Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009

tony cooper filted:

An unconventional clause to include in one's will, to be sure....r

Fluent body language.

I recently read a book called _The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent
Beneath_, by Erica Ritter, a Toronto journalist and writer.  She
examines the human--other-animal relationship in the light of the
"universal" story of the dog (usually) who protects an infant in his
care and is poorly rewarded for it, the one I knew as a child from the
poem "Beth Gelert".  That kind of thing?

Erika:
http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=6402

Beth:
http://sniff.numachi.com/pages/tiWLFHUND2.html

Hm.  Fine old poem not quite as fine as I remembered it.

Interestingly, had he written it as

   until the actual person died and, by dying, reassured my publisher
   that there would be no question of libel.

that reading doesn't seem strange to me at all.

Out of curiosity, do you similarly put "Mark Twain" or "O. Henry" or
"James Herriot" in quotes?

In our last episode,
<761ecfbf-038e-4366-9e4a-da9373de0079@q2g2000vbr.googlegroups.com>, the
lovely and talented jerry_friedman@yahoo.com broadcast on alt.usage.english:

To put my cards on the table:  I discovered about ten days ago that I have
fallen into someone's delusions of persecution, as the result of my rather
minor involvement in a professional embarrassment he suffered a few years
ago.

Those not familiar with the original controversy can find an independent
account here:

<http://www.laweekly.com/2006-01-26/news/navahoax/1>
Los Angeles News - Navahoax - page 1

and my take on those events here:

<http://larseighner.com/archives/2006-01.html#e2006-01-27T08_01_05.txt>
Lars Eighner's The Main Blog Archives: January 2006.

The upshot of it was that I encouraged the investigators perhaps a little,
but they were well on the way to their conclusion without me by the time I
was consulted.

The following month I wrote something about truth in literature,
which I thought was quite good, but no one noticed it:

<http://larseighner.com/archives/2006-02.html#e2006-02-04T22_13_11.txt>
Lars Eighner's The Main Blog Archives: February 2006.

That put the matter to rest for me.  I went about my business and forgot it.
Until, as I say, about ten day's ago.

Then I discovered that my name was being regularly abused here:

<http://le-too.blogspot.com/>
tim barrus' official blog: le-too: boys hate art.

Moreover, I discovered from this site:

<http://nasdijj.blogspot.com/>
Nasdijj Come Home

that apparently the delusions involving my name had been carried over
several blogs, some of which are now defunct, and that my name had been
associated with various videos on video sites like (but not always
including) YouTube.  The nature of those videos I do not know as I am on
dial-up and also do not have Flash capable software.

Well, you know, if you start chasing down everyone on the Internet who says
bad things about you there will be no end to it.  The site in my sig was an
attempt to poke back with satire, but these events set me to wondering.

I think, and so do the folks as the critical site, that the blogs and videos
which have mentioned me are all the work of one person, although supposedly
they are the work of various young people.  I believe anyone with an eye for
style will see, even through web fonts, the same hand in all of the
articles.

In short, it is this, this person has erected at least two different
entirely fictional projects supposedly art colonies for adolescent males who
have been subject to abuse (mostly sexual) and who suffer various
afflictions (HIV, drug addiction) which are likely to be fatal.  He casts
himself as their mentor and rescuer, and has involved me --- or invoked my
name, since between the truth-in-literature essay cited above in February of
2006 and the satire site (in sig) erected last week I have had nothing to
say about this person in public or private or tried in any way to
communicate with him --- invoked my name as the identity of some threatening
stalker and tormentor, with bad intentions toward the rescue projects and
sexual designs on the fictional participants.  This is not exactly the
reverse of the actual situation because I am unware that this person has
ever tried to contact me directly.

Well, this is annoying, but very minor in the scale of my general daily
challenges.  However it did set me to thinking about the role of rescuer in
literature, especially when that role seems to be sublimating --- and often
not very well --- something else.

I wasn't allowed tawdry comics when I was a child in the '50s, but thanks to
the web I have learned a little about the female-in-peril detective comics
whose covers gave us such lovely euphemisms as 'headlights.' Many of the
covers involved tightly bound, scantily clad but very buxom young ladies in
some grave danger.  These young ladies were supposed to be rescued, and in
the story lines of the comics invariably were.  But, gosh darn it, it seems
to me the way they were depicted might have inspired some other thoughts in
adolescent readers and that inspiration might actually have been intentional
on the part of the artists.  Tell me if I am being too coy here.

Next I thought of /The/ /Catcher/ /in/ /the/ /Rye/.  Holden has a noble
image of himself, aspiring to be the catcher in the rye, grabbing children
in danger of throwing themselves, accidently or on purpose, off a precipice.
On the slightly less imaginary level he wants to protect children from
seeing obscene graffiti.  This and 'phonies' are his major peeves.  But of
course he is the phony.  He lies when it suits and sometimes for no
discernible reason --- prides himself on being a 'terrific liar,'
manipulates everyone around him, and so forth.  He plays Hamlet over the
matter of engaging a prostitute, yet the graffiti offends him to the core.
Clearly it is his own innocence he wants to save, and just as clearly it is
too late.  (I believe a story by Hortense Calisher in the New Yorker
concerning a suicide by jumping from a building was Salinger's jumping off
point so to speak, and it seems to me the antecedents of the Glass family
can also be found in previous issues.)

In the '50s there was still on library shelves a peculiar form of
pornography, which I am not sure has been well documented.  It was what I
call "case studies." These were pulp books, not too be mistaken for
Krafft-Ebing.  These volumes described in loving detail the perverse and
abhorrent sexual activities of psychiatric patients, with a few comments on
the sadness and hopelessness of the case by the recording mental health
professional.  Conveniently each volume only sorted out one kind of
perversion, and some perversions seemed to deserve numerous similar volumes.
But of course the reader would only be interested in these books if he were
devoted improving the mental of the community!  At any rate, here were
mental health professionals --- the authors of the case study books ---
trying to rescue these poor patients from their afflictions, hopeless as the
task might be.

Anyway, I am trying to connect the dots between the various rescuers, the
real person who was the model for the character in my novel, and the present
case of rescuing adolescent males, who tend to lose their shirts often and
who have awful, detailed histories of abuse, through art projects.

There is something to all this, but I don't know that I have the means,
intellectual or material, to bring it all together.