Titus Maccius Plautus: Menaechmi ('The Identical Twins,' circa 200 B.C.)

Pompeii mural, Villa of Mysteries

Titus Maccius Plautus (circa 254-184 B.C.): Menaechmi (The Identical Twins, circa 200 B.C.).

In this Roman comedy, identical twins are engulfed in confusion, forming the basis for William Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors (circa 1595, first published in 1623).

To make a long story short, in the set-up for Menaechmi, two identical twins are accidentally separated at age seven, and their father dies within days of this mishap. A grandfather renames the boy he can find the same name as the still missing (and presumed dead) boy, as an honor. Years later, the former, after traveling far and wide and always hoping to find his long lost twin brother, stumbles into said twin's town and a delicate situation involving Matrona (twin's wife) and Erotium (twin's paramour), exacerbated by various in-betweens. 

In the case of Plautus, adapting from a similar Greek play, his tale of identical twins works. The basic groundwork is laid for all sorts of similar -- and similarly ludicrous, comic, or horror-filled -- storylines.

Thinking you know someone and discovering an alien presence can be quite disconcerting. Hence, the ever-enduring fear and dread of zombies, vampires, alien or demonic possessions, clones and reprogrammed memories, pretender-imposters and dementia.  

Such Doppelgänger-type stories that have always impressed me include Nikolai Gogol's Нос / "The Nose" (1836) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Двойник / The Double (1846, 1866). All inspiration for The Twilight Zone, no doubt. 

Identical twins as a device have been exploited in many soap operas, a fine example being Stuart and Adam Chandler (David Canary) on All My Children. Great way to squeeze new arcs out of the same actors. The phantom twin can be haunting and unsettling, too: such as Elvis Aaron Presley's twin brother Jesse Garon, who was stillborn.

Today's Rune: Protection.  

Das Schloß / The Castle

Happily finished Austrian director Michael Haneke's Das Schloß / The Castle, a 1997 movie faithfully based on Franz Kafka's unfinished novel (or extended fragment, ending literally in mid-sentence) of the same name that was first published in 1926. It would make a good companion piece to other Kafka adaptations. 

Anyone dealing with the "health care industry" or, indeed, various other types of large scale organisms, organizations or system-clusters would recognize the truth of Kafka's vision. That is, absurdity prevails. Mistakes. Errors. Oversights. Misunderstandings. Deliberate and -- maybe even sometimes -- accidental.

Das Schloß / The Castle is not really a comedy, but there are elements of satire and dark humor. 

Convenient way to catch up on Kafka, see a movie and hear what amounts to a German audio book, as well. 

Never ever fear: subtitles do appear.  

Today's Rune: Defense.

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

Another precious gem from the book mines -- Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982).

And I'm seeing a clear series of interconnecting patterns, along the lines of the quip (inspired by a thought that is longer and more complex) by Søren Kierkegaard: "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards" (1843). Clever lad, but when shortened to virtually slogan length, not entirely true. We do have some understanding, some inkling, of where life is going, or could go, when (or if) we take time to muse.

But as for All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Kierkegaard makes appearances, as do Gogol, Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky (Berman goes with the Dostoevsky spelling) -- among a gob of other groovy writers, thinkers, dreamers and knowers. In a nod to Bob Dylan and the 1960s, there's a chapter called "The 1970s: Bringing It All Back Home." And throughout this book, everything that might seem eclectic and loosely based is seen holistically, even as constant change often makes people feel as if they (along with the years and decades) are blowin' in the wind.

Technological-communications, town and city planning, transportation, time itself as measured and understood by human beings -- all through the past couple hundred years have brought and have seen and have experienced dramatic change.

Take some examples, and then some water and an aspirin. Ha:

Railroads
Telegraph lines
Engine-powered ships
Electricity
Widespread indoor plumbing
Telephone lines 
Airships and aeroplanes, submarines and jets
Automobiles
Radio broadcasting
Air conditioning
Poison gas and rockets, nuclear bombs, napalm
Television
Reliable birth control
Spacecraft and satellite communications
Personal computers, internet
Digital, mobile wireless devices
Pilotless drones and miniaturized robotics
Social Media
3D Printing/Micro-manufacturing
Holographic projections, image cloaking
The known and the unknown
The foreseeable and the unforeseeable

Yeah, Steve Miller has it this way:

Time keeps on slippin,' slippin'
into the future . . .

And don't you know it?  That's why, I suppose, it's somewhat comforting to have or develop some kind of feeling of continuity, some grounding, some context, some historical and philosophically glimpsed sense of things.   

Today's Rune: The Self. 
      

Books, Thoughts, Image, Action: Tobacco Road

No matter how strange the world may seem, there's always something even weirder around the corner.

Picking up another Gogol tome again while moving around some books the other day, I started looking on other shelves and remembering.

Here's a book that's a quick read, one I can never put down even though it's unsettling, bizarre and, in some ways, pitiful. Why? Because like Gogol, it's absorbing.

Where in Gogol, a man might wake up and find his nose missing, in Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road (1932), Granny might be hiding behind a chinaberry tree, thinking about turnips.

Once you've got these kinds of word images in mind, they tend to plant themselves for good. And I ain't fall off no turnip truck, neither; nor was I borned yesterday. How's 'bout you?

Today's Rune: The Warrior.

It's "Gogol Time!" / Гоголь времени

Usually I post something about Francisco Goya on May 3rd, because of his world class painting forever assigned to this date -- El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid.  But Nikolai Gogol popped into mind, and then Franz Kafka, and then back to Gogol. So Gogol it is, though our "times" seem like a mix of the visions of all three of these artists.

"Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all." Nikolai Gogol, "The Nose" / Hoc (1836).

The actual opener of Hoc goes like this:

Марта 25 числа случилось в Петербурге необыкновенно странное происшествие. Цирюльник Иван Яковлевич, живущий на Вознесенском проспекте фамилия его утрачена, и даже на вывеске его -- где изображен господин с запыленною щекою и надписью: "И кровь отворяют" -- не выставлено ничего, цирюльник Иван Яковлевич проснулся довольно рано и услышал запа горячего хлеба. Приподнявшись немного на кровати, он увидел, что супруга его, довольно почтенная дама, очень любившая пить кофей, вынимала из печи только что испеченные хлебы.

May 3rd, 2013: American stocks soar to their "highest level" even as air temperatures in Texas drop to their "lowest level" for this date in human history. There's snow in Kansas City, a fire outbreak in California. Long rifle and snub gun enthusiasts flock to Houston; while people in West, Texas, reel from a chemical storage plant explosion. Bizarre extremes, at least when filtered through the scrim of language. 

Indeed: It's Gogol Time!

Today's Rune: Defense.

The Double

We run across strangers resembling friends, family. We feel a tingle, a shock of recognition. What is happening here? Yesterday I was getting something framed and a man in his seventies stumbled onto the scene and asked if I was in the military, reminding him of somebody. I asked if he served on the ship advertised on a hat he was donning. No, his father had been on that ship in the Pacific in 1945 when it was hit by kamikaze planes.

There's a woman in graphics who is also, like the man whose father died in WW2, in her seventies; every time we cross paths she says, "Wally!" She says -- every time -- how much I remind her of Wally from Milwaukee, a dude she dated fifty years ago.

Resemblences, twins, shadow doubles, Doppelgängers, archetypes: what's it all about, Alfie?




















Hitting twin nails on the head: Gogol, The Nose / нос (1835/36); Dostoevsky, The Double: A Petersburg Poem / Dvoynik: Peterburgskaya poema / Двойник: Петербургская поэма (1846).

Today's Rune: Signals.  

Lincoln, Darwin, Poe; Plus Peanuts

Lincoln, Darwin, Poe: Leadership, Science, Art.

Also at 200, add the following: Louis Braille; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; Felix Mendelssohn; Cyrus Hall McCormick; Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol; Alfred Tennyson; Fanny Kemble. No great religious leader, no great public sports figure born in 1809 that I can find (I guess the great sports celebrities didn't really come into their own until the 20th century, come to think of it).

Lincoln Award goes to President Obama. Unofficial Darwin award goes to the present-day US Republican Party, especially its many half-witted members including Palinists, Huckabites, and Haggardists. Let them keep blathering: like keeping an eye on pet pigs, it's good to know what they're up to at all times. Poe awards go to Milk and The Wrestler so far. Books, too soon to tell.



















Hopefully, some sort of justice will come to those members of the Peanut Corporation of America who knowingly sent out poisoned peanut products from Georgia, Virginia, and Texas, including its CEO, 54-year old Stewart Parnell of Lynchburg, Virginia. This greaseball apparently (i.e. he's innocent until proven guilty) thought the public health was too costly to worry about, even while serving (thanks to the banally imbecilic W. Bush administration) on the US Department of Agriculture's Peanut Standards Board -- until dismissed by the Obama administration. He managed such alleged crimes while flying his airplane, enjoying a first home near Lynchburg, and a second home in Nags Head, North Carolina, and a membership in Oakwood Country Club, where he played tennis and probably laughed a lot at poor people. The company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy today, Friday the 13th.

Imagine if ten or twenty mass-order crooks like Parnell and Bernie Madoff had their heads put on spikes, would the masses be satisfied? I doubt it. Still, these guys need to be prosecuted and also held accountable for their actions without being allowed to wriggle out of it. Seppuku / harakiri might be an honor-saving alternative.

Today's Rune: Fertility.

Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York

Gail Parent's Sheila Levine is dead and living in New York (2004; orginally published in 1972), is a sort of rough and tumble, more realistic and more depressing prototype version of HBO's Sex and the City (1998-2004).

Parent's novel is pithy, with an eye for telling detail. Sheila, the protaganist, is caught up in the confusion of being a single woman living at the onset of the sexual revolution, second wave feminism, and civil rights -- and the more traditional pressures of finding a well-set husband. This is made all the more conflicted and interesting thanks to her Jewish family background. Sheila Levine longs, or sometimes longs, to be a Tina Balser, her married-with-children contemporary from Sue Kaufman's Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967). Ah, irony. One wants to get in, the other wants to get out. Sheila's double helix tale could easily be called Diary of a Mad Singleton. The grass is always greener on the other side of Central Park, I suppose.

The structure for Sheila Levine, like Diary, is memorable: instead of Kaufman's diary form (in turn loosely inspired by Nikolai Gogol's 1835 "Diary of a Madman"), we have a long suicide note reflecting on Sheila's sometimes fun but mostly miserable experience living in Manhattan through the 1960s. She does not hang out with the hip Warhol crowd. Far from it. Instead, she is stuck with irritating roommates, cheap and lousy boyfriends, partying but not very hip gay friends, a lesbian stalker, and loads of guilty feelings. She plunges into all sorts of apartment and house parties and other social events, even teaching, to find a suitable husband, but all to little avail.

Though the novel is mostly comic and satirical, there is also a sadness to it, maybe best typified by Sheila's secret arrangements for her own funeral, in the process of which she discovers that even in death, it is considered socially preferable to be or have been married than single. Body image issues have even more currency.

Today's Rune: Fertility.

A couple of pertinent Albert Camus quips:

"There is only one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide."
"Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful."

Bon voyage!

Doppelgänger, Jr.

I once had a nightmare in which everyone I knew had been cloned and were no longer the people I loved. Sound familiar? Anxiety dreams are one thing, full-fledged fantasy nightmares another. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, anyone?

When we wake up, we usually begin on the assumption that things will be as we left them the day before. So what happens when you wake up and find your own nose missing? This is precisely the crisis that Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) reveals in his 1836 short story, "The Nose." The story includes shifting points of view, starting with a barber who finds the nose in a chunk of bread he's about to eat. He panics and tries to fling it into the Neva River, only to be collared by a policeman. Next, Major Kovalyov realizes his nose is missing, and comes to learn that it has transformed into a higher ranking official. Much disorientation and desperation ensues.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) took the idea further in his 1846 novella, The Double: A Petersburg Poem. In it, Golyadkin comes to realize that he has an adversarial doppelgänger (dubbed "Junior") much like Kovalyov does in "The Nose." Dostoevsky's tale is scarier in tone, more like a David Lynch film at times, and perhaps asking the reader, do you really know your true identity?

Which begs the question: why do people pay a lot of money for elective non-essential plastic surgery operations like nose jobs? What compels someone like Michael Jackson to have other people chisel away at his nose and other features? Does he have his own identity? Sheila's recent post on body image opens up a lot of questions, and this is one. And what's the deal with Suri, the alleged daughter of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise? Is TomKat a new identity? Is there still a separate Katie Holmes? The lives of these celebrities seem as weird and outlandish as the fiction of Gogol, Dostoevsky, or even Franz Kafka, and as creepy as any nightmare I've ever had.

Auf Wiedersehen, doppelgängers!

Bringing It All Back Home

Urban decay and revitalization, suburban renewal, rural development: all spell change, some good, some bad, and some just plain old ugly. It's been happening everywhere I've lived for as long as I can remember. What amazes me is how we keep struggling to survive, to improve our quality of life, despite entropy and economic forces largely beyond our control. We live together, yet we often live at cross-purposes, with the only physical common ground being shared public spaces. How do we do it? Maybe more importantly, why do we do it?

Marshall Berman takes a long, broad view in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, originally published in 1982 but since re-issued. He integrates literature with urban landscaping, architecture, and city planning and social psychology in a thoughtful series of linked essays. He examines the first European cities of the industrial age and moves seamlessly into existentialism via Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Karl Marx, Charles Baudelaire, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, French boulevard innovator Georges Eugene Haussmann, and New York highway developer Robert Moses.

Much of Berman's content can be brought to bear on Metro Detroit. It would seem that the keys to Detroit's "renaissance" must include improved transportation infrastructure, a secure environment for economic and personal well-being, lots more people living downtown, and thriving public spaces where people of all classes and backgrounds can mix together without spitting on each other. In Philadelphia, its highly evolved mass transit system promotes commerce and cultural interaction in Center City; for a major city, Detroit's lack of a sophisticated mass transit system is glaring. Realistically, though, it's hard to imagine this being changed, so other approaches must be emphasized. I don't think we would like to abandon Detroit as the Inca did their small city states for unknown reasons ages ago; so, how to keep it alive?




New Orleans and other flood-prone areas in the Deep South are another matter the USA as a whole will have to grapple with. Rationally, shouldn't people pull back to higher ground before the next major hurricanes strike? Is there any sense in putting trailer parks back in the bayou, or rebuilding flood-ruined areas like Ward Nine of New Orleans? Would it make more sense to protect the French Quarter and other places on higher ground rather than try to slap together a levee system that will crumble as the lower parts of Metro New Orleans slowly sink?



Whatever happens, people keep trying. Since moving to Detroit, I've seen many changes: new sports facilties, casinos, condos, and improvements to the Renaissance Center's base. Also, the demise of Hudson's; Jacobsen's; all those record chains; area drug chains like Perry's; K-Mart; the Daimler-Chrysler deal, and so forth. What next for Detroit and the rest of the country? And the rest of the world, for that matter? Good luck to us!

Ciao!

Diary of a Mad Housewife

Sue Kaufman (8/7/1926-6/25/1977) saw seven of her books published before she committed suicide by plunging from a building in New York City at the age of fifty. Creepily, her last novel was titled Falling Bodies. Though I am fond of The Headshrinker's Test (1969), she'll probably be best remembered for Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967) which was also made into a movie starring Carrie Snodgrass in 1970. In it, a novel whose title was inspired by Nikolai Gogol's macabre and sad nineteenth century Russian tale, the protagonist, Bettina "Tina" Balser, is an educated and artsy smart woman who's nicely trapped in the Manhattan material world. Married to the well-named Jonathan Balser, a fussy, pretentious nimrod lawyer who is also anxious and unsatisfied, with two children attending local prep schools, she has a hard time getting through life. In fact, she is very unhappy with her station, and few in her circle sympathize, seeing only the material comforts. Frustrated, she begins asserting herself, trying to create an identity independent of her family by beginning a secret diary that provides the vehicle for the novel.

Diary of a Mad Housewife is funny, intelligent, sarcastic, and gleefully depressing. There are scary moments, too, such as when Tina finds herself facing a sinister male presence in Central Park; incidents such as this take her closer to the edge. As in the Rolling Stones' classic satirical songs "Mother's Little Helper" and "Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown," Tina resorts to pills, and therapy, and (not in the Stones' version) an affair with knavish playwright George Prager while trying to find her way. The novel works in an obvious feminist way, but it also works as broader social satire. Furthermore, it works effectively as an allegory for anyone caught in a similar situation: the typical work place, domestic situation, or even prison, where expectations are high and one's ability to break out and become autonomous, independent, and fully realized is seemingly non-existent. In that, Diary of a Mad Housewife is also a thoughtful existential exercise for all. In any situation, who wants to be controlled, bullied, or hamstrung?

Sue Kaufman has been praised by feminists, but why hasn't this novel in particular made it more into the mainstream? Why, until recently, were all of Kaufman's books out of print? Why hasn't the movie been released on DVD? If, like The Stepford Wives (1975) it is emblematic of its time, why hasn't it been remade? Here, I can only speculate and give what few facts I've been able to find.

Kaufman earned an undergraduate degree from Vassar in 1947, then worked as an editorial assistant for Mademoiselle's fiction editor for a couple years before devoting more time to her own writing. She married not a lawyer, like Tina, but a doctor, Jeremiah A. Barondess, in 1953 when she was about twenty-seven. Together they had one child, James, ca. 1957. Kaufman saw her first book, The Happy Summer Days, published in 1959 under the name Sue Kaufman, a name which she retained for all her publications. This is important, because it evidently allowed her to keep some distance from her married status. Even in the late 1960s, publishers seemed a bit confused, saying in the "About the Author" blurb for one version of Diary that she was "married to a doctor and they have . . . an eccentric dachsund, Poppy" on one hand, and that the novel was "Miss Kaufman's third. . ." We can see the need for Ms. here, at any rate, or nothing at all.

Given the detailed description in her fiction of the kind of lifestyle Kaufman actually lived, one wonders whether, after her suicide, Dr. Barondess has not either destroyed or withheld manuscripts, drafts, and correspondence, perhaps not liking the idea of additional public scrutiny. One may hope that some day her papers will be left to some special collection -- perhaps they have been, and are merely sealed until 2025 or so. One can hope.

In any case, Jeremiah A. Barondess is alive and living in New York City. I came across a March 19, 2001 article in The New York Observer that calls him "the patrician elder statesman of the New York medical community." Barondess is currently the President of the New York Academy of Medicine. He has connections with numerous institutions ranging from the University of Michigan to Cornell University, and has dozens of publications listed on the Academy's website. The list, however, only goes back to 1994. Given that Sue Kaufman leapt to her death in 1977, it's interesting to note some of the titles of his work: "Urban Health: A Look Out Our Windows" (2004); "Adolescent Suicide: Vigilance and Action to Reduce the Toll" (2004); "Danse Macabre: Poverty, Social Status and Health" (2002); and "Care of the Medical Ethos: Reflections on Social Darwinism, Racial Hygiene, and the Holocaust" (1998). Cheery stuff, to be sure. If you'd like to see his long Jonathan-like list of accomplishments, and actually see what the husband of Sue Kaufman looks like nearly thirty years after her death, go to www.nyam.org

As with most things, more will be revealed (although the FBI came up empty again in their recent search for Jimmy Hoffa). Meanwhile, I'd love to stir up interest for the release of Diary of a Mad Housewife in digital form, and hope that all of her books will be digitized and posted on the internet. Plus, how about a biography? Or a group study including Anne Sexton and Diane Arbus, among other artists of obvious comparison?

To my knowledge, there is at least one award given out in her honor, the $2500 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for short story collections and novels. (I actually met the first recipient, Kaye Gibbons, an Algonquin Books author who won in 1995. More on Ms. Gibbons and Algonquin in a later post.)

A Salute to Sue Kaufman! Adieu.