Laurel Massé

Mark you this...

Writer Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) had read more than enough of the critical adulation accorded to James Fenimore Cooper, one of America's most revered early novelists (including The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans). Accordingly, in 1895, he published his review of Cooper's works. Listening to the national news this morning, hearing about politicians' maneuvers and the confusions some are having about the mysterious connection between cause and effect, and about the difference between a law and a bill and such, I was reminded of that review. I found it and reread it, and here is the passage that had come to mind.

If Cooper had been an observer his inventive faculty would have worked better; not more interestingly, but more rationally, more plausibly. Cooper's proudest creations in the way of "situations" suffer noticeably from the absence of the observer's protecting gift. Cooper's eye was splendidly inaccurate. Cooper seldom saw anything correctly. He saw nearly all things as through a glass eye, darkly. Of course a man who cannot see the commonest little every-day matters accurately is working at a disadvantage when he is constructing a "situation."

(Anyone in Washington, DC remember this passage? Apparently not.)

Twain then goes on to give an example of such a disadvantage:

...The ark [a houseboat that is about to be attacked] is one hundred and forty-feet long; the dwelling is ninety feet long. The idea of the Indians is to drop softly and secretly from the arched sapling to the dwelling as the ark creeps along under it at the rate of a mile an hour, and butcher the family. It will take the ark a minute and a half to pass under. It will take the ninety-foot dwelling a minute to pass under. Now, then, what did the six Indians do? It would take you thirty years to guess, and even then you would have to give it up, I believe. Therefore, I will tell you what the Indians did. Their chief, a person of quite extraordinary intellect for a Cooper Indian, warily watched the canal-boat as it squeezed along under him and when he had got his calculations fined down to exactly the right shade, as he judge, he let go and dropped. And missed the boat! That is actually what he did. He missed the house, and landed in he stern of the scow. It was not much of a fall, yet it knocked him silly. He lay there unconscious. If the house had been ninety-seven feet long he would have made the trip. The error lay in the construction of the house. Cooper was no architect.

There still remained in the roost five Indians. The boat has passed under and is now out of their reach. Let me explain what the five did -- you would not be able to reason it out for yourself. No. 1 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water astern of it. Then No. 2 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water still further astern of it. Then No. 3 jumped for the boat, and fell a good way astern of it. Then No. 4 jumped for the boat, and fell in the water away astern. Then even No. 5 made a jump for the boat -- for he was Cooper Indian. In that matter of intellect, the difference between a Cooper Indian and the Indian that stands in front of the cigar-shop is not spacious. The scow episode is really a sublime burst of invention; but it does not thrill, because the inaccuracy of details throw a sort of air of fictitiousness and general improbability over it. This comes of Cooper's inadequacy as observer.

Do treat yourself to the whole essay. It's been making me laugh - loudly! - since I was in high school.

 

Cool school

This is wonderful on many levels. It's a great story about jazz and the culture of jazz, a story about being, and trying to be, cool, and, most wonderfully, a story that can teach you how to tell a story.

 

The Manhattan Transfer opened for Mr. Cosby at the Las Vegas Hilton in - oh, what was it? - 1975? Maybe. It was an amazing experience, and not just because of Cosby. James Moody was in the house orchestra! Which was very cool.

Fools on every hill

I'm currently enjoying actor Harriet Walter's book, Other People's Shoes: Thoughts on Acting, in which she writes about her acting life. It is a very conversational book, and, as I read, I feel as though I am taking tea and chatting with a wise friend. In fact, sharing a cuppa with Ms. Walter is now one of my genie-lamp wishes.

In several passages, she mentions "sod's law", the British term for what we in America call "Murphy's Law", which states that anything that can go wrong will. I love words, so because I hope to keep increasing my working vocabulary until eons after the day I die, I did some research into origins.

"Sod" is a slang term that can be defined as a pitiable, awkward, or objectionable person. No one ventures an opinion about who the original "sod" might have been. But I'm voting for Adam, in the Bible, because his very name means dirt, or earth, which is also the non-slang meaning of sod. And, it could be said that he did act like a sod, too.

In any case, I found this passage, from British stage magician Nevile Maskelyne, writing in 1908. He doesn't name it, but he does describe sod's law:

It is an experience common to all men to find that, on any special occasion, such as the production of a magical effect for the first time in public, everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Whether we must attribute this to the malignity of matter or to the total depravity of inanimate things, whether the exciting cause is hurry, worry, or what not, the fact remains.

Personally, I am not convinced that depravity lurks in inanimate things. Nor am I certain that there is any such thing as an inanimate anything. Rather, I suspect these entities are animate, but move so slowly that we can't pay attention long enough to be aware of their progress. In fact, we don't even live long enough to do so. It's all relative, isn't it? To a fly, we are ponderously slow; to a slug, we are a blur and a breeze.

Furthermore, I don't accept that such objects are necessarily depraved. In fact, I think they might be terrifically funny, and cracking jokes all the time, hoping we'll laugh. How else to explain the car keys that vanish and reappear? Or the cell phone one searches for frantically, while it is hiding in one's hand? Or my laptop, which changes the character palette for no reason - as it is doing this morning, insisting on returning to italics even after countless corrections, and arbitrarily switching to the Polish kezboard so that I find I am uging some verz odd spellings of words?

In truth, my computer's shenanigans do seem to be inching toward the doorway to Depravity, as Ms. Mac answers my "Why must you?" with "Because I can". 

In any case (aauurrrgh!), I feel lukewarm about the expression "Murphy's Law". Why does Murphy get the credit? Actually, there is an answer to that question, and it's here.

But the older usage "sod's law" seems more democratic somehow, and more polite. No matter how our lives unfold, we all get an equal chance to take our turn being the sod.

 

 

Had enough yet?

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