A Woman’s Wit

Posted on February 16, 2025 by Kathy

Upon a friend’s recommendation (thank you, Doreen!), I read Judi Dench’s Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent. Over four years, Dench’s buddy and fellow Shakespearean thespian, Brendan O’Hea, interviewed her about all the Shakespearean roles she has played, numbering close to thirty in all. These performances include many media. She’s appeared at Stratford-upon-Avon, the Old Vic, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and dozens of theaters around the world. On TV, she portrayed Lady Macbeth and Cecily, mother of Richard III, in the BBC series The Hollow Crown. Her Shakespearean film credits include Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Mistress Quickly in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, and she appeared in the Shakespeare-adjacent film Shakespeare in Love.

How charming is Judi Dench? Let me count the ways. Now 90 years old, she’s funny as heck and irreverent. She sometimes breaks up laughing on stage and likes to pull pranks on her cast members. (You can see her prank her Richard III costar Benedict Cumberbatch in this ad.) Her language is salty. Her memory is prodigious. In some interviews, she recites speeches that she learned decades ago, sometimes even speeches of other characters.

Extremely hardworking, she repeatedly cites the importance of “doing your homework,” that is, preparing for a role before the first rehearsal. The book is filled with Dench’s delightful drawings from her scripts, where she doodled impressions and costumes. She can be acerbic about actors and directors who haven’t done their homework, but she’s never gossipy. She speaks fondly and admiringly of, for example, Kenneth Branagh, Vanessa Redgrave, and Daniel Day-Lewis, and directors Trevor Nunn and Peter Hall. She refers frequently and fondly to her fellow actor and husband Michael Williams, who died in 2001.

She provides down-to-earth, relatable analyses of Shakespeare’s characters. About Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, she says,

She has no interest in marriage. She’s down on her knees every night praying it’ll never happen. Who needs a man? . . . (Beatrice advises her young cousin Hero) to think for herself, to make her own decisions, and not to let anybody push her around. . . It shows Beatrice to be an unconventional heroine–non-conformist, modern, very forward-thinking.

Dench made me want to read plays I’m not familiar with, such as Measure for Measure (she played Isabella), The Merry Wives of Windsor (Mistress Quickly), and The Winter’s Tale (Hermione). She hates The Merchant of Venice, calling it “an ugly play” for its obsession with money and its anti-Semitism.

For a memorable taste of Judi Dench, watch this excerpt from the Graham Norton show, where she was promoting this book and recited, spell-bindingly, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29.

Do you have a favorite Judi Dench film or appearance? Favorite (or least favorite) Shakespeare? Comment below.

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Let’s Look at One Another

Posted on February 5, 2025 by Kathy
Photo by Monica Bourgeau on Unsplash

In my previous post, I mentioned having read a number of good books recently, so here are two more.

Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town could be a companion piece to the two volumes about near-death experiences in that post. Read it if you haven’t, or if you haven’t read it since high school, or watch it on YouTube. My friend, Sarah, a theater director, recommends the Paul Newman version (referring to the actor playing the Stage Manager). After rereading it last month, I watched the Hal Holbrook production, partly because I like Robby Benson’s and Sada Thompson’s performances. Or, like Sarah, you could travel to New York to see the well-reviewed current production with an interracial cast starring Jim Parsons.

My book group discussed Our Town because it’s the backdrop for Ann Patchett’s most recent novel Tom Lake, largely set in a Michigan summer stock theater. The novel is also set in a cherry orchard. (Get it? A Cherry Orchard?) And Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love is in there, too. I like a book with a lot of literary references, but you could enjoy the novel without an intimate knowledge of those works.

Patchett wants you to read the play. Her Author’s note reads,

I thank Thornton Wilder, who wrote the play that has been an enduring comfort, guide, and inspiration throughout my life. If this novel has a goal, it is to turn the reader back to Our Town, and to all of Wilder’s work. Therein lies the joy.

Edward Albee called Our Town “the greatest American play ever written.” So you have two pretty powerful recommendations, in addition to mine, of course. Both Patchett and Wilder urge us to look around, see each other, and try to appreciate how strangely miraculous life on earth is, even an ordinary boring life like most of us are living. Near the end of the play, Wilder’s Stage Manager tells us that “everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.” Even skeptics like NDE writers Sebastian Junger and Bruce Greyson suspect this is true. Might as well take some comfort.

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Dreamt of in Your Philosophy?

Posted on February 2, 2025 by Kathy
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

As it happens, I’ve been reading some excellent books and want to share them with you. I’ll start with two on the provocative topic of near-death experiences (NDEs).

Sebastian Junger is probably best known for his 1997 book The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men against the Sea, a gripping account of a tempest off Massachusetts in 1991 and the destruction of a fishing boat. It became a hit movie starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. Junger’s new book, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife, displays the same action-scene virtuosity. The book begins with a harrowing youthful surfing adventure, when Junger nearly drowned, and proceeds to a more recent meeting with mortality, “face to face,” when he almost died in the emergency room after suffering an aneurysm.

Junger is a hard-boiled reporter and staunch atheist. He relies on facts and science. These characteristics make him a trustworthy witness when he’s reporting other-worldly experiences. No woo-woo here. Instead, Junger confronts his own skepticism, questioning everything. One section of the book explores particle physics (much to the dismay of some of my book group members), in order to show that the world is really a very, very weird place, where bewilderingly non-rational stuff goes on routinely. Similarly, despite his efforts, Junger can’t explain some aspects of his NDE, hence maintaining some openness to the possibility of an afterlife.

I loved this book. I moved on to one of Junger’s sources: After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (2021) by Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist. In more workmanlike prose, Greyson shares his decades of surprising research with patients who’ve had NDEs. Sticking to the facts, like Junger, Greyson remains open-minded, questioning all his assumptions about the human body. He closes with a fascinating discussion of recent thought about the distinction between the mind and the brain.

After a painstaking and critical examination of the evidence, this conscientious scientist writes,

The evidence that under extreme conditions we can perceive beyond what our physical senses see and hear, and that we can remember things our physical brains have not processed, comes not just from NDEs but from a variety of research avenues. So it makes sense to me to live our lives as if this is really the way things are–that we are more than our physical bodies, that some part of us may continue after our bodies stop working, and that we may be intimately connected to something greater than ourselves. And that has tremendous implications for how we live our lives, and for what makes our lives meaningful and worthwhile.

If you’re skeptical, I understand. I also suggest you give these two brave skeptics a chance and check out their challenging books.

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There at The New Yorker

Posted on November 14, 2024 by Kathy

A Guardian reviewer once wrote that one could probably get a Masters degree in New Yorker lit, i.e., books about the legendary New Yorker and its dramatis personae. I’ve been dipping into that canon recently, though I have a way to go before earning a degree.

I started a few weeks ago with The World She Edited: Katharine White at The New Yorker, a recent biography by Amy Reading. Like a lot of women, Katharine White is known to many based on her relationships; her husband was novelist and humorist E.B. White, and her son, Roger Angell, was a writer and another legendary New Yorker editor. And, as with a lot of women, her accomplishments merit more recognition than she usually gets. She worked tirelessly as a fiction editor at the magazine from 1925 (starting merely six months after its founding) to 1960, when she retired. She nurtured and edited such writers as Jean Stafford, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Nadine Gordimer, Marianne Moore, William Maxwell, Ogden Nash, and John Cheever. She also pretty much kept the magazine going.

Reading presents a complex and sympathetic portrait. If you’re interested but don’t feel like tackling 500 pages, check out this graceful 1996 portrait by New Yorker writer Nancy Franklin.

I moved on to her son Roger Angell’s 2007 collection of autobiographical essays, delightfully titled Let Me Finish. Known in later years as a peerless baseball writer, Angell took over his mother’s office as an editor at The New Yorker in the 1950s. (Katharine worked from home after she and E.B. White had moved to Maine.) Angell provides witty, affectionate, graceful anecdotes about all the usual New Yorker characters, including Harold Ross and E.B. White, as well as his father, Ernest Angell, Katharine’s first husband. These pieces appeared in the magazine in the early 2000s. Angell died in 2020 at the age of 101.

Lastly, at Roger Angell’s recommendation, I read Gardner Botsford‘s memoir A Life of Privilege, Mostly. I’d never heard of Botsford, who died in 2004 at the age of eighty-seven, and who, it turns out, was one of the stalwart characters in those hallowed offices.

He led a remarkable life, growing up in remarkable wealth, especially after his mother married Raoul Fleischmann, heir to the yeast company and, as it happens, a longtime funder of The New Yorker. After graduating from Yale, Botsford was drafted in 1942 and took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944, which he describes vividly. He was wounded and received combat medals for his service. After the war, he bummed around the world with a buddy, romanced many women, slammed down gallons of alcohol, and tried newspaper reporting after he was fired from The New Yorker the first time around.

He eventually returned to the magazine and spent forty years editing such nonfiction luminaries as A.J. Liebling, Janet Malcolm (who became his wife), and Roger Angell. Handsome, witty, and charming, Botsford produced a worthy, beautifully written memoir.

As a footnote, I’ve read a few other New Yorker books over the years, including James Thurber’s My Years with Ross and Brendan Gill’s Here at the New Yorker. Up until now, they provided my view of the magazine’s inner workings. I learned in The World She Edited that Gill’s catty book almost did Katharine White in, and everyone seems to agree that Thurber’s portrait of editor Harold Ross is an inaccurate caricature. The three writers above give fairer (I think) and more nuanced views.

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Fascism 101

Posted on November 1, 2024 by Kathy
Photo by PiggyBank on Unsplash

The word fascism is newsworthy right now, and its history is fascinating (no relation) and illuminating.

A Roman fascis (plural fasces) was a mere bundle of sticks, often with an ax sticking out of the middle. This mere bundle took on a weighty significance, coming to symbolize a leader’s power to punish his subjects. Birch rods would serve to enforce magisterial commands. In the Roman official hierarchy, a low-level guy, such as a praeter, might be called the six fasces, and a more powerful consul the twelve fasces. A consul could really whup you.

You can see that the fasces symbolized absolute authority of the state. Rome and its representatives did not shy away from flaunting power, the power to flog you into submission. Processions featured officeholders with accompanying lackeys carrying fasces, just to make the point.

An unbidden memory. In my high school, the coaches who used to monitor study halls strode up and down the aisles bearing large wooden paddles. Huh. Don’t know why that suddenly came to mind.

Anyway, Mussolini and other twentieth-century authoritarians found found this symbol cool. They adopted the fasces, reveling in a kind of Make Italy Great Again nostalgia. Fascists such as Mussolini and Hitler maintained absolute power, not governed by the rule of law. A fascist believes in the ultimate power of the state to control its perceived enemies. He/she carries the big sticks and can wield them against the perceived enemy, unrestrained mere laws.

America’s Mercury dime, produced from 1916 to 1945, bears a fascis on one side, softened somewhat by an accompanying olive branch, signifying peace. Our mint dropped the design because of the image’s sketchy associations with world dictators.

I recall the time that my dad carefully explained to me the political meanings of right and left, and the associated connections of fascism with the right wing and communism with the left wing. He gestured in a kind of circle to demonstrate that the far right and the far left wing meet up at some point. Fascism and communism are not the same thing, but communism can become fascistic when the government becomes all powerful.

Advocating for staying somewhere between the extremes, relying on the power of the vote and the authority of the governed, as opposed to the dominance of a single person, will preserve a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal.

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Is She?

Posted on October 17, 2024 by Kathy
Photo by Alexander London on Unsplash

My sisters and I used to laugh when our grandmother would tell us, “She is a cat,” as a reprimand for our using the pronoun she. Whatever was wrong with she? And who was a cat, and why was she a cat? What the heck?

I never heard the expression from anyone else, don’t remember reading it anywhere, and never met anyone who was familiar with it. Until the other day, that is, when I was looking up English expressions using cat (not an interesting story) and discovered, “She is a cat” in an online list.

More precisely, I found this expression: “Who is she? The cat’s mother?” It has an English and Irish origin, which is about right, because our grandmother was an Irish immigrant and must have picked up the phrase from her forebears.

Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary explanation: “said to one (esp. a child) who uses the pronoun of the third person singular impolitely or with inadequate reference.” I guess if we, as kids, referred to our mom or to our grandmother herself as she, it sounded rude. Instead of saying, “She’s picking us up at 3:00,” we were supposed to say, “Our mom is picking us up at 3:00.” She was somehow disrespectful. If you’re talking about a cat, however, or a cat’s mother, it’s okay to use a slighting pronoun.

The first OED citation explains that the phrase’s purpose is “to enjoin perspicuity of speech and precision  in reference.” Which begs the question, why isn’t he unacceptable also? Why does the OED refer to the third personal singular pronoun when the only pronoun in question is the feminine third person singular pronoun? Are you familiar with the phrase?

And, finally, why is it perfectly acceptable to insult cats?

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IVF

Posted on September 18, 2024 by Kathy
Photo by Joel Barwick on Unsplash

In vitro fertilization is usually defined as taking place outside of the body. That is not what it means, however. In vitro means “in glass.” As in, inside a test tube, assuming the test tube isn’t made of plastic.

The Latin noun vitrum, meaning “glass,” has given rise to a number of English words. Vitreous means “glass-like.” A vitrine is a glass cabinet. Vitrify means to turn something into glass. The vitrifier heats a substance until it melts and then cools it quickly, whereupon it becomes glass-like. Clay, undergoing vitrification, becomes ceramic.

Pardon a digression here about the suffix -ify. Its root is the Latin verb facere, which means “to make.” To satisfy is “to make enough.” To verify is “to make true.” To clarify is “to make clear.” Hence, vitrify, “to make glass.” Have fun making your own list of -ify words.

You might be wondering if vitriol, another word prevalent in our news, has something to do with glass. It does, though not what I was expecting. I guessed that the word might relate to the sharpness of broken glass.

Instead, in its earliest meaning, vitriol is an actual glass-like substance. Chemicals such as copper sulfate can be found in the form of small crystals, which resemble broken glass, in the bottom of mines. The -ol suffix is a diminutive: vitreolus means “little glass” in Latin. Sulfuric acid earned the name oil of vitreol, because it served as an agent to create this change.

Our terms vitriol and vitriolic relate to this acidic meaning: caustic and burning, just like sulfuric acid.

Babies, by the way, who are not conceived in glass are formed in vivo, or “inside the living.” This Latin root also gave rise to vivacity, vivid, convivial, and many others. We shall pass over vivisection.

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The Pits

Posted on September 5, 2024 by Kathy
Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

In his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, Tim Walz described waiting to hear the results of his wife’s IVF treatments like this: “The pit in your stomach when the phone would ring, and the absolute agony when we heard the treatments hadn’t worked.”

In a recent book group book, My Side of the River, I read that author Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez also had a pit in her stomach.

But “pit in your stomach” isn’t the expression, or it didn’t used to be. Until a few years ago, we instead felt something in the pits of our stomachs.

Apprehension or disappointment gives you a sick feeling, way down deep in your abdomen. There’s science to this: your body’s nervous system registers strong emotion, which you feel not just in your mind but, in this case, in your abdominal cavity, in the bottom, or pit, of your stomach. Like this: “I felt a flutter of nervousness in the pit of my stomach.”

But the expression has apparently evolved. Apparently folks believe the expression describes feeling something heavy in their stomachs and call that something a pit. The website Quora entertains lots of questions about this, many of them worded something like, “Why do I have a pit in my stomach?” One person asks, “How do I get rid of the pit in my stomach?”

A snarky responder says, “What? Did you swallow a peach?”

We snarky traditionalists can shake our fists or howl at the moon, but there’s probably no going back. Language changes. The horse is out of the barn, to use another old expression. We no longer have feelings in the pit of our stomach. We have pits in our stomachs.

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Come Together

Posted on August 30, 2024 by Kathy

After the 2016 election, my Pollyanna side (perpetually battling my inner Eeyore) posited a hopeful theory. Possibly, I thought to myself, Donald Trump will bring Americans together. Possibly, I thought, his very badness would open Republicans’ eyes, and we would, kumbaya, come together in common purpose to impeach, to un-elect, or to somehow ditch. At least to oppose.

You all know how that turned out. By and large, Republicans closed ranks around DJT.

Recently, though, certain Republicans and former Republicans have nudged my little Pollyanna self awake. Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney, Olivia Troye, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Cassidy Hutchinson, and other GOPers, having turned against Trump, are now joining forces (more or less) to defeat him and elect Kamala Harris.

One of the most interesting of these renegade Republicans to me is Tim Miller, author of Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell (2022). I talked about his book’s au courant slang in my last post.

Almost everyone except for MAGA diehards wonders what happened to the Republican party. How did it become anti-trade, anti-NATO, pro-Putin, and anti-teacher, and rabidly supportive of an adulterer, sexual assaulter, crooked businessman, and Bible and gold-shoe-selling hustler.

Tim Miller offers some answers. His book begins, “These were my people. I should know.” Miller never supported Trump, but before 2016 he was involved in Republican politics up to the eyebrows. He worked for Jon Huntsman, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and others. The first half of his book is a mea culpa for some of the moral compromises and dirty tricks he was involved in. “America never would have gotten into this mess if it weren’t for me and my friends,” he confesses.

Miller considered it a coup, for example, when he got Jeb Bush on Steven Bannon’s radio show in 2016. Now he realizes the coup was all Bannon’s. Bannon contrived to host the mainstreamiest of Republican politicians, thereby lending credibility to his yucky show and his icky self.

In the rest of the book, Miller interviews friends from his past, some of whom have escaped MAGA’s sway and some who haven’t. His friend (probably former friend) Caroline Wren, still a Trumper, is driven by her boiling hatred of liberals. She tells Miller, “I just don’t feel the need to drive around my Prius drinking a coffee Coolatta with a coexist bumper sticker. . . .Me moving from plastic to paper straws is not actually moving the needle [on climate change].” She is tired of being told what to do, of judgmentalism, and of diversity employment requirements and “left-wing sanctimony.”

Miller’s heartfelt reaction illustrates his witty and adroit style, as well as his good sense.

I was genuinely dumbstruck by this. As someone who loves a chocolate shake, I also find forcible paper-straw usage to be an utterly moronic inconvenience of modern urban life. But connecting that to support for Donald Trump? Being upset with Joe Biden about private companies switching to deteriorating straws? This anger didn’t click with me at all. I mean, seriously. Who cares? What even is a coffee Coolatta? I had to google how to spell it! Are we sure Coolattas are an elite lib thing? Apparently it’s what Dunkin’ Donuts calls their frozen coffee. This feels like the Armstrong of stretches.

(Full disclosure. I drive a Prius, frequently with a coffee in hand. But my coffee is often from Starbucks, not Dunkin’ Donuts, surely a more elite lib thing. I always refuse a straw. Caroline Wren would despise me.)

Miller has left the Republican party and now identifies as an independent. He works as Writer at Large and podcast host for The Bulwark–a website, podcast publisher, and newsletter. The Republican-led outfit’s mission is “to put country over party, to know that we’re all in this together, and to build a home for the politically homeless.” More bluntly, their mission is to defeat Donald Trump and elect Democrats not only to the Executive Branch but to legislative and local offices as well. Find them on YouTube. I don’t always agree with them but am very glad they are there.

Kumbaya.

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Political Patois

Posted on August 7, 2024 by Kathy

The eye-opening content and transgressive humor of Tim Miller’s Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell (2022) deserve attention, but they will have to wait for another day. Instead, I want to focus on Miller’s hip lingo and confess my ignorance of the current colloquialisms lacing his prose.

If I’d been reading Why We Did It on a device, I could have clicked my way to comprehending these words and phrases. Instead, with an antique paper product in my hands, I had to jot down the slang or interrupt my reading to grab my phone. Alas, sometimes I just plowed on and thereby forgot some notable usages. I’ll share with you here a few that I noted, and if you already know them, feel free to dance a superior dance.

Humina, humina, humina (or simply humina) often has a hubba-hubba sexual connotation, but it can also imply a strong emotional reaction that cannot be expressed in words. Miller uses it more like Seinfeld’s yada, yada, yada, meaning “et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” Interestingly, it derives from Jackie Gleason’s avoidance of incriminating questions, usually from his wife, Alice, stuttering, “Humina, humina,” instead of answering cogently. Why millennials would have picked up a phrase from “The Honeymooners,” which ended in 1956, escapes me.

“Finkle is Einhorn. Einhorn is Finkle” also derives from popular media. It’s Jim Carrey’s critical line when famous pet detective Ace Ventura figures out who the villain is: his co-investigator Lois Einhorn and perpetrator Ray Finkle are one in the same person! Tim Miller, discussing how some Republicans valorize Mike Pence, demurs: “From my vantage point Pence and the boss [i.e., Donald Trump] were one and the same. Finkle is Einhorn. Einhorn is Finkle.”

In one sentence, Miller provides me with two more puzzlers. He’s writing about Alyssa Farah Griffin, one of the young women who worked in the White House and later became a Never Trumper. Her father, Joe, “the human manifestation of Trump’s political id,” edited a right-wing website called WorldNetDaily. It seems, Miller muses, that Joe should have been working for the White House, not daughter Alyssa. He was, after all, “no more porangi than half the other jabronis walking around the West Wing.”

Maybe you’re way ahead of me, but in case you’re not: the Maori word porangi means “crazy, mad,” and a jabroni is a “foolish or contemptible person.” The latter is an alteration of the Italian giambone, meaning “ham.” There you go: two vivid insults to add to your arsenal.

In another passage, Miller accuses Trump of punishing his staff with boar-on-the-floor treatment. You “Succession” viewers have an advantage here. On that series, the boss humiliates heirs by forcing them to crawl on the floor, oinking, in a competition to find sausages. I didn’t even watch that series but found the scene painful to watch on YouTube. Making Miller’s pop-culture reference bitterly pointed.

If you know any of my selected terms, it’s probably lulz. I’ve seen the term at least three times since i began writing this post several days ago, indicating that it was here all the time, and I just didn’t see it. Lulz answers a question you may never have asked: What’s the plural of lol , that is, “laugh out loud”? (I don’t know why the spelling changes to a “u.”) Miller points out that Trump fires employees on Twitter, such as Reince Priebus, merely for the lulz. Just for the fun of it.

I did not find Tim Miller’s use of these unfamiliar idioms off-putting. I found his style funny, original, and engaging, as is the whole book. (Also depressing.) I’m talking about Why We Did It to everyone and will talk more to you about it in a later post.

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