature

This article on women's writing is surprisingly unobjectionable--until I got to this! Near the end we find a single isolated sentence: "Great Literary American Novel Syndrome is a surprisingly persistent condition, despite the increasingly obvious likelihood that no work of art can sum up a nation as heterogeneous as ours without neglecting somebody."

Note the implied idea that a great writer can never speak for someone who is different than him. What the hell. This is Chinua Achebe's obscenely obtuse critique of "Heart of Darkness" all over again. Am I only to read heterosexual female Polish/Scottish 22-year-old authors? If I can find part of myself--not my Eastern European features or my sex, but the most important part of myself reflected in, say, a middle-aged gay French man, then other people should be able to do the same. If they can't, it's their own damn fault.

For a great author--no, even a good one--doesn't just write about the superficial. His characters have hair colors and ages and nationalities, but they have other, more important, characteristics--their personalities are what we identify with--or even more deeply human characteristics.

This said, I do admit that the superficial qualities of characters and authors can make it easier or harder for us to appreciate them. It was, for instance, a strikingly bad idea to make my sophomore language class (a class of mostly female 20-year-olds) spend all year studying old men (Lear and Oedipus). Some of us may be able to reach past the different superficialites--just like some women can reach past the annoyance of an author who assumes all his readers are male. But the fact that there are women and non-white people who write makes it easier for a lot of us to find literature from which to learn.