2005 has been a year to replace some commonplace, but indispensable, household items.
Until now I have been blessed in two ways with regard to consumer behavior, my own that is.

First off, I was somehow imbued with a high regard for quality of workmanship. Aspects of this point of view derive no doubt from my father. He was, if nothing else, an admirer of fine things. An admirer mainly, as he was not naturally disposed to easy acquisition of such things—translation: he was a Russian immigrant, a Jew to boot, and he wasn’t rich. Nor was anyone else in the family, at least not once they stepped off the boat at Ellis Island in 1923, fresh from a sea cruise from the port of Buenos Aires.

This sterling object, actually it’s chrome, was acquired new by my father sometime in the mid-50s at a medical convention. He was sales manager of an over-the-counter pharmaceutical products company and often on the road, helping man the company booth while pitching the virtues of the company’s products and doling out samples in tiny tubes with crimped ends and screw-on tops—these being the days before, I have only one word to say to you, "plastics." Then, as now, members of the medical profession had acquisitive instincts, high incomes (to indulge those instincts) and, among the males, a taste for gadgetry. In the grand tradition of Great American Salesmanship, many companies, at some several removes from the strict salutary precincts of the ward and the laboratory, nevertheless availed themselves of exhibition space at the going rate, and hawked their wares as well. It is true that the products of the Waring company, makers of very fine, very sturdy, high powered blenders and mixing machines could be found in the laboratories of hospitals and schools of medicine, if not, as well, in the compounding chambers of the local apothecary—being ideal to pulverize, puree, and blend whatever nostrum, or biological sample, as the case may be. The ne plus ultra of their machines was the specimen you see here: same powerful motor, same dependable two-speed switch, same sturdy glass cloverleaf carafe, with integral steel cutter, but with a handsome fully chromed base, for all the luxury of which one was required to part with 50 dollars—a princely sum, even for doctors and sales managers in the mid-1950s, yet always offered (demonstrating the wisdom of Waring marketing strategy) at a substantially discounted "show" price. I remember my father bringing this home and proudly unpacking it in our kitchen, where it had pride of place.

It was mainly used for years, as I recall, on the rare occasions that my father, a licenced pharmacist, was called upon to concoct some old formula, the compounding of which younger druggists in the local apothecary had never been taught. In the fullness of time, and as the chrome pitted microscopically, and the cloverleaf (it’s trademarked by Waring, incidentally; a fact that is still touted) carafe developed a crack, I inherited the device, which I had coveted for utterly inchoate reasons (such a display of negative capability should have made plain to one and all that I was doomed to an artistic temperament). I thought once it might have had something to do with validating my incredibly short-lived ambitions to become a doctor—my father’s heart swelled, not unhealthily—and that perhaps through some misbegotten association between expensive chromed kitchen gadgets and the arcane impedimenta of the medical arts.

Miraculously, I found a replacement for the carafe, and have used this wonderful monster through the course of three marriages in 34 years, and hundreds of pureed concoctions, ranging from frozen daiquiris to the smoothies my wife craved through her cancer treatment, to the roasted parsnip and apple soup recipe I re-engineered from the dish served at Casblanca in Harvard Square. It was the preparation of the latter, which required extended periods of pulverization at the high speed setting, that convinced me, sadly, that this too was due for retirement.

The second way in which I have been blessed is with the sense that if it hasn’t worn out, and if it does a good job, there’s no reason to replace it. This is a rule that works better with appliances, and perhaps other less interactive furniture, at least furniture that neither plugs in to an electrical outlet, or requires the regular replacement of consumable parts and components. This gift, if such it is, brings with it an obligation: the obligation to choose one’s possessions wisely and, if they are to be put into regular service (with an emphasis of all the words that derive from or at least are cognative of "regular," like regularity, regulate, or, for those with an etymological bent: "plays by the rules—you know? regulations" and "canonical," as in, endorsed by the Pope who, as we all know, is infallible.
In short, it has been my penchant when I can afford to do so, to buy something that will work well, last a long time, do its job, and serve useful life.

This is the least we should, and the most we can, expect of our appliances, we of this nation of appliances. Plug it in, turn it on, use it, shut it off. No more instruction than that.

Hence, a 50 year-old blender is on the verge of biting the dust. it’s still sold, as the heritage model, or some such, but the base is different, if still chromed, and it has lost its art-deco-in-its-death-throes stylistic charm—also the cloverleaf carafe, in a capitulation to more recent versions of convenience and the appearance of greater control, now sports a molded handle; thereby obviating—obliterating actually—the unassailable utilitarian elegance of the cloverlead design in the first place: four different handles built-in so it can be grabbed from any angle, and the gentle curve was designed to fit the hand, while at the same time affording a grip on the carafe itself, rather than an appended graceless loop of thin, and therefore delicate, glass.

The trick now is, as well as finding a worthy substitute, somehow to keep in mind by other means the thoughts and recollections, the memories and reminiscent emotional states, as opposed to direct recall of specific incidents, elicited every time I hauled this ungainly object from the small appliance cupboard—thoughts of my father and his partricular apothecary’s preciseness and fastidiousness (I have forced myself to follow my own prescriptions, my recipes, barely ever measuring a thing), and the ceremonial way he seemed to approach the use of any such device, as if it contained powers conferred by the gods and, through whose agency, which he was privileged to harness. My father was born in 1905 in rural Russia and electricity may have been an iffy proposition, if it was any proposition whatsoever, during his childhood.

I get my taste for fine things (not just caviar and champagne, but fine workmanship on products that last, and which are beautiful to look at when not in use, or even when in use, though watching the blender in action was a rare indulgence) from my father. But I am left to wonder, where did he learn it? My uncle, his younger brother, had it also, which suggests a genetic root. I suspect though it was a recessive trait.

Whatever the source, it has served me well, certainly at least until this banner year, when we have replaced, in succession: a toaster: the first of the single slot models, and hence very modern, and also very 70s, with its pristine white plastic housing adorned only by a highly graphic stylized logotype, typographic at that, in a brilliant carmine red. It made great toast for 30 years, took fat slices and thin, and was easy to clean. That one-slot design meant a small footprint on the dengerously small countertop spaces in my last three kitchens. It finally stopped toasting. We’ve replaced it with a Braun single slot toaster, no longer modernistic, but with a slight frisson of post-modern Buck Rogerish swoopiness, all in matte stainless steel, but with glowing multi-colored lights, slab shaped that signal the most basic of status conditions. As few moving parts as its predecessor, and with the singular improvement of the addition of a levered lowering bar, which also allows cantilevering smaller toasted objects above the level of the yawning mouth. It’s bigger, but not by much, so there’s a net retention of counter space, and little disruption of now imprinted motor skills. 30 years though, for a toaster, that will be hard to beat.

We finally gave in and replaced our refrigerator, which was a classic generic branded ice box, with the minimal modicum of features that made it competitive. A GE, of course (it was either that or Fridgidaire it always seems), and it was already used when I bought the condo 20 years ago.

I always hear about rules concerning what you take with you and what you leave in the way of appliances (I guess there are, in fact, statutes to this effect), but if memory serves, you leave the stove, which usually has a gas pipe plumbed into it, and remove the refrigerator. Well, I needed a refrigerator, and it seemed like a dumb custom, and it was only five, well maybe six or seven, years old at the time.

By the time we gave in, it was expelling puddles from deep within itself, onto the tiled floor of our kitchen and seemingly infinitely replenished from reservoirs of water, always with some beige growth on it that collected between cleanings, that collected in pools beneath the produce bins. No adjustments of the temperature and humidity controls altered the cooling and keeping capabilities. Sometimes liquids and semi-solids froze within the refrigerator compartment, but only in the summer, and this seemed to signify sufficient cold was still possible.

It had a frost-free freezer, which remained so to the end. Taken for granted by most users I’m sure, it was always a source of wonder and pride (and gratitude) to this writer. I still have memories quite fresh of the ordeal required of Peggy, our "cleaning woman" in the tenement apartment we occupied, whenever the cubic foot-and-a-half sized freezer compartment frosted over, encasing the perishables in an adamantine grayish casket of ice.

My guess is the former owner bought it at Sears, on sale, for several hundred dollars. I don’t know how long he expected it to last him (he and his wife moved from here to a 3,000 square foot house in Winchester, one of one of the derivative benefits of making partner at Ropes & Gray, the white show law firm downtown).

That old GE didn’t disgrace him. It lasted him what it lasted him, let’s say six years, and it lasted us 20, including the exciting last few when we spoke often of its replacement, took several "serious" shopping trips, slammed shut a few doors, and kicked a few kick panels and dent proof stainless doors, and wondered if we would, in fact, be forced to make an emergency purpose before getting off our asses and giving in to the inevitable.
2005, the year of the inevitable.

It took six hours to empty the old refrigerator, including the time to pack perishables into insulated freezer bags and coolers, and to dispose of and clean out the containers for a variety of foods we had collected, and which filled two 33 gallon plastic trash bags. It took 20 minutes to place everything that was left in the new box. Also simple. No ice maker (this would be too much for this Bronx boy to accept as suitable to his worth, not as a bank customer, but as a humble human being). Only a single temperature control—electronic it’s true, but simple to the point of possibly being useful aboard major U.S. weaponry. No more moving parts than necessary. The doors move, open and closed, and the freezer drawers siide, on simple runners. A single light in the refirgerator compartment.

We had two veterans of the coffee wars see either retirement this, the first year of George W. Bush’s second term, retirement or, well, a premature demise.

We’ve replaced a Krups automatic drip coffee maker for the second time in this marriage alone. We’re trying a new brand, one which seems to take itself very seriously in the design and reputation of its products, called Capresso. So far, so good. It makes very good coffee, and it does it very much faster than the previous models (the latest of which died after only ten years of service—what is happening to quality?)

We trusted the Capresso brand to replace as well another estimable war horse from our stable of domestic beasts of all work. We retired a Braun burr-grind coffee grinder, originally a wedding present for one of my more youthful unions, and which ground many a pot-full of beans, morning after morning, for a total, I’m embarrassed to say, of about ten thousand mornings. Like faithful Dobbin, we let that brave little Braun (with its spare design, deservedly the winner, with the entire line of appliances it came from, from the days that Dieter Rams, one of the gods of modernist industrial design, we head of design at Braun, and they just kept turning out a succession of very very dandy small appliances, clocks, and eventually hand calculators and other gadgets that presaged the current Golden Age of gizmos for technology gluttons) go to pasture with dignity, rather than the ignominy of stopping mid-bean, never to revive, and three measures short of a pot.

A new grinder, with the same specification: simplicity, minimal moving parts, an on-off switch, and heavy-duty burr wheels, now sits, squat and rounded, but so black as to brood in moody elegance—sort of a cross between R2-D2 and Darth Vader. But Imperial centurion or rebel, it does the job. So far.

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A number of friends, knowing we are Francophiles and, more importantly, knowing that we own a medieval maison de village in the south of France, wish to have our point of view on the still current and recently extended unpleasant youth uprisings in the outskirts of a number of French cities. We do have a vested interest in seeing that the French preserve the integrity of the social fabric over there. We also intend, and certainly wish, to spend extended periods of time in our little fantasy realised chez nous.

However, my point of view, at least, is informed better than the average American only because I take a greater interest and read a bit further, and listen a little harder, and pay a great deal more attention to the news in France than we in the U.S. are otherwise wont to do. There are no mysteries to what is happening in France, and there is nothing hidden about it.

The briefest observation I can give, delivered with the slight bemusement, but fundamental sang froid, with which my late uncle used to say it: “So?” In short, it’s not a surprise.

I made an allusion to the prevailing conditions in the banlieux, the status quo, in a story to be published in bertha, the magazine I am developing for introduction very soon, if not imminently. This story, a sample, is available (see below) and has been since I wrote it 16 months ago. I was being neither prescient nor insightful. I was merely informing my English speaking readers of what every Frenchman has known for years.

Let me not suggest, however, that it is discussed with any regularity. Certainly not here. But rarely in France. And I’m alluding to discussion, not the ejaculation of peremptory derisive epithets in demotic French.

Nor was I in any way an early reporter. It was hardly reporting. I merely was able to make reference to the facts as discovered by earlier investigators.

One of the best of them, and one of my favorites, is an old newspaperman (I believe, actually, he is younger than I am). That would be Mort Rosenblum, among whose many accomplishments (and a fact not mentioned in the following biographical blurb I lifted from one of his books) is that for 30 years he was among the great war correspondents for American journalism. He now writes chiefly about food-related subjects. And, amazingly, and wholly serendipitously, he lives on a Provençal olive farm he immortalized in a best-seller (also mentioned below) and which is located perhaps 20 minutes from where we elected to buy a modest little stone house.

In his book, A Goose in Toulouse, Rosenblum made of what seems to be his naturally peripatetic nature an excuse to explore France with a largely culinary eye. The excerpt I have included—to help explain what’s going on now with the riots, and the torching of cars, and the terrorization of the bourgeoisie, and the response (such as it has been) of the French government—demonstrates however that Rosenblum always has another eye open. His political eye gives us views on even the most innocuous subjects (or, shall I say, compelling, for what is more compelling, if wholly benign and innocent, than the subject of great food) so as to make them real. As he does in the case of this crisis of the French culture (a culture of great food, if it must be reduced to a singular abstraction). That culture is threatened by the some of the same forces that have formed the hideous banlieux, which, in the perverse justice of the streets, are being consumed in flames.

First, a note on Mr. Mort Rosenblum, from the endpapers of A Goose in Toulouse:

Mort Rosenblum is a special correspondent for the Associated Press, based in France, and former editor-in-chief of the International Herald Tribune. Equally at home in the worlds of international politics and haute cuisine, his acclaimed books include the James Beard Award-winning Olives. He lives in Paris and Provence. [HD note: his latest book is Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light / Amazon.com link to this newest book: Chocolate book].

[About this excerpt: Goose is the regional bird of the Southwestern corner of France in which Toulouse is located, and hence part of the foundation of the cuisine of that terroir. The cooking fat is goose fat, and the quintessential dish is the heavenly stew (requiring three days preparation and cooking if it’s done right and from scratch), called cassoulet, and among whose components are goose confit, and a sausage indigenous to Toulouse. The distinctive taste of cooking in the fat of a goose (or duck, for that matter) in some ways helps characterize the precise distinctions of Toulousean life in the broad range of experiences collectively known as la vie Francaise. Rosenblum has been talking about Southwestern food and other reasons for being there… This book was published in 2000. He was reporting on events that took place in 1998 and 1999. Bill Clinton was still President. September 11, 2001 was two years hence. The dot.com bubble was still expanding. Afghanistan was run by the Taliban, and Iraq was ruled, of course, by Saddam Hussein; as a consequence, neither of these sovereignties suffered a riot, not even a Molotov cocktail.]

Goose grease or not, I returned often to Toulouse because I like it there. The city calls itself a model for the third millennium. It might be. If anyplace now represents France and its extremes, it is Toulouse.

Polls repeatedly rank Toulouse the most liveable city in France. It is comfortably sized, rooted in its past but open to anything new. Its hypermodern hospital in stately old buildings is among the best in Europe. For any number of reasons, it is where most Frenchmen say they would like to move.

For starters, la ville rose is lively and beautiful. When sunlight sets fire to the salmon-hued bricks, it is even stunning. People gather on the grass by the arched Pont Neuf, as in Paris much older than its name suggests. The Place du Capitole, a tile-and-cobblestone esplanade, throbs with music, markets, and meandering in any weather. Cafes and cabarets jam solid with university students.

The tourism office is a tower keep by leaf~shaded fountains and elegant shops off the adjacent Place Wilson. Inside, friendly people can tell you that Toulouse has 150 parks and plazas, 4,000 public benches, 160,000 trees, and 400,000 flowers.

The old center radiates from red-bricked quais on the Garonne, built in the eighteenth century by trade-minded city fathers who meant to show the world some grandeur. From the port, the Canal du Midi begins its long meander across the
bottom of France toward Montpellier and the Rhône. Back from the river, the Rue de la Dalbade is lined with gorgeous old homes built by the local nobility between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Toulouse is also technology heaven. Ariane rockets are made there. The supersonic Concorde was born in Toulouse, still ahead of its time a half century later. It is Europe’s Seattle, headquarters of a French-dominated Airbus consortium that builds wide-bodied planes that compete with Boeing.

Aerospatiale in Toulouse builds those heat-seeking Exocet missiles so beloved by military dictators. During the Falklands War, assembly line workers cheered with pride when Argentines used their handiwork to smoke a British warship. But in a French spirit of fair play, diplomats passed secret aim-spoiling codes on to London so that did not happen too often.
Industrial suburbs stretch away from Blagnac airfield and Aerospatiale’s soo-yard-long main hangar. The city’s four universities, four engineering schools, sixteen institutes, and thirty-four other schools of advanced studies are sprinkled just about everywhere.

Clearly, town planners put in some thought. You can even follow the road markings and find a place to park in the
medieval part of town. For the rest, urban architects designed outskirts that were to live on in greater glory, pilot planning
for the third millennium.

Le Mirail, for instance, an expanse of high-rise apartments and suburban businesses around a university campus, was supposed to house a dynamic, youthful, and convivial mix of young workaday families. As it turned out, Le Mirail offered France a chilling example of what happens in a well-fed society when too many people find no place at the table.

Le Mirail evolved into what other sizeable towns call la banlieu. The word means suburbs, but the connotation is neither Grosse Pointe nor Scarsdale. It is now code for the more specific term, "quartier sensible." That means, essentially: a ghetto populated by immigrants, darker-hued French citizens, and white working-class French families who are not able to move elsewhere. They are no-man’s-land expanses around Paris and Lyon. But Toulouse?

So I was surprised late in 1998, after a visit to France’s lovely model city, to see a headline reading, "Day of Riots in Toulouse After Death of Habib, 17."

Nothing was really clear about the spark that set things off. From most accounts, a police patrol had come upon some kids breaking into a car at 3:30 A.M. on a Sunday. Officers fired but did not chase the fleeing kids. At dawn, someone walking his dog found Habib Ould dead with a 7.65 caliber police bullet in him. He had run a hundred yards from the scene and collapsed. By noon, when the news circulated, crowds gathered in the tough La Reynerie section from all over Le Mirail.

By nightfall, cars were aflame. Rocks rained down on the besieged police. Outnumbered, faced with something new, the riot troops fired plumes of tear gas. Molotov cocktails flew back in riposte. At least six officers were injured in the first clash, and sporadic pitched battles went on for most of a week. Meanwhile, thousands marched through Toulouse holding aloft photos of a smiling Habib and banners in French and Arabic that read, "They murdered Pipo."

The story had the familiar buzz words evoking an underlying malaise that was troubling all of France: "integration" and "assimilation." What they meant was that after centuries of absorbing new immigrant groups, Frenchmen of the old sort saw themselves faced with a people who prefer a different sort of Sunday lunch, which they would rather eat on Friday.

For years, occasional flare-ups drew attention to the "sensitive neighborhoods," usually around Paris or Lyon. The film La Haine, "Hate," traced the patterns of frustrated, youthful exuberance to final gunplay. But the Toulouse spark ignited hot spots smouldering all across France. Habib was shot in mid-December. Over the Christmas holidays, shops and cars burned in Lyon, Saint~Etienne, Lille, Paris, Longwy. Tranquil Strasbourg saw the worst. In a single weekend, twenty cars were torched and city buses were stoned.

Vehicule flambé was a favorite dish. In Grenoble, for instance, kids stopped a bus and flung a firebomb under the seats. The driver crashed into a tree and escaped, with his passengers, before the bus exploded.

Across France as a whole, no one kept careful count.

In less likely places than Toulouse, frustrated ghetto youngsters tried their hand at the violence they watched nightly on television. Arles caught the fever, among other tranquil southern cities. And often the police, overwhelmed or fearful of criticism if they overreacted, simply stood back and watched.

By the time 1999 got started, French society had a new classification: les sauvageons were disaffected youths capable of violence just for the hell of it. Magazines scoured their Rolodexes for sociologists, who came up with conflicting analyses and forecasts. Clearly, this was something to watch between meals.

In a thorough post-mortem, Le Monde wrote, "Riots in parts of Le Mirail were no worse than elsewhere, but because they happened in the ‘the city where Frenchmen most prefer to live,’ according to all the polls, they showed the depth of the social crisis in France."

Sociologists had explanations. Sophie Body-Gendrot, a friend who loves dark chocolate, drafted a study for the prime minister’s office. In short, she said, an excluded class of kids do not feel connected to the same institutions and values of those around them. Repression, the usual answer, only makes it worse. And neither tolerance nor understanding can be enforced. Certainly not at any individual level.

"It is easy to single out suburban kids, or National Front voters, but it’s much more widespread than that," Sophie had explained in Paris. "Whole segments of society are rejecting authority, not paying rent, refusing the old norms of civility. It’s getting worse, and I don’t see solutions."

The predominant reaction in the government, she said, was to tighten the screws, putting out more police and imposing more severe sentences in courts. That would likely make things worse. "We need much more dialogue," she concluded, "but the French don’t know how to engage in dialogue. " When I returned to Toulouse a few months after the riots, I walked around the old center to sniff out sentiments. Near the Garonne quai, I stopped at a small news and stationery shop owned by a slim woman of a certain age, with severely angled clear-framed glasses and a fussy but not unfriendly manner. She was straight out of the manual: shopkeeper, mother, petit bourgeoise, who ruled her small domain.

Yes, she explained, the problem was down in the banlieue. Police killed an Algerian, or something. But a lot of them marched into town to demonstrate.

"That makes you afraid, you know," she said, with a little shudder. "Mind you, it’s not that I have anything against ‘les Arabes,’ but they come here and don’t fit in with our way and yet expect everything for free from us."

"Les Arabes," in this context, has nothing to do with the Middle East. It is a semi-polite term—there are much worse—for North Africans from Algeria, Tunisia, or Morocco, three former French territories. Many of these "immigrants" are second or third generation descendants of French citizens who as soldiers died defending France. Others include Zinedine Zidane, the French-born son of an Algerian night watchman from Marseille, who did the most to help France win the 1998 World Cup.

The stationery store lady warmed to her theme. She was no racist, she assured me, as I paid for my papers and turned to
leave. "You just have to understand," she concluded, "ces gens-là. . ." That translated to: those people. Everyone knows roughly who is included in that collective reference, but the connotations vary slightly as you move around France. In Toulouse, it means olive-hued, Allah-fearing people who would rather eat lamb on a spit than duck or goose.

Mort Rosenblum, A Goose in Toulouse, pp.131-135
©2000 Mort Rosenblum, Hyperion Books, New York
[Amazon.com link to this book: http://tinyurl.com/bmzcq ]

This is the link to the story I wrote, “The Homeless of Provence,” which I alluded to above. It touches most obliquely on the same philosophical issues raised by the plight of the downtrodden, and their reactions against it:
http://www.02138.com/pdfs/02138_coverpage-1b_p7-10.pdf

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There’s no greater gift involving time than creating the kind of life that allows you not to predicate how you use your time on the impact of that use on your ability to make the money you require for living your life as you see fit. In short, the more time you can give yourself, the better you are going to feel. That is, as long as there are other people in your life important enough to you to give them some of your time as well. If you can give yourself more time than the amount you need to make a living in order to meet the cost of necessities, you are on the road to heaven on earth. The problem, of course, is how to “make” such time. (side thought: what do make time out of?)

Many pretend that philosophy is the solution, often the same people who really don’t need to worry about these things, because they have the money to do, more or less, as they please. More often than not the common wisdom is the only philosophy that works universally is “make your life simpler.” Dispense with possessions, except the precious few. Reduce your obligations, in number, if not in magnitude. Eat less. Drink less. Consume less electricity, water, natural gas. Eschew the use of vehicles that are fueled by carbon-based fluids, solids or gases.

This is obviously horse shit, except for the lives of those who have embraced a monastic life within the confines of their chosen religion, and they happen to have a vast garden of food they maintain year round in a temperate climate.

Outside of criminal behavior, there is no custom, there is no set of tasks, that, in the aggregate can be termed simple, however basic and uncomplicated any one of them may be in the particular. Those I know who espouse, if not embrace (a smaller number), the “simple” life in the sense I am attempting to define it, spend most of their time engaged in tasks in pursuit of such a regime. Aside from the observation that one should embrace his or her spouse once in awhile, especially if you actually mean it, I would say, there is no simplicity to their lives at all. Not from the outside. Rather, given the theme of this essay, the more important consideration is the extent to which they devote time to themselves in a way they see not only fit, but they experience as pleasurable also. The fairy tale they tell themselves, and the majority of their friends, about simplicity is not only besides the point, but harmless. It’s not worth the time – aside from observing it and commenting upon it in public – to consider its obvious and pertinent internal inconsistency. If it is not a fairy tale, but told, nevertheless, in hypocrisy or perversity, well, you have some interesting friends, and you should spend more time with them observing their behavior. Unless, as I say, it’s criminal, in which case, be prepared, in sticking around, to accept the consequences of association.

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This is inspired by a spot inventory of the contents of the small pad of paper I carry in my left hip pocket. I have used them for years now (the first of the current series starts January 27 2002; they have 80 leaves that measure 4.1 x 5.8 inches [the odd dimensions derive from the fact that I effect the use of specific brand of “carnet,” French for notebook: it’s a Rhodia Bloc #13, with a bright orange cover, scored to allow folding the front cover over the binding; each leaf is covered with a grid of ruled squares, five to the inch horizontally and vertically]). I write, usually on only one side of each leaf, and each is perforated, so the pad serves the purpose as well of a repository of any needed scrap notes. I record everything here: bits of conversations, ideas large and small, drafts of essays and stories, shopping lists, to-do items, and, for three years, the names of all the oncology specialists treating my wife, her medications, appointments, etc. At the time of the account that follows, I had just started my tenth of these notebooks. This method has outlasted every system (e.g. Filofax, Day-Runner), gadget (PDA), device (Apple Newton computer), on which I have spent thousands of dollars over a 30 year professional career. The notes from which the following is copied says "Transcribed 2005 February 6." I leave the significance, never mind the meaning, of this, if any, to my future literary executors and scholars. Of which I have no doubt there will be an army.

[There are] chores, monthly house payments, auto maintenance, and the workplace
vs.
[the] the classic representation of the artist as monomaniacal with disorderly studio, paint-spattered clothes, unwashed, [eating] makeshift meals, etc.

Just below this entry is the self-stick tracking number ID from the Express Mail pack I sent to Fleet Bank Repetitive Funds Transfer Unit.

This is a typical chore for me. We have to send money, in euros, to our French checking account with the bank that holds the mortgage on our maison de village in Provence, so that our mortgage and mortgage insurance can be automatically paid on the tenth of each month. There are also the usual utility bills, which in France are paid bi-monthly, except for water and sewer, which, as here, are semi-annual.

Woe betide however if you miss a payment, especially if you have arranged, as we have for most of these bills, automatic payment. Miss one payment and the service is cut off. It’s happened with the phone and the water. Once is enough to teach you never to have it happen again. And even an anguished artist will be sufficiently bestirred not to allow this daily need to be interrupted.
Of course, the French are masters at circumventing the system, even in the eventuality of a service cut-off. For example, when I told a French acquaintance about the temporary water shortage chez nous (once we discovered it after a hiatus of several months) he told me that, if needed, he has the special square-headed socket wrench used by the Water Service both to turn on and off your supply (under a cover in the pavement, in our case, in the alley just next to the maison).

Perhaps characteristically, I am somehow more inspired in France, and even in the absence of my usual inspirational mood-altering nostrums, am capable of prodigious amounts of work, including a great deal of the content of bertha magazine. This was true of visits to St.John USVI where, alas, I have no property, but where a very good friend, indeed, resides and where I have been a not quite frequent enough guest. My duties in France are not unlike those at home, as I must still track the course of household expenses and pay the bills. The car is a rental, but needs, perhaps even more than at home, the ministrations that all automobiles require to keep running (or at least a steady eye on its condition and the level of fluids, especially its most precious, the petrol) because the maison is in the middle of nowhere, with about seven or eight kilometers (4½-5 miles) to the nearest gas station. Naturally, it’s open on its own schedule as well.

Further, there are the usual standard responsibilities to assume, preparing every meal not eaten out, with the accompanying kitchen cleanup. The never-ending chores, few and far between it is true, but always, somehow disruptive. There are, as well, the chores that fall into the category of feathering-one’s-nest. These include the delicate task of furnishing and decorating a house from the bare walls—the condition in which we received it from the previous owner.

The latter set of tasks is particularly tricky in France as it is the custom to strip one’s former house as one vacates it of all property, save what is “permanently” attached to the wall, floor, or ceiling. This does not include light fixtures (there were but two, a wall sconce on the third floor, and a storm fixture on the outside wall of the house overlooking the roof terrace enclosing a yellow “insect-repelling” bulb). Even mirrors were stripped from bathroom walls. It was our good fortune to have all the appliances bestowed upon us by the previous owner: an upper-middle-class matron, wife of a successful Marseille lawyer, who was abandoning the house for one they were building closer to the coast and which, presumably, the old appliances did not suit.

It satisfied this would-be artist’s sensibility (and pocketbook) that the left appliances included a Godin range, the cream of the French crop. Our model (with two electric burner, two gas, and an electric grill top, plus two ovens, with built-in rotisserie motors) is a little long in the tooth, though the latest versions of it, little altered in terms of convenience, and in some sense even of design, sells in the United States at “select” outlets for as much as $8,000, depending on the configuration. I’d have to sell a lot of photographs to pay for that.

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lyrics from Merrily We Roll Along, Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

MARY
Hey, old friend,
What do you say, old friend?
Make it okay, old friend,
Give an old friendship a break.
Why so grim?
We’re going on forever.
You, me, him,
Too many lives are at stake.

Friends this long
Has to mean something’s strong,
So if your old friend’s wrong,
Shouldn’t an old friend come through?
It’s us, old friend —
What’s to discuss, old friend?
Here’s to us,
Who’s like us — ?

CHARLEY
Damn few.

I guess there can be such a thing as a surfeit of emotion. Certainly there are many of people who have commented to me the effects of being almost overwhelmed with feeling. It’s a curious quality in the human animal that our particular form of consciousness allows us to interpret the sensation of a myriad of physiological changes as a surge of feeling. We experience different feelings in different ways, and less pleasant feelings, of anxiety, or fear, of grief raise a greater spectre of being overpowered.

Yet even an abundance of good feeling, of love, of joy, even of deeper forms of satisfaction, a penetrating sense of comfort or well-being – perhaps as rare as deep, cathartic grief – can as well evoke a sense of enough, even a bit more may be too much.

Against the possibility of these experiences I wish to propose yet another condition of sensibility. Is it possible as I suppose it to be that one can have a desire for certain feelings, and to prolong the experiences or at least the conditions that are the occasion or at least the setting for having those feelings. In regard to setting a stage, let me further propose that a theatrical performance, if not that the quintessential American theatrical performance of a Broadway musical, seeks to concentrate in a short span of time serial instances of deeply felt sentiment, if not genuine feeling. Such concentrations are best realized in song, for the music alone creates a context that transcends the limitations of language per se in expressing strong feeling. Further, the songs harness the emotive power of the human voice, whose greatest strength seemingly derives from what has to be supposed to be the shortest synaptic travel for any sound arriving at the ear en route to the brain. All other instruments seek mainly to emulate the emotive power of the voice, if not through mimicry then at least through aural stimulation at the extremes of tonal scales or of volume.

The lyrics of the most affecting of songs are simple. Opera lyrics are simple. The simplicity maintains the primacy of the substance of the subjects of most songs, the great themes, the great abstractions. Love. Loss. Fear. Hope. Self-validation.

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There is no denying that the country is divided on the subject of the administration of George W. Bush.

I wonder what a prudent politician must do to deal with such a condition, on the presumption that one does so because one is at least 1% devoted to the proposition that I represent, to the world, the entirety of the American population. If all you are concerned about is achieving and holding office for as long as possible, presumably for other goals to be sought, attainable only as the result of being in office, the strategy is simple. You must only achieve one vote more than required than the other guy.

George W. Bush is clearly content to serve only that part of the electorate that is sufficiently satisfied with his performance to vote in favor of keeping him to continue with it. His objective is simpler still than stated above. He must only gain, if needed, the additional votes necessary to keep him in office.

A president of the United States unconcerned about the significant opposition of his people — by what measure we call it "significant" is beyond my sense of it at the moment, but I am not in the position of being concerned about the size of the opposition — is as president too sure of himself to deserve to be president. As a practitioner of the black arts of psychiatry intimated to me recently, he wishes Bush were more neurotic.

Long since, President Bush has proven himself impervious to nay-saying. The likeliest reason is that he never seeks it, and, by extension, it is never brought to his attention (at least not at his behest).

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George Bush is nothing, if not a quintessential American. He may be happy to consider himself so, but I do not mean this in a positive way.

Americans have, at their worst, certain tendencies that may characterize the American character. At the least they characterize the American way of life. No other sovereign culture permits what ours does. Hence few citizens of few other countries have the means to behave in a legal way that we do.

Blame the Other Guy

And if blame isn’t sufficient, have him investigated. It has happened at different times in different recent administrations in Washington that the touchstone for upright behavior was the expectation that the culprit (for which read, the Chief Executive) will own up to responsibility where such ownership is due. “I did it. I’m responsible,” is a simple formulation…

As they used to say in the Bronx, before they started with “fuggedaboudit,” I say, “fat chance.”

These days the buck stops well before it can be traced any further, or at least it stops in such an obscure place, the outgoing President, or the incoming, as the case may be, has plenty of time to put the culprit on the Big Pardon.

Politics trumps every other consideration

The key condition of having civiiization is people living together. Given human behavior, even two are a collective, with divergent, if not antithetical, goals and ways of reaching them. So with any more than one person there’s the need for politics—or its inevitability. By politics we live together, in the ultimately desultory and inefficient manner we’ve managed to do for as long as we’ve managed to call ourselves a civilization. That is, given human behavior, this means that at any one time it is impossible for the entire civilized collection of us to be happy. Hence, politics: the human way of controlling the inherent chaos, and at least paying lip service to the objective of seeing to it it gets no worse. As long as somebody is happy (somebody other than a politician) at any one time, we congratulate ourselves on our advances.

Each of us has been in the condition of not being in control. It is the defining condition of infancy and early childhood. Many of us have had some experience of being in control, as an older sibling, a bully, a boss, a parent.
Being in control is better. Hence the appeal of politics.

For one thing, being a politician significantly increases the chances that you will be, at any one moment, one of those people in the collective—the body of civilized men and women—who is indeed happy. Being in control may be a precondition. I’ll have to think about that.

In any event, politics tends to encourage those in power to want to stay there.

By at least nominally taking care of business (and civilization is now so complex, we are now so beset by laws and rules and statutes and protocols—with every one of them invented at the time because it served the specific purpose of meeting somebody’s idea of how to keep somebody, usually someone else, or something under control—that most of the population is happy to have someone else assume the job of staying on top of things, so the rest of us can pursue the full time job of keeping misery at bay). Trouble is, it’s merely a nominal proposition; we say, “Thank God, that’s being taken care of,” and go back to making shopping lists for our weekly visit to the local big box market.

You’d think politics—running things—would be a more than full time proposition. But it seems so many politicians find so many opportunities to spend a considerable amount of time running things to their advantage. Until someone notices that no one is really running things. It’s a sad proposition, but the best test of whether politics is working is to have the least number of people with any advantage whatsoever.

Never happens, of course, but we keep trying. The only thing we’ve proven is that the people in power do manage to have some advantage, certainly relative to everyone else, and that becomes a very strong incentive for wanting to stay there. In power.

The result, and we will have to ignore a great deal of history of noble and ignoble rhetoric, which pretty much started the moment Aristotle sent his final corrected galleys of “Politics” to the publisher (so to speak) and people realized this politics was a pretty good idea, is that people in power will say anything to stay there, and if they are not in power, but want to be, they will pretty much say anything, usually about who is in power, to unseat the incumbent and replace them.

Politics is a pretty good idea, at least in principle. Problem is, with regard to politics, “principle” has passed from its ethical sense of the fundamental code of good conduct to its strictly ordinal sense of being the first stone one puts it place before proceeding with the rest of the edifice (usually dedicated to the one who placed the stone).

So, politics is no longer a matter of “first, let’s do the right thing.” It’s a matter of, “first, let’s get into office.”

With such a modus vivendi—certainly it’s the operating truth of American politics, realized most purely in presidential politics—the only dignity we can cling to is that shred that adheres to the rule of honoring the office, and not the human who happens to occupy it.

Don’t read the manual

We’re an appliance happy culture, and we expect all appliances to work the same way — without need for consulting the instructions, however simple. Yet the biggest problem in tech support, for example, with computers (which are not so simple, and far from being appliances) is the neglect of the first two instructions with any electrical device: “Plug it in, and turn it on.”

Apparently Mr., Bush, the chief executive after all, that is, head of the branch of government charged with actually conducting the business of government, likes to pretend that this is a silly first order of business. It’s running, isn’t it? In the case of national security and threats to same (not to mention threats to the life and limb of the citizens of our great republic), Mr. Bush will be the first to allude to his sworn duty to “preserve and protect” the Constitution and all it entails. Hint, it entails protection from threats.

Yet his defense concerning a top secret briefing memo on security was there was nothing to be done in response as it was bereft of hard evidence. In appliance metaphor terms, the oven was on full blast, and we had somehow got our hands on the recipe for Symbol of Financial Power Flambé, but we were not only on the road with the car packed, but we were already at our happy vacation hacienda, and George W. is not apparently one of those kinds of husbands who suddenly wonders if “Gee, did I leave the oven—burners, air conditioner, clothes iron, wood chipper….—running?”

Dealing with terrorism is of course not so reductive, and that stove metaphor looks silly, especially when you consider that, well, they don’t eat what we do. Hell, they don’t even like the same foods. You’d think we’d check up ahead of time on the culture, dining habits, typical dishes, how they’re cooked. But we get along by assuming the world loves a mess of ribs, smoked and slathered with sauce, and dammit, who doesn’t love pork?

Back to that issue of hard evidence for a moment though. In the new millennium, hard evidence is what you get after the fact (remember the innocent days of Watergate, when a magically re-appearing strip of Scotch® Brand transparent tape on a door lock of the office complex garage was enough hard evidence of something or other for an untrained, unarmed security guard to call in the gendarmes?)

Intelligence chatter, and the educated deductions of trained, experienced intelligence professionals is not hard evidence. Declarative sentences are not hard evidence. Four highjacked planes (three of them still with the honor of being implemented successfully as the world’s largest and deadliest IEDs [improvised explosive devices]). That’s hard evidence.

Hmmmm, we’d better check into this. That rascal Osama bin Laden.

Talk Big, Think Small

The big stick is standard issue, so even Teddy Roosevelt would be comfortable with that. But what happened to speaking softly? We should not even inquire into the current state of the Great Unanswered Question (not “why are we here?,”  but “who the hell do you think you are?”), as this might require some intellectual vigor, based on reading, inquiry, thought and analysis.

No, Americans like big talk. Making the world safe for democracy.  Nice idea. Noble. But with the small problem that, as the basis of a strategy, it calls for large, complex, sustained, and lengthy implementation. Not the least of the tasks is facing up to some big enemies, and doing it with some delicacy.

Like big talk, Americans like big action, or shall we say, concrete action. Accomplishing the obvious, and recounting the tale in its entirety (“mission accomplished”) even while satisfying the endemic national attention deficit.

Having suffered the humiliation of a protracted standoff, at great human and financial expense, with a determined enemy that had already withstood a slightly older version of an indomitable, superior, and larger and more sophisticated military foe, we’ve been picking easier targets ever since, or pulling out before something very small and nasty turned into something very big and even nastier. Lest I lose anyone here, I’m talking Vietnam, who had already outlasted the French, and subsequently the malleable, but only mildly unpleasant regimes of Haiti, Grenada, Panama. The pullouts occurred in Lebanon and Somalia, you may recall, but that may only have occurred because we had not as yet drawn a bead on a definable enemy, even an abstract one, like “world terrorism.”

Hence our big actions involve lots of men and lots of guns and lots of noise, and until George W. Bush lots of justification, at least enough of the sort that satisfied the most reasonable of exponents of liberalism.

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I find, especially as I’ve gotten older (how many times do I think this should be a "default" opening for anything I write?), that I am less and less inclined to write at length, and even more so disinclined to read matter of great length.

The issue seems to me to be one of the engagement and interest. If I am fired up about a subject or a topic, I go on blithely and at what I know to most other people are insuperable lengths to state my point, whatever digressions my rambling may inspire (or provoke), whatever associated matters, with an attendant discussion of a length that the new matter deserves. This is a behavior that produces a result that to many people (and always as a surprise to me) is the object of envy. Why on earth would anyone want to be able to express themselves in such a way, and endlessly to boot? Further inquiry reveals that this envy is more of an abstract wistfulness about the difficulty of self-expression. I become convinced that it is less the actual artfulness that is evident and more the quite evident ease with which the words pour out that elicits the envy.

Similarly, if I am truly interested in the subject, presumably either in some visceral way, or at least as a matter of prolonged intellectual engagement, I will read on, in any medium, sometimes doggedly (held back chiefly by the ineptitude, or at least the inelegance, of the writing skills of the author). When I was training to be a scholar, which is how I think of my career both as an undergraduate and a graduate student of literature, I quickly learned of the most daunting aspect of the regimen. It is only in retrospect that I can articulate and hold closely my belief in the actual challenge. Through my student days, I always wondered about the soundness of my own intellectual equipment, not only in making discoveries of merit, and using such discoveries as the basis of original, cogent, and useful scholarship on matters that might in fact add to the store of human knowledge, and most specifically about the nature of being alive, as a human. I should not have worried, as I well knew with the abrupt end to my formal education, having observed the evidence of the extent and quality of the equipment bestowed upon my peers and found myself at least to have a middling chance at competing on that score as a result of the talents and skills I myself possessed.

No, the true obstacle to furthering a career in academe (aside from the vagaries of the intrigues, politics, and bureaucratic snafus that seem to characterize academic life as much as life in any other profession or craft) is slogging through the dross, through the verbal landfill that characterizes most of the output of writers on serious subjects, including unhappily (and, as they say in the software business, counter-intuitively), literature. Language is not the determinant. Whatever the native language of the writer, and whatever the language of the subject matter, there is a high degree of predictability that the writing will be impenetrable, off-putting, and, incomprehensible.

I am convinced, and I state this at the risk of becoming a target to whom one of the worst of epithets that I can think of applies, "anti-intellectual," that one reason for the esteem, as well as the cachet of difficulty and extremity of understanding, in which certain orthodoxies are embraced is the execrable way, indeed the almost impossible way there is about them of extracting any meaning, in which the theorists of that orthodoxy have expressed themselves. My metaphorical hat is off to those who, not so much translated them from some other tongue than English (fill in your own languages here), but to those who have managed somehow to abstract, distill, or otherwise channel, whatever wisdom or fineness of thought that may be therein embedded. If Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard and company have a following at all among Anglophones it is due to those brave, prescient, enduring, or possibly inventive, souls who have mined the tons of ore that are their canons, and managed to put on display, in clear, cogent and attractive form, what gems (and such seems the ratio of ore-to-precious substance) these living intellectual spelunkers of deep, unlit grottoes have claimed to have found hidden in their darkest corners. It’s easy to turn foreign gibberish into gibberish in English. Most such translators hone their skills through a youth misspent in generating their own original gibberish.

If it were up to me, their greatest contributions would have been relegated to the status of effective sleep aids. I lament the years, made up of strings of anxious moments as I despaired ever of writing like a critic or scholar, whose accumulated output would burden, for decades, if not centuries, the shelves of ill-lit book stacks only to be exposed to light by hapless students whose plight it is to suppose that one day they themselves will have left behind something worthwhile reading, never mind pondering and explicating to oneself, and then to others, and not to mention the actual business of modern scholarship, and that is, to build upon, enhance, or perhaps take issue with on substantive grounds, only to emerge as the basis for a new or anti-orthodoxy. The brotherhood of academia seemingly takes (or took — I will not speak for current conditions) one vow, and that is never to suggest to recruits, neophytes or acolytes that this particular emperor wears exclusively the proverbial emperor’s wardrobe.

Discovering truth is a tough business. To cloak what one believes is truth in anything but crystalline garb (a not subtle distinction from the cloth of the famous Emperor’s cloak) is to leave the truth undiscovered. To do otherwise also suggests that the discoverer is incapable, in his or her own field, of accomplishing successfully what I am told the mathematician must understand is the great challenge of his discipline. It is said that if you cannot explain your theorem (never mind its proof) to an intelligent ten year-old, it is likely you do not understand it yourself. Einstein said, "make it as simple as possible, but no simpler."

Compression of Language / Compression of  Thought

The Einsteinian admonition to be as simple as possible is not a command to be poetic, gnomic, or epigrammatic in expression. Bible study over two millennia has demonstrated that the simplest of texts can inspire torrents of words by way of enlightenment, explanation, explication, or mere rhapsodizing. Some seemingly simply stated concepts sometimes require lengthy elucidation. The danger is in imagining that such elucidation requires something other than clarity and simplicity (of that further irreducible Einsteinian variety of "simple") itself.

There is a truism, I believe, that suggests that even the most seemingly difficult of ideas — the Theory of Relativity is the usual contemporaneous example, as it has been (and as it has been contemporaneous) for a number of decades now, suggesting a dearth of truly difficult, truly profound ideas in the interim, that is, since 1905 — will eventually become the curriculum in high school, if not in the lower grades. This is a testament not to the diminution in time of the profundity of an originally difficult idea, but to the power, as I am trying to suggest, of simplicity. For you advocates of String Theory, I will say simply that I am not aware that it is as much an integral part of the high school physics curriculum, nor may I suggest, is it as simple (and no simpler) a theory as that of Relativity. I will not comment on either its profundity, or repercussions (but merely because I know even less than I do about its currency in high school curricula).

For me, if some things have proven more difficult for their hardness (I mean this metaphorically, in the metallurgical or gemological sense), it is not that I am less interested in them. There are lines of poetry, if not whole poems, that I would put on a par, in terms of comprehension in an encompassing fashion, with certain principles of science. I spent less time with the so-called Laws of Thermodynamics, than with some of the Cantos of Pound, not because one was harder than the other, and certainly not because of a proportionate lack of clarity (or simplicity, if you prefer), but because the one interested me more. It seems to me that scientific laws (or equations) and poetry are, by intent and definition and the magical ingenuity of the language of each, that is, the least building blocks of the language of each: letters and integers, the least reducible ways in which we can express, simply, any idea, from the most homely and quotidian to the most profound. There is no more efficient way, I don’t think, of compressing meaning via language than through poetry or the formulae and equations of mathematics (itself, essentially, the language of science).

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Long-windedness is a quality that I do not restrict to my e-mail messages.

Rather, it receives the greatest expression in e-mail, because it is in this format that I can most readily overcome impediments presented by most other media. At least this is true of other means of communicating that occur in real time, and particularly in person, with other individuals within earshot.

In short, who wants to listen to a windbag? As I am always a windbag, I am often not listened to.

With e-mail, I can be equally verbose, but the victims, that is, the audience, is largely disobliged from paying very much more attention than they otherwise might if I were speaking to them around a dinner table.

Let me tell you what often happens in the latter instance. Conversation is lively, filled with bon mots, badinage, witticisms, and most of the rest of the time with matter of the same insanely banal, localized and usually of a provincial interest (even when occurring in the urban milieu), that is, it’s conversation of little quality when measured in terms of wit or wisdom. I will attempt from time to time to contribute my share of the information, opinions, and diatribes to be communicated. Often as not, even when answering a direct question, I find myself with a truncated sentence, the end of which dangles from my lips, in my mouth, and that the train of conversation has left for another station.

Boring also. Did I mention that?

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It’s probably a good bet, and something to explore someday (as part of that list of well-meaning interesting projects I’d like to do and will probably never get to — the editorial calendar of that great magazine I want to do in the sky). I’ll bet there’s an instant way to test the sincerity and authenticity and likely the justification of a movement and that is, by the quality of their Web site, let’s say.

They will always be plain, scruffy, unadorned, undesigned, and largely prose oriented, with heavy amounts of text.

Whether this is purposeful or accidental is hard to tell, without invesitgation, but I’d guess it’s the latter. The last thing that do-gooders and well-meaning social engineers manage to do is to look professional, that is make the effort (assuming they even had the resources) to look like what all other entities who communicate to the public and manage any degree of efficacy in forming opinions and swaying emotions.

The tentative communications strategy I would suggest to them is a stealth one, borrowed in part from guerrilla marketing and other seemingly off-the-cuff, scruffy-looking, disorganized seeming strategies that have been successful in the past.

André the Giant bombs the world! (from Salon.com)

Earnest people, and the organizations they form, seem often embarrassed to suggest that packaging is important in order to get the attention of many people. Certainly the greater part of the population of the United States of America – at least all of those who can be reached through a broader medium than accosting them face-to-face in the street or in their homes – has been conditioned to be spoken to a certain way. Like it or not, they are swayed by how things are said. They are moved by how things look. They are persuaded by appearances.

In addition to the significant problem of gaining the attention of any individual altogether there is the added problem of holding it for long enough at least to attempt to deliver a message of some substance – even if that message, as famously and tortuously promulgated by Ernie Kovacs, is as simple as "Chew Gum!" For those who couldn’t possibly know what I am talking about, I am referring to a phony commercial that Kovacs produced as one skit in one of his television programs (he hosted several, most of them of a variety format) in which an elaborate stage set, involving drapes covering a stage opening to reveal a full and rather large chorus of men and women, all dressed in long satin choral robes, and all of them holding open music folders. With the curtains fully drawn, the entire chorus drew a deep breath, and in harmony intoned the words, "Chew gum!" with some emphasis. No doubt part of the joke derived from a very deep reference to a famous pronouncement of architect Frank Lloyd Wright to the effect that television was "chewing gum for the eyes." Kovacs, speaking in more or less the same time frame (we’re talking the early days of commercial television of the 50s), said, television is a medium, so called, "because it is neither rare nor well done."

Similarly, the Web is not particularly well done by most of the people who have taken the trouble to put a page or two, or an entire site, up for the entire world to view.

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