I also know about the Burmese practice known as "Ordeal by divination," in which two parties are given candles of equal size that are lighted simultaneously; the owner of the candle that lasts longer wins the case. And I know about the medieval practice of "appeal to the corpse," which allowed the dead body to point out the murderer.
So I know some things. But nothing could prepare me for the trial of Phryne. Phryne was a famous prostitute in ancient Greece. Her name means Toad--a sobriquet she picked up because of her sallow complexion. Phryne was phenomenally successful at her job; she made so much money she offered to rebuild the walls of Thebes. But she was also controversial, as prostitutes tend to be.
Phryne was on trial for blasphemy, a capital offense. Things were looking a bit bleak for Phryne, so she employed an interesting defense. In the words of the Britannica, Phryne tore her dress and "displayed her bosom, which so moved the jury that they acquitted her." That's what the EB says. She flashed her tits and she got released. I believe in legal circles this is called the "Greek Whore Gone Wild defense."
Now, I don't need the EB to teach me that your average heterosexual man loves looking at boobs. I've worked at a couple of magazines that based their economic model on this fact. I've received an e-mail from my previous boss expressing outrage that Jodie Foster's nipple had been digitally erased from a photo. So I know.
Still, this is surprising historical evidence. Men really will do anything after looking at a lady's top shelf. A pair of breasts are mesmerizing enough to be a powerful weapon. No doubt, Phryne's were particularly impressive--they were green, for one thing. And earlier in the Britannica, I read that jury duty lasted an entire year in ancient Greece. So the guys were probably desperate for a little variety.
But I wonder if lawyers today could make this work. It could revolutionize the profession. "Yes, my client poisoned her husband and chopped him into chunks the size of croutons and fed him to her Rottweiler. We admit that. But gentlemen of the jury: have you seen her rack?"
pigeon
I know I just talked about passenger pigeons. But I've reached the entry on the nonpassenger kind, the regular old pigeons who are, right now, as always, strutting on the windowsill of my office.
After reading about them, I lay my volume on the glass table and spend a good five minutes observing the three-dimensional version. Their characteristic head bobbing when they walk from one end of the ledge to the other. The skin saddle between the bill and the forehead. Their little orange eyes. The way they dive their bill into their feathers to preen, which I have learned spreads skin oil to the feathers.
They're remarkable. They may be flying rats, as my mom calls them, but they're remarkable flying rats. Plus, they're monogamous for life--the surviving spouse accepts a new mate only slowly--which makes me empathize with them all the more.
As I stare dumbfounded at the three pigeons head-bobbing their way along the ledge, I have that "whoa" feeling, as if I've just done some bong hits, like that freshman in Animal House who said, "You mean, our whole solar system could be one tiny atom in the fingernail of some giant being?" Three hours of heavy reading will do that to me, send my mind into a different state. I find myself being blown away by pigeons.
Earlier, I was concerned that all this reading was bad for my relationship with the world. I wondered if I wasn't like John Locke's blind man, who learned all about the concept of scarlet but remained totally clueless as to its true nature. Maybe. But I've decided it can have the opposite effect too. It can enhance my relationship with the world, make me marvel at it, see it with new eyes.
And those eyes are constantly shifting. When I read about the hydrosphere, I see the world as a vehicle for water--the rain, the evaporation, the rivers, the clouds. Then I'll read about energy conversion, and see the world as a collection of ever-shifting quanta of energy. There are infinite numbers of ways to slice the universe, and I keep seeing cut after cut. Recently, I tried to trace the role of pumpkins through history (the highlight being the Pumpkin Papers, which were documents from alleged spy Alger Hiss that were hidden in pumpkins). Pumpkins might be slicing it too thin. Perhaps gourds would be better.
Pirandello, Luigi
The Italian playwright, creator of Six Characters in Search of an Author. Pirandello said in 1920: "I think that life is a very sad piece of buffoonery; because we have in ourselves, without being able to know why, wherefore or whence, the need to deceive ourselves constantly by creating a reality (one for each and never the same for all), which from time to time is discovered to be vain and illusory.... My art is full of bitter compassion for all those who deceive themselves; but this compassion cannot fail to be followed by the ferocious derision of destiny which condemns man to deception." Good Lord. That's a bleak paragraph. That is just the kind of thinking I'm a sucker for--that life is just a sad piece of buffoonery. But it's not healthy. I've got to fight it, wash it out of my mind with thoughts like Robert Ardrey's on the miracle of man. Is Ardrey's point of view just pitiable self-deception? I hope not.
planetary features
Julie comes into my reading room.
"Honey," she says, "look at this. What do you think is going on?"
She lifts her shirt to reveal a rash that has taken over a good part of her stomach.
"Looks like the Great Red Spot on the surface of Jupiter."
"What?"
"The Great Red Spot. It's this strange big red cloud on Jupiter, like fifteen thousand miles long. Scientists don't know what causes it, but they think it's a storm or maybe a--"
Julie pulls her shirt down and walks out. Not another word. Just walks out of the room and shuts the door a little too hard. Uh-oh. Not good. When she's peeved, Julie argues with you, gives you sass, lets you know exactly what's annoying her.
But when she's furious, she clams up and walks right out of the room. When she's furious, she goes scarily silent and retreats to another place until she calms down.
This is a furious.
I probably should have known this is not the best time for a fun fact. I already pushed Julie to the breaking point this morning. She suggested that maybe we have a picnic in the Central Park--it was such a nice day. I told her no thanks. I could see the park from the window in the reading room.
So that didn't go well. And now this.
I try to go back to reading. I start in on Plateau Indian and platform tennis, but it's not working; I'm too distracted.
Julie doesn't even have to argue with me. I'm arguing with myself, and I'm losing: She doesn't need this now, not with our fertility woes already blackening moods. She doesn't need to hear about an astronomical phenomenon. She needs to hear: "Oh, no. I'm sorry to see that you have a rash. Does it itch? Can I help? Have you eaten anything unusual?" When these facts in my brain push out my ability to empathize, then maybe I've got to reassess. When I'm too busy parading around my knowledge to ask about the health of my wife, that's bad news.
A couple of days ago I was congratulating myself on my appreciation for pigeons. But now I feel like doing some penance. I feel as though I should flagellate myself like a 14th-century Christian (before the practice was condemned by Pope Clement VI). Instead, I go to the bathroom and fetch a tube of Lanacane anti-itch cream.
I crack the door of the bedroom, where Julie has retreated. Her fury has melted to sadness. I hold out my peace offering, a yellow tube of ointment.
"Sorry."
"I really need you to be here for me."
"I know."
Plath, Sylvia
What is it with writers and suicide? I knew about Plath before I read the Ps--and I knew about Hemingway before I read the Hs. But man, what an army of company they have. Writers are drawn to self-destruction like hawk moths to the Madagascar orchid (the insect has a remarkable nine-inch nose that it uses on the orchid's long nectar receptacle). I tried to start a body count every time I read another self-destructive writer, but it got so high I'd need scientific notation.
A French writer I'd never heard of hanged himself from a lamppost. A Peruvian did it in a deserted classroom. A Japanese poet finished himself off with his mistress at a mountain retreat. They throw themselves down stairwells, they leap from bridges. One Hungarian writer weighted his clothes down with stones and jumped in a lake, foreshadowing Virginia Woolf, who will do the same in another few thousand pages.
And that's not to mention the writers who tried to commit suicide and failed. Among them: Joseph Conrad, Maxim Gorky, Guy de Maupassant, Eugene O'Neill. Pretty impressive list, actually. If I plan to continue this writing thing, I better tell Julie to hide my razor blades and remove the shoelaces from my sneakers.
I find the whole phenomenon a bit baffling. As far as jobs go, writers have a pretty sweet deal. You make your own hours, the dress code is remarkably lax. You rarely strain your back, you don't have your phone calls recorded for training purposes, and you don't have to intentionally lose to clients at golf. And the ladies like you.
These writers need to buck up and suck up and keep the nooses off their damn necks. I haven't read about a lot of coal miners committing suicide (okay, there aren't quite as many coal miners who get write-ups in the Britannica, but you get the idea).
Plato
More philosophy. I get to Plato as I sit on an Acela train that's whizzing quietly and efficiently toward Philadelphia. It's Friday, and I'm with Julie--who is, thankfully, rash free--on our way to visit her brother Doug for the weekend.
I read the fable about Plato's cave just as the train emerges from a tunnel. Weird, I think to myself. I'm coming out of a cave just as I read about coming out of a cave. Well, maybe not that weird. These coincidences happen all the time. I read the fatigue entry as I huffed away on the Stairmaster. I read about the Julian calendar while watching a miniseries about Julius Caesar. I read so damn much, these overlappings are bound to happen. If the tunnel hadn't happened, something else might have--some guy might be eating a Greek salad in the next row, or slightly less likely, drinking a glass of hemlock.
In any case, I'm reading Plato and I have to say, I'm not impressed. His theory of forms seems absurd, even infuriating. Plato wrote about the existence of another world, apart from the physical world, a world filled with ideal forms. Somewhere, there's an ideal man, stone, shape, color, beauty, justice. Somewhere, there's the Platonic ideal of a bottle, of a chair.
Seems like a bunch of what they used to call hogwash. Problem is, reading the Britannica is a very un-Platonic experience. Over the last 21,000 pages, I've watched everything change and evolve--men, stones, beauty, everything. How can there be an ideal form of a chair? Which of the dozens of chair styles would you choose to represent this ideal? The 18th-century ottoman? The 19th-century cockfighting chair? And what of beauty? Anyone who says that it's eternal needs to take a look at the stone cutting they show in the Britannica representing Helen of Troy, the great beauty of her day. She looked like a drag queen in need of a nose job. Today, that Helen of Troy wouldn't make it past a local Miss Broccoli pageant, much less Miss Universe. She wouldn't launch a dinghy today.
Yes, there are a few constants among the thousands of changes. Like Planck's constant, a physical law that says that radiation emitted from atoms remains steady. And I'd like to think that "Thou shalt not kill" is a moral constant. But you won't find them in some outlandish otherworld of ideal forms.
Likewise, I hate Plato's theory of knowledge. He resides on the knowledge-is-internal side of the spectrum. Like his teacher Socrates, Plato said that men already have all the knowledge in the world, they just need to have it drawn out of them. This, in my opinion, is more of what they used to call claptrap. I'm on the empiricist side of the knowledge debate, the side that says it all comes from the senses. I don't trust internal knowledge. Of course, there's a little rationalization going on here. I've just spent the last eight months getting knowledge through my senses. If it's true that the most important knowledge is interior, then I'm a moron.
Regardless of whether I'm right or wrong, I have to give myself credit: this is a big improvement over my interior dialogue during the Aristotle entry. Remember that one? The one that went something like: "Hey, he likes hot young girls." "Yeah, that's cool."
plumbing
Allow me to present Sir John Harington, another in the Britannica's continuing series of unsung heroes, and one who got his own two solid paragraphs back in the Hs. I'm stunned I haven't heard of Harington. This guy invented a device that affects my life just as much as Edison's lightbulb or the Wright brothers' airplane, something every American uses several times a day, not counting that drunken Sigma Chi pledge who repeatedly peed on my duvet cover freshman year of college. And yet I'd never seen Harington's name.
At one point, I'd heard Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet. Then I was told that was a myth--which it is--but I never learned the real identity of the man behind the can. Finally, here he is. And what a likable rascal he is.
The first thing to strike me is that Harington is no shlub; he's the godson of Queen Elizabeth I of England and a member of her court. But as befits the father of the toilet, he wasn't exactly the most pristine courtier. In his twenties, Harington distributed among the ladies of the court a "wanton tale" from the 16th-century Italian poet Ariosto. Elizabeth was not amused. She banished her godson, imposing on him a punishment that doesn't qualify as cruel, but it sure is unusual. She ordered him to translate Ariosto's notoriously long epic poem, Orlando Furioso. Beats becoming a prison bitch, I guess.
After doing his homework and returning to court, Harington invented the flush toilet and installed one for Queen Elizabeth in her palace. You'd think he'd get a parade. Not so much. He had the gall to write a playful book about his invention called The Metamorphosis of Ajax (a pun on "a jakes," which was Elizabethan slang for a water closet). As the Britannica says, Harington's book described his toilet "in terms more Rabelaisian than mechanical," and he was again banished from court. Exasperated--at least I would be--Harington went on a military expedition to Ireland, which finally got him knighted. A moderately happy ending for Sir John. I think Harington has my favorite resume in the Britannica--even better than Goethe's: plumber, translator, wit, army officer, royal godson, scoundrel. I don't know how history overlooked him. What does a guy have to do to get some respect? A forgotten military jaunt to Ireland gets him knighted, but revolutionizing the bathroom doesn't? And don't think Harington gets respect whenever we call the bathroom a "john." That name came about independently. We really should be calling it the Harington.
Poe, Edgar Allan
He married his cousin when she was thirteen. Sort of the Jerry Lee Lewis of his day but with more interest in Gothic imagery.
pop quiz
We're back from Philly, and my mom has sent Julie and me an e-mail. For years, my mom refused to get e-mail, saying she thought it was a waste of time, but now that she's gotten it, she's become a frighteningly enthusiastic forwarder of lawyer jokes, Jewish jokes, wacky haiku, and other things with smiley emoticons at the end of them. This e-mail is a collection of trivia called "Think you know everything? Think again." So admittedly, it's pretty relevant.
After the Great Red Spot debacle, I've been very good recently about refraining from inserting unwanted facts into conversations with Julie. But this time I have license. Julie wants to quiz me. As I lie on the couch, my Britannica resting on my chest, she reads off her Macintosh screen.
"All right. A dime has how many ridges around the edge?"
"Two hundred and forty-four," I say.
"No. A hundred and eighteen."
"What did Al Capone's business card say he did?"
"Phrenologist."
"No, used furniture dealer."
"Who invented the words 'assassination' and 'bump'?"
"Well, Assassins were an Islamic sect. They were named for the hashish they smoked to get into a frenzied state before acts of war."
"No. Shakespeare. What is the longest one-syllable word in the English language?"
"Makalakamakai," I say. No doubt Alexander Woolcott would have had the exact same answer had this question been asked at the Algonquin--and had "makalakamakai" been a one-syllable word.
"No, 'screeched.' Which winter was so cold that Niagara Falls froze over?"
"Nineteen thirty-two," I say confidently.
"Yes," says Julie. She looks at me. She seems genuinely impressed, even amazed.
"How did you know that?"
Frankly, I guessed. Pure plucked-from-thin-air speculation. But there is no way I am going to tell Julie that. I am going to take full credit for this one.
"I just know a lot," I say. "I know so much sometimes I don't even know how much I know."
Powhatan
Powhatan was an Indian tribal leader and the father of Pocahontas. I went to Camp Powhatan in Maine for three summers--and until very recently received the Pow-Wow Newsletter, keeping me apprised of such vital information as the construction of a new outhouse facility near Bunk 14--and yet somehow I was able to remain ignorant of the identity of Powhatan himself. This is a little embarrassing. I probably should have paid attention to my history textbook or at least gone to see Disney's Pocahontas. That might have helped.
Powhatan, says the Britannica, was "a bright and energetic ruler, but he was also noted as being cruel." This is appropriate, because we campers were both energetic and cruel, as well. But mostly cruel. We were a real bunch of prepubescent schmucks. I'm thinking in particular of our treatment of Rob Blonkin, a frizzy-haired twelve-year-old from upstate New York who suffered from numerous twitches, most notably one involving excessive puckering, which immediately qualified him as our scapegoat (the original scapegoat, of course, was burdened with sins and thrown over a Jerusalem cliff).
We developed several methods of mental torture. In one, we'd go up to Rob and say, very quickly, "Hi, Rob. How you doing, Rob? Bye, Rob"--then walk away. This would leave him sputtering in frustration, still formulating his response of "I'm fine." In another method--our most sophisticated and evil--we'd sing "All Around the Mulberry Bush" in a particularly menacing manner, which, without fail, caused Rob to burst into tears. No one knew why. It was a Pavlovian thing, I guess; we'd start by growling, "All around," and by the time we got to "Pop goes the weasel," Rob's cheeks were wet.
I'm not proud of this behavior. Those summers were my lowest moments as a moral being. (During the school year, I was more likely to be the one sprouting tears from bullies who were making fun of my acne, of which there are fifty different types, by the way.) I don't have an excuse. Maybe I was so focused on being the smartest boy in the world. Looking back, maybe I should have tried to be the most moral boy in the world. Maybe I should have said, "Hey, instead of making Blonkin cry, let's have a bake sale and donate the money to farmers in developing countries."
One thing is for sure: if Julie and I ever have a boy, I'm not sending him to an all-male camp. Exclusively male environments lead to trouble. The EB talks about the increased incidence of aggressive behavior in small groups of isolated men, such as polar explorers and prisoners. No doubt about that. Polar explorers, prisoners, and predominantly Jewish summer camps in Maine and Vermont. But I digress. Back to the books.
precedent
I've never met someone else who read the Encyclopaedia Britannica from A to Z. There've been a couple of people in the same ballpark, reference-book-wise. My mother-in-law, Barbara, for instance, has read almost the entire Manhattan phone book. She loves it. Thinks it should be on Oprah's book club. She tells me she started to read it when she was a kid visiting her grandparents. They were just over from the old country, spoke no English, and spent their days eating chicken fat and weeping. "So what do kids do when adults are crying?" says Barbara. "They read the phone book, of course." She says this emphatically, as if it's a perfectly logical syllogism. Who am I to question it? So ever since childhood, Barbara has devoured a few letters whenever she has some free time. "I learn some very interesting things," she says. I once asked her what exactly she's learned. "Well, I learned that a man I know who works with Spike Lee lives in the building next to yours." That kind of thing.
And every couple of weeks or so, I run into someone who confesses to being an encyclopedia dabbler. One man told me how his mom stashed the Britannica in the kids' bathroom growing up. She was hoping to fill her children's minds while they voided other parts of their bodies. Problem was, this guy would remain seated on the toilet reading about Faulkner and flamingos and flounders for hours, while his siblings banged on the door outside and suffered bladder distress.
But these are amateurs. I've never met anyone who's completed the alphabetical marathon that is the great EB. (Incidentally, the modern marathon gets its distance--26 miles and 385 yards--because the British Olympic committee in 1908 wanted it to go from Windsor Castle to the Royal Box in London Stadium.) I've never met anyone who has attempted to read every word. I know they're out there. Or at least they were in the past. George Bernard Shaw read the complete ninth edition at the British Museum. Physicist Richard Feynman consumed an entire set. C. S. Forester--the author of Horatio Hornblower--also read the EB. And he read it twice, which I suppose makes him twice as smart as I will ever be. It's not clear whether Aldous Huxley--the author of Brave New World--read the entire thing, but he carried half-sized volumes with him on trips, calling it the best travel reading around.
These guys were no slouches, and that made me feel good. After polishing off Z, maybe I'll come up with a revolutionary theorem in astrophysics or at the very least, write a respected nautical novel. But these names were also unsatisfying. I wanted someone living, someone with whom I could swap war stories.
I called the Britannica headquarters and spoke to the publicist Tom Panelas. As you might expect, Tom was the smartest publicist I had ever encountered. In all my years talking to publicists for Paul Reiser and Bruce Willis and the like, I had never heard the adjective "Borgesian." Tom used it. He also knew all about Huxley's Britannica habit--and added that Huxley died on November 22, 1963--the exact same day as C.S. Lewis and John F. Kennedy. Good to know.
Tom told me there had been other faithful readers over the years--that's what we're called, "faithful readers"--but he didn't know if any of them were still alive. (He assured me that there isn't a causal relationship. My head won't explode.) He promised to investigate further.
A couple of days later, Tom called with an update. The only other person currently reading the entire Britannica is a guy in a small town in China. He wrote a couple of fan letters awhile back, but the letters are gone, and the EB folks have no way of contacting him. On the other hand, there's one living American who read the Britannica from A to Z decades ago, when he was a kid. His name is Michael DeBakey. As any fan of surgical breakthroughs knows, DeBakey has since gone on to become a world-famous heart doctor--he implanted the first artificial heart in 1963--and to merit his own four paragraphs in the Britannica.
I phoned up Dr. DeBakey and was surprised when the esteemed ninety-five-year-old physician got on the line. DeBakey has a wonderful Louisiana drawl and a warm way about him. I think I'd feel comfortable having him reroute my aorta, even if he's seen a few dozen birthdays.
"When I was a child," DeBakey says, "my parents allowed us to take one book out of the library every week. I came home one day and said there was a wonderful book at the library--but they wouldn't lend it to me. My parents said, 'What is it?' And I said, 'It's the Encyclopaedia Britannica.' So they bought a set. I was about ten or twelve years old, so it must have been 1919 or so. By the time I went to college, I had finished the whole thing. I had four siblings, and all of us would rush through our lessons so we could get to read the encyclopedia."
I ask him, as a man who has survived the voyage from A to Z, if he has any advice for me.
"You have a job and a family," says Dr. DeBakey. "You only have a limited amount of time. The thing you want to do is skip over the topics you aren't interested in."
I don't want to be rude, so I jot down his wisdom and thank him. But my actual reaction is: What? I can't do that. I'm trying to achieve something here. Trying to finish something consequential--if simultaneously ludicrous--for the first time in my life. I can't run fourteen miles of marathon, and take a cab through the neighborhoods that don't appeal. I've got to be--as Alex Trebek says--curious about things that don't interest me.
procrastination
I'm pissed at myself. I just spent forty-five minutes Googling my ex-girlfriends and ex-crushes. That's just information I don't need. I don't need to know that Noel Dawkins is a consultant on an indie movie called Dead Sexy. Or that Rachel Zabar still holds the record for the 1600-meter dash at the Dalton School. Or that Kathleen Murtha--probably not even the Kathleen Murtha I know--wrote a letter of recommendation for a California roofing service. This is an unhealthy addiction, this Google, a waste of my time and brain space. Those forty-five minutes could have been spent any number of ways: reading the Britannica would have been nice, or hanging out with my wife, or maybe sorting our rubber bands by size and color. As Dr. DeBakey points out, I have a limited amount of time. So that's it: No more inconsequential Googling, I tell myself. Though I know that vow will be unbroken for maybe three days, max.
It's been a constant battle to dam the data flood that comes with being a 21st-century American. I'm trying to keep my mind relatively free from non-Britannica information, on the Sherlock Holmesian theory that there's only so much room in the mental attic. And I have made a little progress. I've cut way down on the New York Post; no more updates on Kirsten Dunst's canoodling behavior for me. I trimmed back on my New York Times consumption--only the important articles about world events; no more whimsical stories about the trend for upscale luaus.
Proust, Marcel
It wasn't a madeleine. In real life, Proust's memories were sparked by a rusk biscuit, which is basically another name for zweiback toast. He changed it when he wrote Remembrance of Things Past. What's wrong with zweiback? I'm just guessing, but I smell a corrupt product placement deal with the madeleine industry.
Public school
I was lucky enough to go to a fancy private school. But my dad--he was a pure public school kid. He took the subway every day from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Bronx Science, a public school for gifted children, mostly middle-class Jewish kids at the time.
I know a good amount about my dad's education after high school. I know about his many, many diplomas. He's told me how engineering school battered his eyesight with its microscopic charts on steam pressure. He's told me about how, during law school, he operated some of the earliest computers--the ones with punch cards and vacuum tubes that sprawled over several basketball courts. He even wrote a paper on how computers could influence the legal field, modestly proposing that computers be the judge, jury, and--since they were already electric--executioner. So I know about his college days.
But the high school era--that's sketchy. So as part of my continuing effort to figure out the origin of my mania for knowledge, I figure it'd be good to get a few more details on my dad's formative years. The next time I see him--it's at a benefit thrown by my grandfather--I corner my dad.
My dad, of course, is reluctant to answer seriously. But I press him. "It's for my encyclopedia project," I tell him, cryptically. Well, he says, there's not really much to tell. His favorite subjects were math and science. He had a ducktail haircut.
And how was he as a student? Top 5 percent? Top 10?
He shakes his head. "Oh no. Top seventy-eighth percentile."
What? Is this a joke?
"No. I was in the seventy-eighth percentile."
"How'd that happen?"
"I had a rule. I only did homework on the subway to and from school. If I didn't finish it on the subway, it never got done."
This was a weird revelation. My dad as a slacker. It's strange to discover your dad's flaws, even if they're small and forty-five years old. Somehow, it makes his twenty-four books seem less intimidating. Even slow starters like my dad can end up accomplishing great things.
Puccini
Julie convinced me to go to the theater. I try to go to the theater about once per Juglar cycle (the eight-year financial cycle of global recession). The genre just doesn't appeal to me. I grew up on movies and TV, so whenever I'm at a Broadway show, I keep waiting for the director to cut to a new scene. Where's the montage? Where's the extreme close-up featuring the actor's huge, unblinking eyes? Instead, I'm looking at the exact same sawed-in-half house for an entire excruciating hour.
But Julie tells me that if I'm trying to become smarter, I should engage in some highbrow cultural activities. And she's right. So I found myself sitting in my red faux velvet seat at the Broadway production of the opera La Boheme, waiting for the show to start.
"So is it what you expected?" says Julie.
"What?"
"The inside of a Broadway theater."
"I have been to a couple of shows before."
"Now, remember, there won't be any previews. It's just going to start right in."
"Okay, okay. Very good."
"And no yelling at the screen," she said. "Because these are live actors, and they can hear you."
Mercifully, the lights go down and the show begins. It's not a bad show. The plot line is okay--a love story with a little consumption thrown in. But now, a couple of weeks later, as I read about La Boheme's composer, Giacomo Puccini, I've become less impressed. The problem is, Puccini's life contained more high drama and surprising twists than his operas. Why didn't Puccini just write some librettos out of his diary? Here's what he could have put to music:
In the 1880s, says the Britannica, Puccini caused a scandal when he fled from his Italian hometown of Lucca with a married woman named Elvira. His affair with Elvira--whom he eventually married--was juicy, but it was only Act I. In 1908, "Elvira unexpectedly became jealous of Doria Manfredi, a young servant from the village who had been employed for several years by the Puccinis. She drove Doria from the house, threatening to kill her. Subsequently, the servant girl poisoned herself, and her parents had the body examined by a physician, who declared her a virgin. The Manfredis brought charges against Elvira for persecution and calumny, creating one of the most famous scandals of the day." Elvira, says the EB, was found guilty, but Puccini paid off Doria's parents to keep Elvira out of prison. After that, Puccini's marriage was "in name only."
Murder threats, poison, adultery, trial, young servant girls--what more do you want? That's one lesson the Britannica drives home every day: truth is better than fiction.
punctuation
The Greek interrogation mark became the English semicolon. Bizarre, no;
Pythagoras
Here I encountered one of the quirkiest men in the encyclopedia. He seemed so harmless--the inventor of the perfectly rational geometric theorem that bears his name. But not counting his admirable work with triangles, Pythagoras was a complete and total wacko. He founded a religious brotherhood in ancient Greece--and by religious brotherhood, I mean a fringe cult. According to the encyclopedia, members of the brotherhood were told to "refrain from speaking about the holy, wear white clothes, observe sexual purity, not touch beans, and so forth."
That's what it said: do not touch beans. The Britannica offered no explanation for this edict, which it listed as if it was just another run-of-the-mill commandment, along the lines of "Do not kill your parents." It didn't say whether that meant all beans, or just certain beans like kidney or pinto. Just those four words. Sometimes I'm inspired to venture into non-Britannica sources to clarify a point--but in the case of no-bean-touching, I decided to accept it and move on.
Legumes aside, Pythagoras also had a complex set of beliefs about the spiritual qualities of mathematics and the holy attributes of certain numbers. The brotherhood was way into math. Fanatically so. The brothers allegedly drowned one of their members because he pointed out the existence of irrational numbers, which didn't jibe with the Pythagorean worldview.
All this was interesting enough, but it wasn't the most notable lesson I took away from the Pythagoras sections (he is featured in his own write-up but also gets some ink in the philosophy entry). The most notable lesson came when I was reading about the Pythagoreans' love of something called a gnomon. This square was constructed out of dots or pebbles, and was meant to represent certain numbers. The number 16, for instance, looked like this:
A perfect square. Using the gnomon, the Pythagoreans figured out the square root. The square root of 16? That would be the four dots at the bottom of the square. In other words, the square root is actually a square root. The word "square" in the phrase is not just some coincidence.
This was a revelation to me. Did everyone know this? Is this so startlingly obvious that I should I be ashamed I had never made the connection? Maybe. But I'm happy, at least, that I understand it now.
I've come to realize that dozens of words and phrases have been detached from their origins, and the Britannica is helping me put them back together. "Cupboard" is a place to board cups. "Holiday" is a holy day. "Fiberglass" is a fiber made from glass. "Marshmallow" was originally made with the marshmallow root. I keep these facts in a computer file that I've labeled, wittily enough, "Duh."
Pythagoras was a loon and bean hater, but I'm glad I know about him and his perfectly sensible square roots.
Q
qa
This word--a Babylonian liquid measurement--could be the best Scrabble word I've encountered in my life. So already the Qs are shaping up to be helpful. I'm very much looking forward to this Q chapter, which clocks in at a gloriously short thirty-nine pages. A little grapefruit sorbet between the rich courses of P and R. A few pages of Arab leaders followed by quail and quicksand, and boom, you're done. A breeze.
I will read every word of Q. I make that pledge because, well, I've been bad. In the last handful of letters--namely M, N, O, and P--I did some felony-level skimming. Not a huge amount, but enough to make me feel guilty. The Macropaedia entries on optimization, plate tectonics, plants, and Portuguese literature--those took the heaviest hits. Earlier in the alphabet, I'd breezed through some paragraphs, going too fast for full comprehension--but now I've progressed to another, more disturbing level of skimming. With this method, I unfocus my eyes and try to take in the whole page at once. I rationalize to myself that since I see every word on the page, even if I don't process every word, I am still--by some definitions--reading every word. I know. Very Clintonian. I feel like going on TV and making an apologetic speech to the American public.
So I'm here to reform myself in the Qs.
Quaker
Originally, the word "Quaker" was an insult. It was coined to make fun of the members of the Society of Friends for trembling at the word of God. As George Fox, founder of the society in England, wrote in 1650, "Justice Bennet of Derby first called us quakers because we bid them tremble." Despite early derisive use, the Friends adopted the term themselves. Now, of course, it carries no negative connotation.
I love these stories--the ones where an underdog group co-opts an insult and makes it their own. It's got a great mischievous Bugs Bunny feel to it. I loved when the gay movement stole the word "queer" and took all its power away from the seething homophobes. And the Britannica is packed with other examples: A journalist came up with the term "Impressionism" as a jeer, but Monet and his pals stole it as their own. A group of Oxford students in the 18th century were derisively called "Methodists" because of their methodical habits of study and devotion. Muckraking was originally an insult derived from John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, which referred to the Man with the Muckrake "who could look no way but downward," always searching for worldly gain in the cow dung, never bothering to look to heaven. The early crusading journalists stole it and made it their own. Me, I'm still trying to figure out how to coopt my eighth-grade nickname, Douchebag.
quarantine
Ships in the Middle Ages were isolated for thirty days; the period of time was later increased to forty days, to equal the amount time that Jesus was in the wilderness. Not exactly the product of rigorous logical thinking. I wonder how many total days were wasted because they decided the ship-Jesus thing was a handy metaphor.
quill pen
It's Sunday, and I decide to take a tour of the museum at the New-York Historical Society. Not only is it about fourteen steps from my apartment, but they have a great permanent exhibition of antique furniture, Revolutionary War costumes, and paintings of old New Yorkers signing historic documents (the best quill pens, by the way, were made from the second or third outer feather from the left wing of a crow).
Our guide is a prim lady named Nancy with straw-colored hair, a tiny pocketbook, and a bad case of hay fever. You can tell she used to be a teacher--her tone is a mixture of kindness and condescension, with a little I'll-send-you-to-the-vice-principal sternness thrown in. I'm joined by about a dozen fellow tour takers, most of them pushing sixty.
Our first stop is a series of Audubon paintings of North American birds. The Historical Society has the largest collection of Audubons in America, explains Nancy, having snapped them up from his estate soon after his death. I know I should probably keep my trap shut and nod politely, but I feel compelled to speak up. I've got some Audubon information, and that information wants to be free.
"You know," I say, "Audubon was quite the bastard." Nancy seems startled. "What I mean is, Audubon was a literal bastard. Illegitimate."
"Oh yes," she says, relieved. "Yes, he was illegitimate." Nancy acts as if she knew about Audubon's birth heritage, but I'm not convinced. I continue: "Also Jean Genet and Alexandre Dumas were bastards. Lots of bastards running around throughout history."
I chuckle, and look around for approval from the crowd. I don't get it. The other tour takers are regarding me warily, as if I might decide to take off my pants or lick the glass display cases. I have miscalculated. I was working blue before I had gained their trust.
Nancy leads us to a painting of colonial businessmen in their wigs and three-corner hats.
"Does anyone know when the first stock exchange in New York was?" she asks.
I don't know, but I think I'll offer up a related fact: "The first stock exchange was under a tree," I say.
"Yes, that's true," says Nancy.
I'm feeling semitriumphant--the head of the class--when I hear a deep voice. It belongs to a fellow tour taker, a man in a gray sweater who's even taller and skinnier than I am.
"A buttonwood tree," he says.
Who the hell is this guy? I don't like him at all. First off, he raises his right index finger when he talks, like he's hailing an imaginary cab. What kind of person does that? And second, that seems just crass, this naming the variety of tree just to top me. And third, what in God's name is buttonwood?
"Yes, it was a buttonwood tree," she says. "But then it moved to a coffeehouse, the Starbucks of the day." And it was 1792, by the way.
Nancy--in between sneezes--leads to a painting of Peter Stuyvesant, the peg-legged Dutchman who was an early governor of New York.
"Anyone know where Suriname is?"
Suriname. Damn--I should know. Though I'm not up to the Ss, so I sort of have an excuse. Uh-oh. Manute Bol in the gray sweater is raising his index finger again. "It's in South America, near Brazil."
He is correct. A small country on the northern coast of South America, formerly known as Dutch Guiana.
"Very good," says Nancy. She proceeds to tell us what is, admittedly, a great fact. In 1667, the Dutch engaged in perhaps the worst deal in real estate history: they traded Manhattan to the British in exchange for Suriname. It seemed like a good idea back at the time, since Suriname had lots of sugar plantations. But unfortunately for them, Suriname didn't become the commercial center of the Western Hemisphere. The Suriname Times didn't become the newspaper of record for the free world.
I'm feeling threatened. I need to redeem myself. We get to a painting of Peter Minuit, who bought Manhattan for that famous sum of $24. Here I see my chance. I raise my finger--a deft satire of Mr. Buttonwood Tree over there--and say: "Actually, the Indians got paid a lot more than twenty-four dollars. More like $120."
Which is true. The Britannica said that Minuit bought Manhattan for sixty gilders, which equaled about a pound and a half of silver. For some reason, I had decided to click on Google and see what a pound and a half of silver would sell for today. The total: One hundred twenty bucks. So the Indians were ripped off slightly less badly than most people think, and I had successfully wasted five minutes of my life.
Nancy refuses to be rattled. "Yes, some people say that it was more in the range of a hundred dollars." I hear at least one "Isn't that interesting?" from the crowd. I flash a smug smile at my competition.
A few paintings, a couple of statues, and an antique chair later, Nancy pauses to ask a question. "Now who knows when was the first insanity plea in U.S. history?"
"The Stanford White trial!" My decibel level is alarmingly high--more suited to, say, alerting my fellow colonists about approaching Redcoats--but I'm just so pleased to know the answer. Stanford White, the colorful and lady-loving New York architect, was killed by a jealous husband.
Nancy smiles and shakes her head. "A lot of people think it was the Stanford White trial. But actually, it was a Civil War general named James Sickling."
What a sucker. I have fallen right into Nancy's trap. Perhaps it's punishment for my Peter Minuit hubris. Stanford White is the wrong answer, but it provides her the segue she needs: White designed Madison Square Garden, which had a statue of the Greek goddess Diana on top. White's assassin--a man named Harry Thaw--thought that White modeled the Diana statue on his wife, and went ballistic.
"And the irony," says Nancy, "is that Diana is the goddess of what?"
Diana, Diana...
"She's the goddess of chastity," says my rival.
I spend the rest of the tour silently sulking in the back, beaten. By the end, the bald guy is giving mini lectures on the lampposts of New York, explaining that you can still spot olde-style lampposts on the Upper East Side at Sixty-second Street.
"You know a lot about New York," marvels Nancy. She loves him. She'd like to take him home and make him wear nothing but a stovepipe hat and have him whisper to her about Tammany Hall.
What a bastard, and I'm not talking about the Audubon kind. I'm jealous, I'm discouraged, and most of all, I'm troubled: am I as annoying to the rest of the world as this guy is to me?
quiz show
Still no word from Millionaire. I guess I wasn't good-looking enough for daytime television.
quodilibet
Julie and I are up at our friends John and Jen's house for a Saturday summer barbecue and some quodlibet (free-ranging conversation on any topic that pleases us; Louis IX, for instance, allowed his courtiers to engage in quodlibet after meals). It's not an ordinary Saturday, though. At 1 P.M., the nurse at our fertility clinic was supposed to call Julie's cell phone to let us know if she's pregnant. Right now it's 1:45. No call. I'm flipping out.
I'm trying not to read anything into the thundering silence of Julie's cell phone, but that's an impossible task. Too nervous to socialize with John and Jen, Julie and I have wandered over to a hammock in their yard. They must think we're antisocial schmucks. So be it. As they grill some shish kebab, Julie and I lie silently in the hammock, rocking back and forth, staring at her Nokia.
I trot out some calming-the-nerves material--all the reasons to be thankful, whether or not we have a child. Life expectancy in ancient Rome was twenty-nine years, so we're lucky to be breathing at all.
"That's a good way to look at things," she says.
Maybe it's because we're vulnerable, or maybe it's because my speech didn't involve planetary storm systems, but that information goes over well. No one-dollar fines here. I'm sort of helping, or at least helping to pass the time.
The race does not go to the swift, I tell Julie, nor the battle to strong, nor bread to the wise, nor babies to those who would make really good prents and read Dr. Seuss to them every night, but time and chance happen to them all.
And...the phone is chirping!
"Hello," says Julie.
The nurse apologizes for calling late--the blood-testing machine was broken for thirty-five minutes. Okay. Maybe we could hear about the blood-testing-repair anecdote another time. Maybe now would be a good time to tell us: is Julie finally pregnant?
Julie gives the thumbs-up. Yes! My seed has found purchase. The mitosis has begun. If she were a hamster, she'd be in labor right now. This is a great day. We hug hard, happier than we've been in days, weeks, months, years. We say nothing for several minutes. I have finally been rendered silent.
R
rabbit
Still can't believe Julie's pregnant. Maybe that stuffed rabbit--the symbol of fertility--finally kicked in its magic. I'm delirious. Of course, I've also got a whole universe of new things to worry about: miscarriage, Klinefelter's syndrome (when there's XXY instead of XY chromosomes), cri-du-chat syndrome (congenital heart disease that causes a high-pitched cry like that of a cat). Horrible.
No, I've got to think good thoughts: Julie's pregnant.
raccoon
It washes its food before eating. My new favorite animal.
raspberry
Our friends Paul and Lisa are staying the weekend--they live in Washington these days. Paul tells us over dinner that he just got in an argument with his uncle over the definition of a fruit.
I have to break it to Paul: his uncle was right. A fruit is, botanically speaking, anything with seeds. So yes, tomatoes are fruit. Paul is no shlub, intellectually speaking--he graduated from Yale Law School--but for some reason, he has never heard the widespread classic about tomatoes being a fruit.
But that's baby stuff. I know something that will really freak him out.
"What about this one," I ask Paul. "Is a strawberry a berry?"
Yes...he ventures.
"Nope. A strawberry is not a berry. Neither is a blackberry or a raspberry."
"What are they?"
"They're aggregate fruits. Aggregate fruits." I repeat this as if I am a professor and Paul is taking notes for a quiz. "So what is a berry?" I continue in my postdoctoral tone. "I'll tell you. A banana is a berry. So is an orange. So is a pumpkin."
Paul is, in fact, impressed, if a little confused. So what's the definition of a berry?
"Botanically speaking, a berry requires a single ovary with lots of seeds," I say.
At this point, I am hoping they will stop asking questions, because I have reached the frontier of my knowledge about berries.
"How do you tell if it's a single ovary?" asks Julie.
"Very carefully," I say. Ancient joke, as old as the Fig Tree chert fossil from South Africa (3.1 billion years old, the oldest on record). But I don't know what else to say.
"That's insane," says Paul. "Wouldn't it be easier to just change the definition of 'berry'? I mean, it's gone beyond any usefulness. A pumpkin as a berry? What about eighteen-wheel trucks--are they berries?"
"No, I don't believe so."
"What about tables and chairs? Are they berries?
"No, I believe those are legumes," I say.
The truth can be controversial.
Rasputin
An illiterate peasant, Rasputin rose to become a powerful mystic and adviser to the Russian czar and the czarina. It was his death, though, that struck me most. Rasputin was well hated by the aristocrats in the czar's inner circle, who resented the sway he had over the czarina (she believed Rasputin knew how to treat her son's hemophilia). In 1905, a group of conspirators decided to murder him. And what a murder it was. This was a man who did not go gentle into that good night. First, Rasputin was given poisoned wine and tea cakes. That didn't kill him. So a frantic conspirator shot him. Still Rasputin didn't die--he collapsed, got up again, and ran out into the courtyard. There, another conspirator shot him again. Not dead yet. Finally, the conspirators bound Rasputin and threw him through a hole in the ice into the river, where he finally died by drowning (they hoped).
His was among the more unusual expirings. But just one of dozens, hundreds, thousands I've read about over the months. I've read about blues singer Robert Johnson, who died after drinking strychnine-laced whiskey in a juke joint. And Marie Blanchard, an aviation pioneer who died when her hot air balloon was set ablaze by fireworks. Explorer David Livingstone died of hemorrhoids(!); poet Henry Longfellow's wife's dress caught on fire; the Greek philosopher Peregrinus Proteus threw himself into the flames of the Olympic Games; the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat was stabbed in his bath by a female assassin. Samuel Johnson said, "The frequent contemplation of death is necessary to moderate the passions." Well, be assured: my passions are quite moderate. I know that at any minute I could leave the building for a whole number of reasons. I could keel over from uremic poisoning, like Jean Harlow. Or slightly less likely, but still within the realm of possibility, I could be thrown out of my window by eunuchs and then eaten by dogs, like the Bible's Jezebel. It's memento mori after memento mori.
But then there's the biggest memento mori of them all: when someone in your family dies. We got a call a couple of days ago from Julie's mom that her aunt Marcia had passed away. Today was the funeral.
I didn't know Marcia well--maybe met her three times--but I learned from the speeches at the memorial service that hers was an extraordinary life, with a childhood spent under the floorboards of a chicken coop in Poland, hiding from the Nazis. All the speeches had the same theme: Marcia was a giver. When Marcia was sick in the hospital with cancer that was eating away at her body, a friend called with some troubles; Marcia asked how she could help the friend. Or more precisely whispered it, because she was in such pain she couldn't talk. It reminds me of that Horace Mann quote: "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." Marcia seemed to have won some victories for humanity. Nothing on an epic scale, but small victories, every day.
After the service, we drove out to the cemetery in Long Island, alternately tailing and losing the hearse in traffic. When we got there, we all took a silent turn with the shovel, tossing a couple of heaps of cinnamon-colored dirt onto a pine box at the bottom of the grave. Nothing will make you contemplate death like the soft thud of earth on a coffin. It's such a final sound, that thud. That thud is worth a thousand entries about death.
We drove back to Manhattan to sit shiva. In the car, the dings in my mind continued as always--Bavarian corpse cakes are a food placed on dead bodies to soak up the deceased's goodness--but they were faint and hollow, and I mostly ignored them. When we got to Julie's uncle apartment on the Upper West Side, I busied myself by making two huge urns of coffee. I shoveled scoops of coffee into the filter, the soft thud reminding me of the other soft thud at the grave site. But the coffee project made me feel better. I needed to keep busy. I'm addicted to work, whether it's reading the Britannica or making coffee. And at least this work provided a clear, caffeinated benefit to others.
After a couple of hours, we said good-bye. We had another rite of passage to attend. My sister, the night before, had given birth to a seven-pound baby girl, Isabella, at Cornell Medical Center. It's a nice twofer for my parents, Julie's pregnancy and Beryl's delivery.
When we got to the hospital, Beryl's husband, Willy, was cradling Isabella in his arms while Beryl ate yogurt in the bed, tired but giddy. The birth wasn't easy--Beryl had a cesarean section. But still, Isabella was healthy.
"She looks like an old Chinese man," said Beryl. It's kind of true. She does look like she'd be at home in an opium den or paging through Mao's Little Red Book--but she's an adorable, gorgeous old Chinese man.
It was a weird day--death and birth. And at the end of it, when I got home, I couldn't bring myself to read a single page of the Britannica.
razor
Prehistoric ones were made of clamshells and sharks' teeth. Egyptian razors were made of gold, which probably cost slightly more than my Mach 3, but not much.
Reed, Walter
I recognized Walter Reed from the famous hospital that bears his name. But I didn't know he was the man who solved the yellow fever mystery. During the Spanish-American War, when hundreds of soldiers were dying of yellow fever, Reed went down to Cuba to try to figure out how the disease was spread. Previous suspicions had focused on infected bed-sheets and uniforms. But some scientists--including Reed--now thought insects were the culprits. Reed eventually proved yellow fever was indeed transmitted by mosquitoes, thus saving hundreds, thousands, who knows how many lives. Which is great. He deserves much praise.
But I think at least a couple of smaller hospitals should bear the names James Carroll and Jesse Lazear. These long-forgotten men were the two scientists who worked with Reed and who volunteered to be bitten by infected mosquitoes. Carroll suffered a severe attack and survived; Lazear died. It's one thing to come up with a scientific theory, it's another altogether to get yourself dosed with a fatal disease to help prove it. I can't even imagine what that must have been like for Carroll and Lazear. What went through their minds when they stuck out their arms and let those little fiends feast on their blood? On the one hand, they no doubt wanted the mosquito hypothesis to be true--but on the other hand, if the hypothesis was true, they'd have a fatal disease coursing through their veins. These were great, brave men.
religion
I didn't grow up with an overabundance of religion. I'm officially Jewish, but I'm Jewish in the same way that the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant. Which is to say, not very Jewish at all.
I never saw the inside of a Hebrew school, had no bar mitzvah, and wouldn't know a gefilte fish if it bit me on the finger. Until recently, my family celebrated Christmas instead of Hanukkah--though, to be fair, we did sometimes have a Star of David on top of our Christmas tree.
My family had melted right into that pot. You want to talk assimilation? My family are members of something called the Maidstone Club in East Hampton. This is a club for those who enjoy tennis, golf, speaking with their jaw locked, and debating which of their ancestors stepped onto Plymouth Rock first. This could be the Waspiest organization in America. I can't swear on it, but I'd guess there are at least five unironically named Muffys on the membership roster. My friend John always urged me to wear a pink-and-green plaid yarmulke to the dining hall, maybe one with whales embroidered around the edges. Sadly I never did.
Perhaps my closest brush with true Judaism came via a girlfriend, Rachel Zabar. Not that Rachel was particularly religious. She wasn't. But she was Jewish royalty. Her father owned Zabar's delicatessen, the most famous Jewish deli in the world, the white-hot center of whitefish.
Everyone said the same thing: "Bet you get a lot of free lox. Eh? Eh?" Then they'd elbow me in the ribs, thinking they were making a very original sexual innuendo. Yes, I did get free lox. I also got to attend a Zabar seder, where both of the Zabar brothers--Rachel's father and her uncle--brought matzoh from their respective stores, and you had to choose your allegiance by which matzoh you ate.
In any case, that--and watching Woody Allen movies--is about as religious as I've gotten. As for my belief system, thanks to my relatively God-free upbringing, I'm agnostic. The word "agnostic", by the way, was coined by the great and honorable evolutionary thinker T. H. Huxley, who died in 1895, fittingly, midway through a defense of agnosticism. Agnostics like to point out that there's no empirical evidence for or against God. In fact, it's impossible to even conceive of the evidence that would convince a true agnostic. The Britannica asks readers to imagine thousands of people are watching the night sky, and the stars suddenly rearrange themselves to spell out the word "God." Would that constitute evidence? The Britannica says no. But let me tell you, if that happened, I'd be in a temple strapping on tefillin before you could say "potato kugel."
But as of this writing, the stars haven't spelled out "God", or even something close, like "Thou shalt not kill," or "Never pay retail." So I'm left to ponder these things without definite proof. I'm probably just rationalizing my own beliefs, but the Britannica does seem to offer support for agnosticism. You read about dozens and hundreds of religions, all claiming to be the one true religion. And you get scientific explanations for biblical miracles--the rivers of blood during Moses' time were probably the result of excessive heavy rains mixing with the red soil and red algae of North Africa.
The Britannica, at least, has made me feel less egregiously ignorant about the religion I was born into. It's been an excellent substitute for Hebrew school. Finally, I know what this Purim is. I know who Esther is, and I know that a haftarah is not half a Torah, which I actually thought it was.
Do I consider myself more Jewish after reading all this Judaica? Yes and no. I've found more reasons to be impressed with Judaism than I anticipated. I've also found more things that I really dislike about my religion. In the spirit of Talmudic dialogue, I figured I should talk my learning over with a three-dimensional rabbi.
A friend's rabbi agrees to see me. He has asked me to meet him at that well-known center of Semitic studies, the Au Bon Pain in Greenwich Village. When I arrive, I couldn't be happier with the way he looks. His chin sports a long gray beard, about the size of a cafeteria tray. Very rabbinical. It reminds me of the facial hair I've seen in pictures next to 19th-century people in the Britannica. Perhaps Theodor Herzl? The rabbi is wearing a tweed jacket, big wire-rim glasses, and a yellow tie.
I get a sesame bagel, which I figure is appropriate. The rabbi just has some coffee. We start with some small talk about our mutual friend, but he soon cuts us off. "Well, I could schmooze you all day, but I know your time is short," says the rabbi. "Why don't we get to your questions?"
Straight to business. I like that.
I figure I should ease into our debate--give him a couple of things I like about Judaism before attacking my own millennia-old heritage. I tell him I admire Judaism's love of scholarship. I quote the Britannica, which says that scholarship in Judaism is an "ethical good."
The rabbi nods his head, his beard bobbing up and down right above the table's surface.
"It's more than an ethical good," he says. "It's a tool for survival. The emphasis on telling a story--that's one way to express yourself Jewishly."
I've never heard Judaism used as an adverb, but I liked it.
I next praise Ecclesiastes.
"What do you like about it?" he asks.
I get nervous, as if I am going to fail his test. I babble as Jewishly as I can. I say that I think Ecclesiastes is wise and true: you can't be guaranteed of anything, so you should enjoy the good things that God has provided.
He agrees it is wise--I have passed the test! "We shouldn't be focused on the completing of a task. When you're going from A to Z, if you make it to Z, great. But if you don't, it doesn't mean you're a failure."
"Very appropriate," I say.
He smiles wisely. "Some Orthodox Jews read a page of the Talmud every day. After seven years, they complete their study, and there's a big celebration at Madison Square Garden. You know what they do the next day? They go back to page one."
Dear Lord. I hope I don't go back to a-ak when I finish this.
"Another thing I like about Judaism is that there's very little ascetism," I say. This is something I read way back in the As and it had stuck with me.
When I bring up ascetism, the rabbi embarks on a long verbal detour about Cain and Abel and participating in the community. It is a little off the point I am trying to make. I am trying to say that I think it is cool that Judaism allows you to have sex. But now that seems a bit too sleazy a point to pursue. So I decide to change the topic.
"Okay, now to the things I don't like about Judaism," I say.
"Okay," says the rabbi.
"Well, there's halitza," I say.
"Halitza?"
"Yes, you know, halitza. According to the Bible, if a woman's husband dies, she must marry his brother. Halitza is what the widow must do to get out of the marriage. The widow pulls a sandal off her brother-in-law's foot and spits in his face."
"I know what halitza is. What's your question?"
"My question is, well, don't you think that's crazy? I mean, first requiring a woman to marry her dead husband's brother. That's crazy. And then with the sandal and the spitting?"
"I'm still not sure what you're getting at," says the rabbi.
His tone isn't offended, just confused. I realize my question wasn't the best phrased in the history of Jewish debate. So I try to explain again: halitza is a bizarre and unsavory ritual, one I could never support, and it comes straight from the Bible. Since other Jewish rituals--circumcision, Passover--come from the same source, why should I give them any more validity?
The rabbi nods his head and stays silent for a solid fifteen seconds. Either I've made him think, which would be good, or I've really ticked him off.
"First, halitza is not practiced anymore."
"That's good," I say.
"We don't practice it because it's demeaning to human beings. You have to distinguish between rituals that are demeaning to human beings versus rituals that are life-affirming."
A good point, and a distinction that seems reasonable. And yet, Jews--like those in all religions--still seem to practice many non-life-affirming rituals. In the Orthodox synagogues, for instance, men and women are not allowed to sit together. That, to me, doesn't seem life-affirming.
"Have you ever heard of the two rabbis Shammai and Hillel?" asks the rabbi.
I shake my head.
"These were two famous rabbis, and they disagreed about everything. One said the mezuzah should go horizontal, the other thought it should go vertical. Which is why it's diagonal to this day. Anyway, a man went to Shammai and said, 'Tell me about Judaism while standing on one foot.' Shammai said, 'Get out of here.' So the man went to Hillel and asked the same thing. Hillel stood on one foot and said, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That is the essence of Judaism. All the rest is commentary.' "
I like that story. It's a story told well and Jewishly, a fine conclusion to my Talmudic debate.
My conversation with the rabbi lasted a couple hours--admittedly not quite equivalent to several years at Hebrew school, but longer than I'd ever spent one-on-one with a religious figure. At the end, I'm still agnostic. And yet, there is wisdom in Judaism--so I'll just pick and choose the parts I like and hope I don't go to Jewish hell (known officially as Gehenna). I'll choose to follow the Golden Rule. I'll choose Ecclesiastes. I'll choose to go to seder, but more to be with my family than because I find the ritual meaningful. I'll choose to stay married to Julie, who knows all the Jewish rituals cold, and who will give our kid a proper dose of ethnic identity.
As we leave Au Bon Pain and walk to the subway stop, I throw out my final Semitic fact--that I am a descendant of a noted Jewish scholar. He was an 18th-century genius named Elijah ben Solomon, also known as the Vilna Gaon, the Wise Man of Vilna.
The rabbi seems impressed, almost startled. "That's quite some yichus." I am flattered, once he explains that "yichus" means "lineage." I feel like a very minor star, as if maybe I should autograph a yarmulke. "He was the original know-it-all," says the rabbi. "I hope that he would think you were following in his footsteps." Oy. That's a lot of pressure. No one's calling me the Wise Man of New York City.
I had brushed up on the the Vilna Gaon before my meeting. According to the Britannica, he revolutionized Jewish study by expanding its boundaries. He argued that a complete understanding of Jewish law and literature required a broad education--the study of mathematics, astronomy, geography, botany, zoology, and philosophy. He was also violently opposed to the mystical Hasidic movement, which he thought of as un-scholarly. I ask the rabbi about that. "Yes, that's a battle that rages even today. Some people have a great hunger for what we would call the touchy-feely side of spirituality. The Vilna Gaon didn't like the touchy-feely side. He didn't like those who got in touch with God through dance and music."
For better or worse, I've inherited the Vilna Gaon's worldview. His and my dad's. I don't think I had a choice. I was fated to be the obsessive scholar. I was genetically bound to be the wary-of-emotion, intellect-worshiping reader that I am.
Renoir, Jean
It's the weekend, and I'm feeling sick once again. Got flulike symptoms. I'm moping around the house in my polar-bear-themed pajamas, drinking my Tropicana orange juice and shooting extremely expensive cold medication up my nose. Julie thinks I'm sick because of a lack of sleep. Then again, she thinks every health problem is caused by a lack of sleep. If I twisted my ankle or got pistol-whipped by a gangsta rapper, she'd blame it on my not getting the proper eight and a half hours.
Regardless of the cause, I feel terrible and achy and generally unsettled. But I'm trying not to wallow. Nowadays, I'm trying to think more positively about my frequent illnesses, trying to see the silver lining. There's always a silver lining--that's what the Britannica has taught me. When the volcano Krakatoa erupted in 1883, it caused tremendous, unprecedented devastation. But it also threw so much dust into the atmosphere, it caused the most beautiful red sunsets around the world for the following year.
Well, maybe that's not such a relevant example. But there are plenty of instances--dozens, even--when getting sick was the best thing that could happen to a guy. The great Latin American writer Jorge Luis Borges was a decent if unremarkable writer until 1938. That was the year when he banged his head, suffering a severe wound and blood poisoning that left him near death, devoid of speech and fearing for his sanity. Best thing that ever happened to him. The Britannica says this experience seems to have "freed in him the deepest forces of creation." After that, Borges did his best work. Frida Kahlo began painting while recovering from a horrible bus accident. Henri Matisse took up the brush while recuperating from a bad case of appendicitis. Jean Renoir spent time recovering from his World War I leg wound in moviehouses, where he fell in love with the medium.
The key is to take advantage of the free time your health problem creates, to use it as a chance to explore some unknown creative alleyway. So far, this weekend, the alleyways I've explored have been pretty unimpressive. I doodled a bit in my spiral notebook, tried to think of some Big Ideas and failed, stacked five Cheerios in a column without tipping it over. Maybe this isn't my breakthrough illness, so I go back to reading my Britannica.
reproduction
The bandicoot male has a two-tipped penis, and the female a double-slotted vagina, so they can have a little orgy without sending out invitations.
revelation
Another thing my dad and I have in common: bad cholesterol. Without Lipitor, we'd both have cholesterol approaching Avogrado's number (6.0221367 x 1023). Now I've also started to take aspirin every night. I can't remember when I decided this would be good for my heart--after reading a Newsweek article? after talking to Julie's father, a fellow high cholesterol sufferer? But it seems like the right thing to do. (Aspirin, by the way, was originally made from the bark of the willow tree.)
When we're on the phone, I tell my father about the aspirin habit. He's not opposed, but suggests I should consult Dr. Mackin.
"I'll think about it," I say.
But I won't. And the main reason I won't is that the Britannica has systematically, relentlessly eroded my faith in the authority of doctors. That's what will happen when you read about page after page of bloody and bloody ridiculous medical history. I knew about leeches and bodily humors, but that's just the start. I'm still unsettled by trepanning--the primitive practice of drilling a two-inch hole in the skull to let out the evil spirit. I'm sure during the heyday of trepanning, the chief resident for trepanning at Lascaux Grotto Hospital was very authoritative and assured his patients in a condescending tone not to worry about a thing. We're professionals here, he said, as he smashed their skull with a rock.
Okay, so that's too easy. But medical history in the postscientific age isn't much more heartening. Here's a quote that took me aback: "I believe firmly that more patients have died from the use of [surgical] gloves than have been saved from infection by their use." That's from one of the leading medical experts in the early 20th century weighing in on the surgical glove controversy--a controversy I didn't even know existed. In my encyclopedia, I wrote a little note in ballpoint pen next to that quotation: "Doctors don't know shit."
That was an overreaction, of course. They do know a little shit. I do believe in science and double-blind studies. But I also have much less faith in the infallibility of these self-aggrandizing guys with diplomas on their wall. Plus, I can feel myself getting a little cocky. I've read about medicine, so I know this stuff too, right?
Cocky, that's the word. In the last few weeks I'm not sure where, maybe the late Os--I started to feel my ego expand. I started to feel secure. I realized this when I did a little gedankenexperiment--a thought experiment. I imagined myself at a dinner with such established big brains as Salman Rushdie and Stephen Hawking, and I could see myself holding my own. (The good part is that I will never actually find myself at such a dinner, so there's no way to disprove my thesis.)
The thing is, I don't feel intellectually adrift as I used to. I feel that I have a handle on the map of all knowledge--and even if there are some details missing, I at least have the outlines of the continents and islands. When I go to meetings at Esquire, I've got this bedrock of confidence that wasn't there pre-Britannica. Sure, they may talk about the football game I know nothing about, with names of Jets and Falcons that I couldn't spell. But for every running back I've never heard of, I've got a handful of Portuguese explorers or Parisian archbishops or whatever in my mental pocket. I know they're there if I need them.
Rice, Dan
We all know the cliche--politicians are a bunch of clowns. Well, here we have an actual, bona fide clown/politician. Dan Rice was perhaps the most famous clown of the 19th century. He started his circus career, says the Britannica, when he bought a half interest in a trained pig. He then switched over to a short stint as a strongman before settling on clowning and horse tricks. The 1860s were Rice's glory days, the decade when he toured the country for a then amazing salary of $1,000 a week (not so far from my own, salary, come to think of it), recognized by his trademark white beard. He got so popular, President Zachary Taylor made him an honorary colonel. And here's my favorite part: in 1868, he ran for the Republican nomination for president. He didn't win, which is sad. I would have liked to read history textbooks about the Pie in the Face Incident involving the French ambassador.
riot
You only need three rambunctious people to legally qualify as a riot. That's all. So Julie, our kid, and I could hold our very own riot.
Robert-Houdin, Jean-Eugene
Robert-Houdin was a French conjurer, the founder of modern magic--a man so revered that a Jewish kid in Wisconsin renamed himself Houdini in his honor. My favorite Robert-Houdin fact: in 1856, the French government sent him to Algeria to combat the influence of the mystical dervishes by duplicating their feats. I like the idea of magicians being called into war service. Maybe we should have air-dropped David Blaine into Iraq. A really dangerous part of Iraq. A minefield, perhaps.
Robespierre
Out to lunch with Dad again, one of our semiregular workingman meals at a midtown deli. Dad is already seated when I get to the restaurant, chewing on one of the complimentary pickles they leave in a bowl on the table.
"Be careful of that. Pickles have been linked to stomach cancer," I say. "Pickled foods and salt both increase your chances of gastric cancer." I'm not really concerned about my father's health, which would have been nice. I'm just trying to show off.
"I'll only have half," my dad says.
"Also, Jewish women after menstruating are forbidden to touch pickles."
As soon as I said that one, I wished I could take it back. That is just a rule of life, along with "shower every day" and "wear sunscreen": Do not discuss menstruation with your father.
Luckily, Dad kind of ignores me. Which is better for both of us.
"So I've been reading about your profession," I say.
"Oh."
"Yes, they had a nice section on lawyers in the Britannica. Did you know that Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Lenin, and Robespierre were all lawyers?"
"A lovely group of people," says my dad.
Sometime before our sandwiches arrive, my dad spots a colleague across the dining room--a man I've never met. He asks me to go up to the guy's table and say, "Hi, Barry," to see the reaction.
I feel even more uncomfortable than when I brought up the Jewish menstruation taboo. I just can't do it. Dad looks disappointed.
rock tripe
A monthly story meeting at Esquire. It's five of us in the conference room, with the editor in chief, Granger, at the head of the table, taking occasional notes.
My fellow editor Brendan is pitching a story about living "off the grid," away from civilization.
"Getting your own generator is just the tip of the iceberg," says Brendan.
"Actually, the tip of the iceberg can be pretty large," I offer.
"What?"
"A tip of the iceberg doesn't have to be small. In some iceberg formations, fully half of the iceberg is above water. So it's not a very accurate cliche."
Brendan thanks me with a glare, then finishes his pitch by talking about solar energy. Granger likes it, as evidenced by his scribbling pen.
A few seconds of silence follow, so I figure maybe I'll jump in now.
"I've got a good one," I say.
Granger's listening.
"I think we should do something on an unsung hero of our country," I pause dramatically, then: "Lichen."
"The fungus thing?"
"Part fungus, part algae, and all-American."
The faces of my colleagues indicate that they don't quite follow. So I explain: George Washington's starving troops ate lichen off the rocks at Valley Forge. Lichen saved our country. If it weren't for lichen--or more specifically rock tripe, a type of lichen--we'd all be playing cricket.
Someone says that they actually think we should bolster our coverage of ferns instead. Everyone laughs. Someone else says that nothing can beat Norman Mailer's article on peat moss.
And on it went. Back in the safety of my office, I give lichen some more thought. I honestly don't think it would make a bad article. Everyone likes an unsung hero. Granger's always asking us for ideas that haven't been done before, and I can almost guarantee GQ hasn't scooped us on lichen.
Originally I was thinking big--a two-page spread on lichen, a list of its other uses (perfumes, litmus, food dyes), a lichen recipe, the top ten varieties of lichen, a celebrity lichen angle that I hadn't quite figured out yet. But after the reception at the meeting, I'd settle for a little box. I e-mailed Granger restating my case. Just a little box, I say.
He e-mails me back: "Fine."
After two years at Esquire, I've mastered Granger's e-mail code. "Great" means he loves an idea. "Okay" means he likes it. "Sure" means he couldn't care less. And "fine" means he hates it, but he'll let you do it to shut you up.
A few days later, I have written up a little salute to lichen and squeezed it on the bottom of a page. I've even had the art department call in a lichen photo. Let's just say it's not quite as attractive as Penelope Cruz. It looks not unlike a skin ailment. But it's a proud moment--lichen is getting its due. When the article comes out, lichen will take its place next to Paul Revere and the guy with the fife as a Revolutionary War hero. I love when my knowledge has an impact on the outside world.
rodeo
The inventor of steer wrestling was an African-American cowboy named Bill Pickett. He would tussle a steer to the ground and bite the steer's upper lip in a "bulldog grip." Jesus. Makes rodeos today look like PETA conventions.
Rubens, Peter Paul
This much I knew about Rubens: the adjective "Rubenesque" may sound smart, but it's something to avoid when trying to compliment a date. The Britannica had a little more for me. I learned that Rubens, the 17th-century Flemish painter, was prolific and inventive, his style partly influenced by our old friend Caravaggio. But their similarities end with their work. In his personal life, Rubens is the anti-Caravaggio. As the Britannica puts it: "The father of eight children--this prosperous, energetic, thoroughly balanced man presents the antithesis of the modern notion of struggling artist." Yes! That's comforting. Rubens will be my role model. Now I know: I don't have to yell and scream and throw artichokes at waiters to qualify as an artistic genius. I don't have to kill a man on a tennis court. So forget the tantrums. I just need some talent.
S
Sabbatarians
My God, I'm exhausted. I keep thinking about that scene in Cool Hand Luke in which Paul Newman shoves hard-boiled egg after hard-boiled egg into his mouth. I think I know how he felt after that forty-third egg. Same way I felt after I ingested that twenty-seventh Lithuanian poet.
And now I'm confronted with S. The killer. At 2,089 pages, the single longest letter in the Britannica. It's like Heartbreak Hill in the Boston marathon. I look at the S volumes on my mustard-colored bookshelf. So silent, so thick, so smug. I take a deep breath and I march ahead into the Ss, right into the Sabbatarians--a term sometimes applied to Christians who believe the weekly holy day should be Saturday rather than Sunday. For me, neither Saturday nor Sunday this week will be a day of rest. It will be a day of Ss.
Saint Elias Mountains
The Saint Elias Mountains are a mountain range I already know depressingly well, having seen them up close for far too long. When I was growing up, my parents took my sister and me on a trip every summer. They wanted to show us the world, and they did such a thorough job, I now feel happy to do any additional traveling by watching the Discovery Channel, much to Julie's dismay.
But anyway, when I was a freshman in high school, my parents took us on a trip to Alaska, where we visited Glacier Bay National Park, bordered by the Saint Elias Mountains.
It's a huge park--five thousand square miles--about four thousand times the size of Central Park, though without as many Rollerbladers or drug dealers. And it's spectacular, even for someone like me, who, as Woody Allen says, is at two with nature.
One afternoon, my sister and I rented a kayak (a craft, by the way, that was invented by Greenland's Eskimos and was originally made of sealskin over a whalebone frame). The man who rented it to us looked harmless enough, if overly familiar with the workings of a bong. My sister and I paddled out into the glorious bay--oohing and ahhing at the mountains and the seals that poked their noses out of the water. We saw no one else--no other kayakers, no campers, nothing to indicate humans existed at all. Just wilderness. And then, as planned, half an hour later, we started to paddle back. Problem was, we seemed to have made a wrong turn. The place where there was once a channel of water had now become a beach. (We found out later that the bong-loving kayak rental guy had forgotten to mention that the low tides would drain our channel.)
So Beryl and I just made a right turn and started paddling, figuring we'd find a way back eventually. Not the best philosophy, but our navigation skills weren't honed to a sharp edge, seeing as going from Eighty-first to Seventy-sixth Street doesn't generally require a compass.
We paddled and paddled some more. We passed the minutes singing TV theme songs--Diff'rent Strokes, Brady Bunch. We started on Gilligan's Island, but decided that a song about an ill-fated nautical adventure was too appropriate, so we stopped. We talked about which of our classmates might be most upset by our deaths. I liked to imagine that Rachel Yassky might throw herself on my coffin and have to be dragged off. That was a nice thought.
After an hour or two, we ran out of songs and conversation, so the only sound was the paddles splashing in the water. That, and the occasional howl of an unidentified but no doubt ferociously carnivorous animal.
We didn't want to go on land alone. The hotel owner had told us an unpleasant story that had effectively removed that option. I can't remember the details now, but it involved a grizzly bear, a pack of butterscotch Life Savers, and a detached torso. It got cold. And dark. And it started to rain. We were scared--though not overly so. Maybe it was New York over-confidence, but we weren't panicked.
Our parents, back on land, were making up for our panic deficit. They were terrified. Because it was now night, the park rangers couldn't send out search planes till morning. Worse, the rangers let slip that if Beryl and I kept paddling, we would freeze to death. So my parents had to stay up wondering if they had kids anymore.
At about 1 A.M., Beryl and I heard something over the sound of our chattering teeth. Men laughing. We shouted. They shouted back. We paddled toward their voices. We found out later they were the only campers in hundreds of square miles. They were nice men, up from California to relax and fill their lungs with fresh air. The first question they asked us was, "You got any cigarettes?" Beryl and I got a decent night's sleep--the California men lent us a nice dry tent and assuaged our worry about the bears--and we awoke to the sound of the search-and-rescue seaplane buzzing overhead.
I still remember the look on my dad's face when he stepped off the plane and saw me and my sister. It flooded with relief. I'm not just throwing that phrase around--I could see the relief wash over his face.
That night shook my dad up good. You can joke with him about most things, but not that night. I think it changed him, too. He liked having us nearby before then, but after that, he became obsessed with physical proximity. Nothing pleases him more than having us in the room, watching TV, even if no one's allowed to talk except for those fifteen seconds when we're fast-forwarding through commercials. After that, he wrote me a note so uncharacteristically earnest and emotional, a note all about how proud he was of me, that I can't even think about it without tearing up.
In any case, I bring all this up because I'm starting to get a glimmer of what it felt like for Dad. Julie had cramps the other day, and it freaked me out. I would put that in capitals and italics with a couple exclamation points, but you get the idea. I've been a worrier my whole life. This, however, was a whole new level, a quantitatively different type of distress. Thankfully, Julie turned out to be fine, but I'm starting to understand the man in a Slavic folktale who plucked out his eyeballs for fear he might inadvertently give his children the evil eye.
Salieri, Antonio
Here's the flipside of Thomas Paine. History has given Paine a big fat wet kiss, but poor Salieri has gotten a drive by. What'd he do to deserve his status as the embodiment of mediocrity? Not much. In his day, the Britannica says, he was a respected composer, even a revered one. And far from despising Mozart, he was a Wolfgang friend.
Unfortunately, a man named Rimsky-Korsakov thought it'd be fun to write an opera called Mozart et Salieri (1898)--based on no historical evidence--in which Salieri is eaten up by jealousy and poisons Mozart. Then a few decades later, the play with the same theme. Yeah, artistic license and all that. But what about poor innocent Salieri? Just doesn't seem fair.
Sartre
Here he is, the author of Nausea. The man who practically accused me of pedophilia. I scan the entry for weaknesses and find that Sartre was cross-eyed. First Descartes and his fetish, now this. I've got to ask: what is it with French philosophy and crossed eyes?
Schmeling, Max
I knew about Schmeling--the Aryan boxer, Hitler's champion in the ring, the Great Nazi Hope. A real villain. Or so I thought. After reading Schmeling's life history, I'm not so sure. I'm not going to name my kid Schmeling Jacobs, but I also don't think he's the soulless incarnation of evil. The Britannica does that a lot. You realize that, yes, there are a few black-or-white hats in history, but most are somewhere in the charcoal or slate range.
Schmeling gained fame from his bout with Joe Louis in 1936. Schmeling was clever. Before the fight, he studied slow-motion films of Louis and found a weakness--Louis always dropped his guard after delivering a series of left jabs. Thanks to that information, Schmeling knocked Louis out. By the time of the rematch in 1938, Joe fixed his bad habit and flattened Schmeling--dealing a nice blow to Aryan propaganda.
But here's the odd part: the man touted as the Aryan boxer "openly associated with Jews," had a trainer who was Jewish, and shielded two Jewish boys in his Berlin apartment during Kristallnacht. His refusal to abandon Jewish friends got him in trouble with the Nazi regime. Instead of giving him favored treatment like other celebrities, they assigned Schmeling to the dangerous parachute forces, where he was injured in 1941.
After the war, Schmeling briefly returned to boxing, then opened a Coca-Cola franchise in Germany. Later, he gave financial aid to the widow of his former nemesis, Joe Louis. So there you go: he's not about to be sainted--he did fight for the Nazis--but he also shielded Jews and helped out Joe Louis's widow.
school
I figure it's time for a nostalgic field trip. Since I used to be under the impression that I was the smartest boy in the world, and seeing as I'm trying to recapture my former glory, maybe it'd be illuminating to return to the scene of the crime. Maybe I'll get some insights from a trip to the Dalton School, where I spent thirteen years improving my brain, from kindergarten right on up to graduation.
My guide for this adventure is sixth-grader Abbey Bender. Abbey is the daughter of my old English teacher Steve Bender, the one who suggested I read that snotty Flaubert book. I trust Abbey--she's smart and funny, and when I asked her what I should know before my big day, she told me not to wear a miniskirt. Good advice.
I get to school ten minutes early--a years-old habit. And I find Dalton has changed plenty since the days I spent here trying to make turkey tetrazzini stick to the cafeteria ceiling. Macs have popped up everywhere, the elevators actually work, and all the white Upper East Side boys dress like rap stars. That's what strikes me most. I feel as if I've walked into a school teeming with four-foot-tall Eminems: baggy pants, white head-bands, Allen Iverson T-shirts hanging down to their knees. They're missing some diamond jewelry and Glock semiautomatics, but otherwise, they've got it cold.
My first class is science, with Dr. Fenton, who does not look like a rap star. He looks like a charming British fellow, which he is, with his beard flecked with gray and his tie stuffed in his shirt pocket so it won't flap about and find its way into a Bunsen burner. Dr. Fenton tells us that we're going to do some chemistry today. Chemistry. I can handle that, I think. I try to recall my chemistry facts from the Britannica, but only come up with the story of Fritz Haber, the German chemist who had a scheme to pay for the fatherland's World War I reparations by extracting gold from seawater. There is, in fact, gold in seawater, but not enough to make his scheme successful. I decide to keep this nugget to myself.
Dr. Fenton gets out a coil of magnesium.
"Can you burn magnesium?" asks one of the tiny hip-hop artists.
"It's illegal to burn it," says Dr. Fenton. "It might scar the retina."
"Can you eat it?" asks another kid.
"No, that's not a good idea either."
I like the way these kids think. But seeing as the really fun things have been ruled out, we have to settle for observing Dr. Fenton drop bits of magnesium into a container of hydrochloric acid.
"Now watch what's happening," Dr. Fenton tells us. The acid bubbles and hisses and burps out a smoky vapor. My fellow students and I--who are all wearing fluorescent green safety goggles that would be at home at a San Francisco rave--watch intently, scribbling notes. "Now how do you explain what's happening?"
Uh-oh. I'm hoping Dr. Fenton won't call on me, because I'm really not sure what's happening. Something involving covalent bonds, perhaps? Noble gasses? Electroplating?
"Do you have pH strips?" asks a particularly skinny kid. "Because if the hydrochloric acid..." His voice trails off.
"Please continue," says Dr. Fenton.
"Because if the hydrochloric acid is the stuff being released in the vapor, the solution should be getting less acidic."
Dammit! That 12-year-old bastard is good. Dr. Fenton runs off to get some pH strips, which he dips into the solution. We talk some more, and there's another suggestion that we eat the solution.
It's time for me to assert myself. I raise my hand. I'm genuinely nervous. "What if the magnesium is still in the liquid?" I ask.
"Are you saying the magnesium is in the liquid, or turns into the liquid?" asks Dr. Fenton.
I'm not honestly sure. I dodge the question. "Either one."
Dr. Fenton nods. I'm glad I spoke up, because my hypothesis--vague as it was--turns out to be the right one. Dr. Fenton shows us that the magnesium does dissolve in the liquid, and hydrogen is released. Yes! Plus, at the end of class, to prove that the gas is indeed hydrogen, he creates an explosion. It wasn't a Jerry Bruckheimer-style explosion; it was more of a pop about as loud as a bubble wrap. But a crowd pleaser nonetheless.
After Dr. Fenton dismisses us, I decide to give myself a grade: B. I couldn't have come up with the chemical equation (Mg + 2HCl - MgCl2 + H2), but my instincts were right.
Abbey's next class is English. Good. This is what I happen to do for my salary, this English language, so I should be able to shine. Our teacher, Ms. Cornog, an attractive woman in capri pants, announces that today is a special day. "It's the Grammar Jamboree!"
The class is small one, eight kids including me, and we split into two teams of four for a grammar-themed showdown. I'm on a team with two rowdy rap artists and a shy girl. Ms. Cornog will hold up a sentence written on a piece of oak tag, and if it's your turn, you have to tell her the grammatical term for the underlined word. Ms. Cornog holds up a poster for Sophie: "The cat dragged Frank to safety."
"Noun," says my teammate Sophie. High fives all around.
Ms. Cornog flips the next poster. "The sun shone, yet the day was cold."
"Conjunction!" shouts Jack, before Ms. Cornog can read it out loud. In celebration, Jack does the dirty bird.
And now Ms. Cornog turns to me.
"Yesterday, she saw twenty bears." Uh-oh. That seems tricky. Why couldn't I get the damn cat? I know what a freakin' cat is. Okay, I can do this. Yesterday is a day, which is a noun.
"Noun."
"Sorry," says Ms. Cornog. "It's an adverb."
My team lets out a groan.
"Aren't you a writer?" says Jack.
"Well, you see, there are people called copy editors who work with the grammar. So actually, writers don't need to know grammar too much."
Maybe that wasn't the best thing to say. I look at Ms. Cornog. She looks pissed off, which, by the way, is an adjective.
"You're now on scoreboard duty," says Jack. "You think you can handle that?"
That I can handle, and handle well. But when Ms. Cornog lobs me another grammar question, I incorrectly answer that "with" is a conjunction--it's a preposition, apparently. My teammates slap their foreheads and wonder if I'm maybe better suited to kindergarten.
When the final Grammar Jamboree question rolls around, my team trails 23-25, thanks entirely to me. But now, Ms. Cornog introduces a little spice. We can wager as many points as we want. My teammates want to gamble eighteen. I say no. Let it all ride! We do, and--after parsing a sentence about Chauncy and a slippery surfboard--we win! The other team didn't wager enough. I'm a hero! I may be bad at parts of speech, but I did teach them about gambling. So that's at least something.
I give myself a D.
Time for history class. Our teacher is Ms. Springer, who wears an untucked denim shirt, glasses on the tip of her nose, and calls the kids "sweety pie" and "darling," except when one of the boisterous boys won't pipe down, at which point she says, "Hey, Zach! This is your life passing by."
Today's topic is Rome.
A boy named Alex raises his hand. Ms. Springer calls on him.
"Have you seen Gladiator?" he asks.
"You bring up Gladiator every time we talk about Romans," says Ms. Springer. "Yes, you know I've seen Gladiator."
Alex makes the point that Russell Crowe's character was a farmer at one time, and therefore...and therefore...well, that seems to be the extent of his point. Still, it's hard to argue with.
"Okay, class," says Ms. Springer. "What does arete mean?"
"Quest for excellence!" they shout. Damn. How could I have forgotten that? I knew that at one point.
"The Greeks were interested in arete, and the Romans were interested in dominance." Or as she puts it later, "The Greeks were wonderful. The Romans were savages."
Ms. Springer is wise, I've decided. "You're young," she tells the class. "You are going to live through a lot of war. People are going to say that it's a war to make peace. I want you to think back to your sixth-grade history class. Because they've been saying that since Roman times."
I wonder if my own sixth-grade teacher said anything that I should have remembered all my life. I wonder if--well, I wonder if that girl in the first row could possibly make any more noise. She is hoovering handfuls of Honeymade chocolate graham crackers, and every time her fingers dive in for some more, she crinkles the bag at disturbingly high decibels. Finally, Ms. Springer suggests that "sweetheart" put the bag away till after class. These kids have it good. I don't remember ever being allowed to snack during class, even if I snacked silently.
The kids, like those in my other classes, know a lot, and not just about Russell Crowe's character. They know about Assyrian kings and Virgil's Aeneid and several other things that I should know but don't. Though I did get a round of applause by saying what res publica means. So I give myself a C+.
In conclusion--that's how I ended my elementary school essays, so I figure it fits--I came away with three things from my time travel adventure. First, I got more alarming evidence of the Ebbinghaus curve. From magnesium to arete to conjunctions, I've lost even more information from my school days than I expected. Second, I got a better glimpse into the origins of a young know-it-all. I can't say for sure whether any of those mini Eminems I met think they're the smartest boy in the world, but I recognize their cocksure swagger. It's the swagger of boys who are consistently told how smart they are, who have yet to get drop-kicked by recessions and failed relationships. And third, I realize--way too late, as it turns out--how fun school could have been. As confident as I was of my intellectual abilities, I still spent most of my time worrying. I worried about grades, my appearance, the effects of that nefarious carbon monoxide. I neglected to realize that I was spending five days a week learning amazing things. That was my job. Learning. I guess I should stop looking at the Britannica as a self-imposed homework assignment and just embrace the joy of learning. Relax. Remember, A.J., this is your life passing you by!
Scrabble
The game is available in braille. That's a nice fact. This makes me feel better about humanity for some reason. I can't really explain why.
script
Dammit. Julie watched The West Wing and told me that President Bartlet stole my great July Fourth fact about Jefferson and Adams dying on the same day. Now it's common property.
selection
A regular day at work editing an article on a new BMW and another on a pouting TV star. A regular day until about three in the afternoon. That's when I get the following message on my voice mail: "Hi, this is Matt from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." Sweet mother of God. I call him back and it's what I both hoped and feared. I've been chosen. I've been called to the big leagues. The show will tape on December 16. A few short weeks to prepare. I immediately get a stress stomachache.
Seven Wonders
A real letdown. I don't think even half of the seven qualify as genuine wonders. The pyramids, yes, they are, in fact, wondrous, but some of the others--well, let's take a look. The Colossus at Rhodes did not bestride the harbor. That was a myth. It was pretty big--105 feet--but there was no bestriding going on. It just stood with its legs closed on one side of the harbor. So I'm already disappointed. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were not hanging at all. Just terraced gardens on a bunch of ziggurats. Sort of a fancy roof garden. Again, not impressed. And the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus--it didn't do much. It was just a big rectangular building. I, for one, am not sure I'd call that a wonder. Whoever came up with the Seven Wonders of the World concept--that was a great PR mind.
sharks
Menstruation can increase the likelihood of a shark attack. Another reason to be happy Julie's pregnant.
Shaw, George Bernard
Before I started reading the encyclopedia, my most impressive piece of Shaw knowledge was his quote about marriage: "When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal and exhausting condition until death do them part." I remembered this because, for a couple of years there, every time I attended a family function at my grandparents' house, my grandfather would break out Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and read Shaw's passage out loud, giggling until he shook. Then Grandma tore out the page and the recitations stopped.
Shaw, I learned, was a an odd man. A failed writer in his twenties, he became a pamphleteer, a music critic, an opera buff, a peacenik, a vegetarian, and a socialist, before getting around to completely revolutionizing English drama. He also had an apparently celibate marriage--how the Britannica knows this I can't say--which helps explain his quote about the institution. But my favorite Shavian fact was this one, which I actually learned back in the Cs: the great dramatist got nekkid for a photographer. In 1906, at the request of Alvin Langdon Coburn, the first art photographer, Shaw posed for a nude photo in the stance of Rodin's Thinker. George Bernard Shaw, centerfold.
This is heartening news for the thousands of men and women who have peeled their clothes off for a cameraman. So what if Vanessa Williams exposed some skin? So what if Madonna and Burt Reynolds went buff? The modern world's greatest playwright did too.
I am personally heartened because, sadly, back when times were tough, I too posed naked. It happened in my second year at Esquire. We had asked the actress Mary-Louise Parker to pose nude in our pages--a request we make of many talented young actresses--and she said she'd do it, but only on the condition that the editor of the piece also pose naked. The editor happened to be me.
This was unsettling. The only thing more unsettling was that when my boss heard about the idea, he thought it was absolutely brilliant--and suggested I be photographed with caviar spread over my nipples, the way we shot an Italian actress the year before. So, in order to keep my job, a few days later I found myself at a dim, hangar-sized studio being shot for a "classy" black-and-white photo. There were no Russian fish eggs involved, but I did have to sit in an awkward cross-legged yoga position to cover up what the Irish photographer called my "chopper." He also kept telling me to "sooook in yer goot," which I eventually figured out was a request to conceal my mini beer belly. Sadly, all the cute young female assistants displayed monumental indifference to my naked form, which to them apparently held as much allure as a wicker table.
The really anxiety-producing part was the reactions of friends and family. When I told my mother, she looked at me the way I imagine John Walker Lindh's mom did when he told her he'd chosen a career in the Taliban military. Several people recommended I invest in some bottles of Nair body hair remover. And colleagues told me this was the end of my serious journalistic career, as if I ever had one.
In any case, I wish I had had the Shaw fact in my arsenal back then. That would have made me feel much more comfortable. But since I still occasionally get mocked for taking off my pants for a photo, I finally have an answer at the ready: "Well, it didn't seem to hurt George Bernard Shaw's career." Now all I have to do is write a few brilliant plays.
Sinology
I'm not what you'd call a relaxed father-in-waiting. I'm overprotective, constantly stressed. Julie's much better about dealing with this whole pregnancy thing than I am, and she's got the little added difficulty of hormonal seesaws and a growing human being in her body.
I get nervous if Julie carries anything heavier than, say, a bottle of Liquid Paper. I hate it when she's out pounding the New York pavement or, worse, riding the Stairmaster in our extra bedroom. She swears to keep her heart rate low, but I still hover nervously nearby, checking to see if she starts huffing too heavily. Personally, I wouldn't object if she spent the rest of her pregnancy in bed.
I think I'd be even more neurotic--if that's possible--if not for one reassuring fact. Namely, that the wife of Mao Zedong accompanied him on the Long March while she was pregnant. The Long March--a roundabout trek from east to west China--was a grueling, six-thousand-mile ordeal over eighteen mountain ranges and twenty-four rivers. If Mao's wife and baby survived that, I figure it's probably okay for Julie to walk to the Fairway supermarket eight blocks away.
Mao's wife survived the Long March, but their marriage didn't. A few years later Mao dumped his devoted wife and married an actress. I tell Julie to watch out--I'll probably marry Renee Zellwegger soon.
sleep
I won't be getting a lot of this once the baby comes out--which doesn't trouble me too much. I've always hated sleep. I see it as a waste of time, one-third of my life vanished with nothing to show but a bunch of ever-larger drool stains on my pillows. Julie, on the other hand, loves her shut-eye. She's a champion sleeper, polishing off twelve hours on a weekend night with no effort at all. She'd rather sleep than do pretty much any activity--read, watch TV, listen to her husband discuss the various competitors to the Dewey Decimal System. And when she wakes up after a solid dozen hours, she makes that satisfied postnap smacking sound that I used to think was the exclusive trademark of Yogi the bear after he finished his hibernation.
She'd better savor those twelve hours now. We'll soon be suffering from hyposomnia (little sleep)--which is the preferred term to "insomnia" (no sleep), because, technically, almost everyone gets a little sleep. High-pitched screeches will soon jolt us out of sleep. This, I learn, is actually considered quite dangerous by certain cultures. The Tajal people of Luzon believe that the soul leaves the body during sleep and goes to a special dreamworld, which is why they "severely punish for awakening a sleeping person."
When I tell Julie this, she approves, as I predicted she would. "Now that's a good law," she says. "Those Tajal people have their priorities straight." And as I should have predicted, the next morning, when I clink my cereal bowl a bit too loudly on the counter, Julie shouts from the bedroom, "Don't make me come out there and punish you!"
Julie likes the Tajal people, but I've got to prefer the Kamchatka. The Kamatchka believe that dreams demand fullfillment, sort of a literal "make all your dreams come true" rule. Here's the sentence that got me: "Among some natives of Kamchatka a man need only dream of a girl's favour for her to owe him her sexual favours."
You have to admit, that's a pretty interesting idea. In my case, this would have come in extremely handy in high school. I can imagine any of dozens of conversations like this one:
"Hey Isabel, you busy after school? Well, you might have to cancel that. Because I kind of had a dream about you last night. So why don't you come on over wearing a very tight meter maid's outfit? And maybe bring some pancake batter. And why don't you invite your sister Alison along. Sorry, but I did dream it. See you then!"
Of course, there is a little downside to this fulfill-your-dreams idea, which the Iroquois Indians apparently got to see up close. They had a similar dream philosophy to the Kamatchka, and as the Britannica says, "One Indian was said to have to have dreamed that 10 friends dove into a hole in the ice of a lake and came up through another. When told of the dream, the friends duly enacted their roles in it, but unfortunately, only nine of them succeeded."
So maybe that's not the best idea. Maybe I should focus instead on creative dreaming. The Britannica lists all sorts of people who have used their dreams to help them work. Samuel Coleridge wrote "Kubla Khan" after composing it in his dream (he had fallen asleep while reading about the Mongol conqueror). Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, said that his writing was helped by "little people" in his dreams. A German chemist figured out the structure of benzene by dreaming of a snake with its tail in its mouth.
Excellent. Sleep doesn't have to be a waste of time. I'm going to use those eight hours to finish everything in my in-box. To quote Lorenzo de' Medici, who was berated by a friend for coming to work late: "What I have dreamed in one hour is worth more than what you have done in four."
Over the next few nights, as I'm falling asleep, I promise to do some creative thinking. Namely, I decide to think about how I can turn my encyclopedia facts into a great poem or a new scientific theory. But the only dream I can remember involved Benedict Arnold retiring to a Florida condo, the kind with shuffleboard and bookmobiles. I think my "little people" need to be fired.
snails
They can actually jump quite rapidly, by a violent flexing of their foot. Good for snails--smash that slow-as-snail stereotype to bits.
snorkel
I've got an idea: maybe names of objects should be reassessed every fifty years or so. If they're named after something evil, then they get a new name. The word "snorkel" came from the ventilating tube used by German submarines in World War II. That's pretty evil. And "sandwich"--well, we all know about the earl of Sandwich, but I didn't realize he was such a miscreant. He was a bribe taker, a backstabber, a gambling addict (the eponymous sandwich came from his snack while he was at the gaming table for twenty-four straight hours), an enemy of American independence, and a terrible tactician to boot. We should come up with an American name for it. Maybe after Robert Morris, underappreciated financier of the American Revolution. Give me a ham and cheese Morris.
socioeconomic doctrines and reform movements
My favorite reform movement leader is a Frenchman named Fourier, whom this Britannica entry matter-of-factly describes as "more than a little mad." In Fourier's utopian vision, humans would live in cooperative groups, called "phalanges," where they would "cultivate cabbages in the morning and sing opera in the evening.... Love and passion would bind men together in a noncoercive order."
His anticapitalist plan called for not just social but natural and cosmological transformation: wild animals will turn into anti-lions and anti-tigers, serving mankind, and the ocean will be changed into lemonade. It's a lovely vision and, of course, completely bonkers. In reality, as we all know, the ocean will be changed to tomato juice.
Fourier didn't convert me. I'm still a capitalist. But I will say that reading the Britannica has stirred up quasi-radical political feelings I haven't experienced since those dreaded Marxist days in high school. For the last few years, I've been mostly successful in cocooning myself in the comfortable first world, with its abundance of chain stores and restaurants and catalogues. When most of your reading consists of celebrity autobiographies, you can go for long periods without confronting the horrors of famine. You shouldn't underestimate my ability to come up with blinders. But here, every day, I read about countries where the average annual salary barely breaks double digits, where the life expectancy hovers in the forties, where thousands of children die of dysentery. I can't help but grapple with this stuff again. I can't help but realize the world needs saving. I should be more like my sister Beryl, who spent several years in Peru working in shantytowns, sort of a one-woman Peace Corps. She's got a powerful moral sense, and she don't need no Britannica to awaken it.
Solomon
I knew he was wise. But I didn't know that he was so busy. The biblical king had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines--sort of the Larry King of his day.
sound
That old question--if a tree falls in a forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?--hasn't kept me up at night in a long time. But it's still good to know the unequivocal answer: yes. Yes, it does make a sound, says the Britannica, because a sound is defined as a mechanical vibration traveling through the air or another medium at a frequency to which the human ear is sensitive. So a falling oak makes a pretty serious sound. Done.
Spanish-American War
Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill is a good yarn, as is William Randolph Hearst's warmongering yellow journalism. But my favorite fact about the war is this one:
"Spain declared war on the United States on April 24, followed by a U.S. declaration of war on the 25th, which was made retroactive to April 21."
Now that's a handy trick--retroactive declarations. If my boss ever fires me from Esquire, I figure I'll just say, "Well, that's nice. But I quit, retroactive to last Tuesday. And I'm retroactively telling you to go screw yourself."
America's retroactive declaration is a fine example of the impeccable logic I've noticed throughout the history of warfare. True, men in wartime sometimes act nobly--but more often they act like tantrum-throwing kids. Geopolitics reminds me of fourth grade, except that the titty twisters and swirlies more often result in death.
To prove my point, I've been keeping a list of my favorite absurdist wars, wars worthy of a Joseph Heller novel. There's the Pastry War. This was an epic clash between Mexico and France that began when a French pastry cook living in Mexico City claimed that Mexican army officers had damaged his restaurant. I feel bad for the men who died in this war. There's just not a lot of dignity to losing your life over dessert, even if it's a really good eclair. And then there's the War of Jenkins's Ear. This one--between England and Spain--started because a British sailor named Jenkins claimed his ear was cut off by the Spanish coast guard. He even presented the remains to Parliament. And that's not to mention the Pig War, which occurred between the British and the Americans in 1859 in the San Juan Islands over a marauding British pig in an American potato patch. And finally, the Beer War, which had nothing to do with keggers or the classic tastes-great/less-filling debate, but happened in 15th-century Germany over a beer tax.
speech disorder
Julie's cousin Andrew visited our apartment the other night. Andrew--a lawyer and film professor--is one of the best talkers I know, so his revelation that he was a star of the Columbia debate team made a lot of sense.
"You should take them on, smart guy," Andrew told me.
This is not a bad idea. The debate team--that'd be a nice and rigorous test of my intelligence. If I can beat the vaunted Columbia team, who's to say I can't take down my brother-in-law?
Now I'm not exactly a veteran debater. The only official experience I've had was a particularly disastrous appearance on CNN's Crossfire. The topic was "Are movie prices too high?" (apparently, it was a slow news day over at CNN). I had written an article on box office prices for Entertainment Weekly, so I was chosen to represent the point of view of the consumer. I knew the show was called Crossfire. I'd seen an episode or two, and was aware that it had a debate format. But somehow I thought, since the subject was the movies, this was going to be more along the lines of a fun and friendly chat. Maybe host John Sununu would tell us about his favorite Bond villain or quote lines from The Godfather.
Instead, as soon as the red light appeared on the camera, Sununu began barking at me. The man seemed genuinely upset with me, as if I had just fondled his teenage daughter's breasts or urinated on his BMW. Prices too high, are they? So you don't like capitalism? You want the government to regulate movie prices? What the hell's the matter with you, boy? I felt as if I was one of those shell-shocked shlubs at the McCarthy hearings. So how long have you been subscribing to Pravda, Mr. Jacobs?
The producer in my ear tried to help. He'd say, "Now might be a good time to defend yourself." Or, "Feel free to jump in." Or, "Please, just say something." With me on, it wasn't so much crossfire as receive fire. When I did get around to responding, the main thrust of my argument was that the new movie Lost World--the sequel to Jurassic Park--cost $9 to see, but still kind of sucked. Socrates I wasn't.
When I got to work the next day, my colleagues couldn't even muster a fake "You did great!" Instead, I got: "Are you all right?" "You looked stunned out there." "At least you have your--well, I guess you don't have that...um, okay, see you later."
The Columbia students seemed a lot more polite than John Sununu. When I called them up, dropped Andrew's name, and explained my plan, they seemed to think it was a capital idea. I was told to show up on a Tuesday night at Columbia.
I expected somehow a grand debating coliseum, but the actual debate is held in an institutional-looking room on the fourth floor of the student center. The debate's topic is "The death penalty can be justified." I am given a teammate--it's a two-on-two affair--and we are assigned the pro-death-penalty side.
The first debater is a tall senior named Evan, who steps up to the podium and delivers an excellent seven-minute speech. He enunciates, he projects, he talks about the Rousseauian social contract and cost-benefit analysis, about rehabilitation and individual rights and several other grand philosophical ideas. Damn, he's smooth.
"Hear, hear!" Evan's teammate bangs his hand on the table. This is a clever trick, the "Hear, hear!" Very debaterly. Also, I learn the phrases "point of order" and "on this side of the house," both useful ones. And best of all, if you stand up to make an objection, you must put your hand on top of your head. (This dates back to the British Parliament, where the lords had to make sure their wigs didn't fall off.) Throughout the debate, these college kids constantly pop up with their hands on their skulls to interrupt one another, reminding me of very articulate chimps.
My teammate, Gary--who is a fast-talking, energetic senior--is a particularly good objector. When he rebuts points, he presses two of his fingers on his neck as if he's taking a pulse. I'm not sure whether this is proper debate procedure, but it looks kind of cool. Gary makes some excellent points about how there needs to be another level of punishment besides prison. "Hear, hear!" I say, banging my hand on the table. "Hear, hear! Hear, hear!" I've got that down.
But unfortunately, the rules of debate procedure say that I too must make an argument. When I get to the podium, I grab the sides of it, since that seems to me stern and decisive. I look down at a piece of paper on which I have scribbled some death penalty facts. I begin: "In Mesopotamia, under the Code of Hammurabi, the first legal code, bartenders could be executed for watering down the beer. Watering down the beer was a capital offense."
I pause. An interesting start--but I'm not really sure where to go with it. How about this: "Am I suggesting that we should execute bartenders on the Upper West Side for watering down cosmopolitans? Not necessarily. But I am saying that you can bet that the beers in Mesopotamia were pretty damn strong."
The crowd was very gracious, if a bit skeptical about my innovative logic. There were no "hear, hear's," but at least there were no vegetables hurled in my direction. There were even some polite chuckles.
"Let's turn to ancient Rome. In ancient Rome, the punishment for parricide--the murder of your father--was getting thrown in the river. But you didn't just get thrown in the river alone. You were thrown in the river in a bag that also contained a dog, a rooster, a snake, and a gorilla."
I pause again, partly for dramatic effect, but mostly because I am trying to figure out what conclusion to draw. "What am I saying? Well, I'm not saying that we should throw modern-day criminals in the Hudson with a bunch of animals. But I am saying that Roman fathers felt pretty safe."
I've got more time to fill, so I look down at my scrawlings. "Let's talk beheading," I say. "In ancient times, beheading was seen as a privilege of the upper class. Then came the French invention of the guillotine. This made beheading much more practical. Now everyone from king to peasant could be decapitated. One man proposed a steam-powered guillotine to make beheading even easier. But that never got implemented." Uh-oh. I seem to be wandering off point. I don't help matters when I start in on the topic of benefit of clergy, the 16th-century capital punishment loophole. I pronounce studying Latin a good thing and thank the audience.
I return quickly to my seat. In support of myself, I bang my hand on the table and say "Hear, hear! Hear, hear!"
My opponent Max takes the stand and proceeds to pick apart my points without difficulty. He points out that Iraq is hardly a model of justice, so I shouldn't be citing the Code of Hammurabai in glowing terms. He points out there are plenty of other ways to deter people besides throwing them into a river with a dog and a rooster. Then, he and Evan conclude with a flurry of facts about xenophobia, torture, and zero gain--all from the last chunk of the alphabet. Having fun at the old man's expense. I have to be flattered.
These kids were smart. Smarter than I was in college, and quite possibly smarter than I am now. At least they are better at forming a logical argument. That wasn't so good. I had genuinely gone into this experiment hoping to dazzle them with some syllogisms and QEDs. I had the proper weapons and ammunition, but I didn't know how to aim and fire, so I ended up spraying a bunch of cannonballs into the water. Still, at least I made a loud bang. And it sure was better than my Ishtar of a CNN debate.
spice trade
I promise myself not to take cinnamon Pop-Tarts for granted. Or Big Red gum or Quaker Oats cinnamon-and-spice-flavored oatmeal. As a 21st-century American--an upper-middle-class New Yorker with massive chain stores dotting my neighborhood--I live in a place and time of huge bounty. I live in a consumer culture where everything is available--probably cinnamon-flavored reindeer sausage, if I look hard enough on eBay. I've got to appreciate this, I decide. The encyclopedia makes that clear.
Because four hundred years ago, I'd have had to spend my monthly salary to get a pinch of cinnamon. The spice trade, I learn, was a big morass of deceit and corruption, sort of like the drug trade nowadays. One of its prized substances was cinnamon, which was more valuable than gold. To discourage competitors, spice traders spread tales that cinnamon grew in deep glens infested with poisonous snakes. They also said that the cassia spice grew in shallow lakes guarded by winged animals.
If I put my cinnamon into a mug of hot chocolate, I promise not to take the chocolate for granted either. The conquistador Cortes introduced chocolate to Spain--but Spain kept it secret from the rest of Europe for more than a hundred years. So that's it. No more entitlement. I pledge to appreciate chocolate and cinnamon as I've never appreciated them before.
sporting record
Sixty-six solid pages on the topic of sporting record. There are forty-five sports covered, from archery to yachting--and let me tell you, this is a tough read, an endless stream of names and scores and dates.
You want to know who was the Tiger Woods of badminton in the 1920s? That would be J. F. Devlin of Ireland, a master of the shuttlecock. The winner of baseball's first World Series in 1903? The Boston Pilgrims. Maybe if the Red Sox renamed themselves the Pilgrims, they'd break their little curse. The Canadian Football League, I notice, has a team called the Ottawa Rough Riders as well as a team called the Saskatchewan Roughriders, which could be a record of its own for lack of imagination.
I do like reading the names of champion horses. Like Gay Crusader from 1917. Or Pope from 1809. Or the strangely modern-sounding Skyscraper, which took a British Derby title in 1789. It reminds me of the time, back when I was a know-it-all wiseacre kid, that my grandfather bought a share in a racehorse. I was particularly excited about the prospect of naming the horse. I submitted a long list of potential names to my grandfather--all of which were designed to trip up the announcer and confuse anyone listening to the race on radio. Names like "Three Furlongs" and "Muddy Conditions" and "By a Nose"--that kind of thing--so that the announcer would have to say, "It looks like By a Nose by a nose." Looking back, it's remarkable what a jackass I was. Thankfully, my family overruled me.
sports
More ammunition for those dreaded sports conversations at work: The first basketball game--played with a soccer ball and peach baskets--took place in 1891 in Springfield, Massachusetts. The score was 1-0, thanks to a midcourt basket by William R. Chase. I assume Chase immediately got a multihundred-dollar cream soda endorsement.
Stalin, Joseph
If there's one ironclad rule I've learned about government, it's this: never trust a politician with the nickname "Uncle." You've got Uncle Joe Stalin, who won't be receiving saint status anytime soon. There's Ho Chi Minh, whose nickname was Uncle Ho. And for the trifecta, you've got Paul Kruger, the founder of South Africa's nefarious Afrikaaner nation, also known as Uncle Paul. So if you see an uncle on the ballot, do not be tempted to vote for him. He is not actually your uncle. He will not tell you funny jokes and pull nickels out of your ear. Instead, he may try to have you purged. Just to be safe, stay away from politicians named Papa as well.
Star-Spangled Banner, The
Francis Scott Key's poem was originally called "The Defence of Fort M'Henry." Not quite as catchy. Also, the melody was taken from a British drinking song. Which is odd, since Key wrote it during the War of 1812 against...the British. First rounders, now this. We love to steal our most patriotic things from our former enemies.
Stravinsky, Igor
I actually knew about Stravinsky very early on in my life. I was about twelve. I was taking piano lessons from a Denise, a nice, frizzy-haired, thirty-something bachelorette who would come to our apartment to teach me Fur Elise, Bach's variations, and, to keep me interested, the theme from Star Wars. Despite the minor point that I showed no musical talent whatsover, I somehow decided I needed to take it to the next level. I needed to become a composer.
So one week, I spent hours every afternoon plonking around on the piano in our foyer, scribbling down notes, erasing, scribbling some more. Finally, on Friday, Denise came, and I played my opus for her. It sounded like a combination of a traffic jam on Madison Avenue, a fax machine, and weasels in heat.
"Good for you, A.J," she said. "You're experimenting in atonal compositions."
"Yes, I'm very interested in atonal compositions." Of course, I had no idea what atonal compositions were; in fact, I was trying desperately to write tonal compositions. It's just that my ear was 100 percent tin.
"It reminds me of Stravinsky," she said.
"Ah yes, Stravinsky," I replied, nodding my head. Denise was being exceedingly nice. She didn't want to discourage me, but the only way it could have reminded her of Stravinsky is if Stravinsky had accidentally sat on the keyboard.
That's how I first learned of the Russian master. Then, in college, I expanded my knowledge of Stravinsky by four words: The Rites of Spring. An atonal composer who wrote The Rites of Spring. So that's about where I stood.
From the Britannica, I learned two important things. First, it's The Rite of Spring. Only one rite. So I'd been sounding like a jackass all these years when I made the occasional allusion to Stravinsky (and sadly, I had made an occasional allusion). Second, The Rite of Spring was enough to cause an "opening-night riot" when it debuted at the Theatre des Champs Elysees on May 29, 1913.
Stravinsky's score--with its "scandalous dissonances and rhythmic brutality"--caused an uproar among the chic Paris audience. The commotion was so loud, the ballet dancers couldn't hear the orchestra in the nearby pit. But the dancers kept dancing anyway, urged on by the choreographer, who stood on a chair in the wings, shouting and miming the rhythm.
I love this. I can't believe that less than a century ago, a ballet with some discordant notes could cause an actual riot. (If they heard my composition, by the way, they would have burned the theater down.) Nowadays, audience members at the ballet rarely riot. They are often too busy falling asleep. Or if they are really upset, they leave after the first act to get a nice pasta dinner somewhere. But they don't riot.
It makes me feel nostalgic for when you could shock people with art. It was so easy back then. A couple of notes too close on the scale, a little sex, and presto, outrage! Now, good luck shocking the audience. You go to the movies and watch teenagers having sex with parakeets or whatever, and you just won't be treated to an uproar, a commotion, or even a man standing on a chair. Being a true artist used to be a lot easier, not counting that tuberculosis business.
stuttering
I will not overcorrect my child. That's a promise. "Stuttering tends to appear when a child's parents anxiously overreact to normal pauses and repetition--which may also explain the tendency of the stutterer to be an only child or to have no siblings close in age."
That's some solid parenting advice, which is good, because the creature inside Julie is becoming more and more human.
Yesterday, Julie and I were at Mount Sinai Hospital to get an ultrasound. The nurse paints some molasses-colored liquid on Julie's stomach, then places the end of a microphone-like gadget on top of that. She sticks the gadget in hard, indenting Julie's stomach, and making me nervous. But there it is, there's the baby.
"Can you see an organ?" I ask.
"Oh yes, you can see the heart," she says, pointing to a little pulsating blip. "And that black spot is the liver."
"No, I mean the organ." I want to know whether our kid will be a future reader of Esquire or of Cosmo.
"Oh, I see," says the nurse. "Let me get a better view of that." She clicks a couple of buttons on the big humming ultrasound machine, switching to a new point of view. "Oh yes, there's an organ there. You've got a boy."
The screen shows what appears to be a white blobby peninsula off the mainland. It's not a bad-sized peninsula. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I could swear the nurse was impressed. She made a face that looked to me like "If I were single and thirty-five years younger..."
But in any case, a boy. A boy who will not stutter. Julie and I aren't sure how to react. The Jacobs name will continue, that's one thing. But boys have a tendency to destroy more property than girls, and decorate the opposite wall with more lunches. But let's not quibble here--we have a child. A beautiful child with a thumping heart and a black spot for a liver and an organ that could qualify him as the Milton Berle of fetuses.
Julie gets dressed, and we go to pay the bill. While we're waiting, I look out the window at the collection of softball fields. I guess I'm going to have to relearn how to swing a bat.
"That's a pretty park," I say. "Which park is that?"
"Uh, that's a little park called Central Park."
"Oh."
"Where did you grow up, again?"
Damn. She's got a point. The Britannica hasn't helped with my sense of direction.
Suez Canal
Just over a month till my Millionaire appearance, and I'm handling the pressure well. By which I mean I can't sleep, can't think straight, and eat only when I force food down my gullet. I'm not making nearly as much progress through the alphabet as I should. Instead, I'm spending my nights studying, reviewing, preparing. I feel as if I'm about to take the SATs again--but this time in front of millions of judgmental home viewers.
Several times a day, I panic because I think of a topic that I have only a wobbly grasp on. In my pocket, I have an ever-growing list of these subjects--Plutarch, major bridges, pints versus quarts, Asian capitals, Russian nobles, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Walter Scott, Sir Francis Drake, robber barons, zodiac, Bayeux tapestry, Suez Canal (built in 1869, separates Asia and Africa). It's like a syllabus from the College of Crazy.
Since this project began, I've often felt that I'm been swimming in facts. But now I feel as if I'm immersed in them, drowning in the damn things. I had a weird sensation the other day. I was walking home from work up Central Park West, and I started to see the world as a collection of moving, pulsating, caroming facts. It was like that scene in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves's character visualizes life as a stream of zeroes and ones. Same thing for me, but mine were facts about tires and lights and cement and awnings, all bouncing off one another. I'm losing it.
I envy all those other, regular folks on Millionaire. They haven't just spent the last year of their lives reading the encyclopedia. They haven't declared to their friends and family and coworkers that they know almost everything there is to know. Their potential for humiliation? High. Mine? Stratospheric. (Note to self: study the levels of the atmosphere.)
My confidence veers wildly. In my good moments, I just know I'll be pocketing a seven-figure check. I fantasize about my victory speech. Maybe I'll demand my winnings be given to me in one hundred $10,000 bills, the ones with Chief Justice Salmon Chase on the front. In my darker moments, I'm sure I'm going to muck it up on the hundred-dollar question. What if they ask about nursery rhymes? I don't know my Little Jack Horner's thumb from Little Miss Muffet's tuffet. Or what if they ask about zebras or Zanzibar? I mean, the timing of my Millionaire appearance is good--I'm near the end of my alphabetic journey--but it's not perfect. They could still trip me up with a yak fact.
I'm annoyed at myself for placing so much emphasis on my performance. I know I'm relatively smart, I know I know a lot. Why do I need public proof of this? But I do. So I've been watching Millionaire every day, scrutinizing it--an activity that's not good for my already shaky psyche. If Meredith asks the contestant a question that I know--and I do know most of them--it drives me batty. Why didn't I get that one? My brain contains only a couple of million facts--and that's another one I won't get asked about. But if I don't know the answer--that's even worse. And there are those facts I just don't know--facts that aren't even in my beloved encyclopedia. The official name of the drumroll in taps? A muffled ruffle. That's not in the Britannica. A new flavor of Life Saver? Blackberry. That ain't in there.
When I'm not hogging the TV watching my Millionaires, Julie watches this show on MTV about the life of a blond pop star named Jessica Simpson. Jessica's become Public Imbecile Number One. Julie told me about how, on the very first episode, Jessica asked her husband whether tuna is a chicken or a fish. She can't figure it out. Her surprised husband informs her that tuna is, in fact, a fish. Well, she responds, if it's a fish and not a chicken, why does the container say "Chicken of the Sea"?
At first, I chuckled. Yes, very funny. Jessica's got a brain the size of a midget moth (wingspan three millimeters). But then I started to feel bad for Jessica. Or as bad as you can feel for a repulsively wealthy pop star. We all have those knowledge gaps, right? I once announced that I was never going to eat cheese again because it was made from cow pee. Okay, I was six years old when I said that. And I think it's an honest mistake--confusing milk and urine. But still, those two months of mockery that ensued from my classmates, they leave a scar. More recently, I mixed up former baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth and fat British actor Peter Ustinov, which led to a round of ridicule at work. Ueberroth and Ustinov--the walking encyclopedia has stumbled. Ha!
What if I stumble on national TV? I could become the Jessica Simpson of my peer group. You can ingest facts for seventeen hours a day, every day of your life, and you'll still have gaps. It's just a matter of where the gaps are hidden and whether you can drive a truck through them, or a Segway scooter. That glorious cockiness I felt a couple of weeks back? The feeling that I could hold my own with Stephen Hawking? Gone. Vanished like the dodo bird (of which the only remnants are a head and foot at Oxford, a foot in the British Museum, a head in Copenhagen, and a handful of scattered bones).
T
Taiping Rebellion
This was a Chinese upheaval in the mid-nineteenth century that "took an estimated 20,000,000 lives."
I read that sentence again. And again. It took 20 million lives. Holy shit. I try to process that enormous number. That's four hundred stadiums full of human beings. That's more than ten times the population of Manhattan. The Taiping Rebellion occurred about the same time as our own Civil War, which was horrible and bloody--and took less than seven hundred thousand lives. About 4 percent of the Taiping total. And I've barely even heard of this rebellion.
I feel like an ignorant Westerner. Even with my liberal education, I learned next to nothing about the other side of the world, so that doesn't feel good. But I also have another, stranger reaction. I feel angry at the Britannica. The Britannica just states that 20 million died in its typical deadpan tone. Shouldn't there be three exclamation points after it? Shouldn't it say, "took an infuckingsane 20 million lives"?
There's a disconnect. The Britannica is completely dispassionate, which I've always thought was one of its strengths. But how can you be dispassionate with crazy information like this? How can you try to deal with the horrors of human behavior as if you're talking about tectonic plates? The Britannica's tone lulls you into thinking that the world is rational, but entries like this one just stop you cold.
The details of the story are sad and bizarre. The rebellion started with Hung Hsiu Chuan, a peasant from a small town in southern China. His early life was a disappointment--he took the Confucian civil service exam several times, but failed repeatedly. After the third failure, he suffered a breakdown, and experienced a vision in which he saw an old man with a golden beard, who told him the world was overrun with evil demons and presented him with a sword.
After the fourth failure, Hung found a book that was written by a missionary, basically a Chinese-language Christianity for Dummies. He read the book and decided that the golden-bearded man in his vision was God, and he was the new Jesus Christ. Hung didn't have the best grasp of Christianity--he ignored the kindness and humility of the Christian God and instead focused on his vengefulness--but that didn't stop him from declaring himself Heavenly King.
His message--a mix of primitive socialism, spiritualism, and Puritanism--struck a chord. He demanded an equal distribution of land; the abolition of gambling, prostitution, and opium smoking; and an end to the repressive Manchu rulers.
He started out with hundreds, then thousands of followers. As the rebels passed through the countryside, says the Britannica, whole towns and villages joined them, till their ranks swelled to more than a million. Taiping followers were both men and women, but no sexual relations were permitted. Oh, except for the Taiping leaders, who had huge harems. That's Cult Leader 101--always have a huge harem for yourself.
Hung took Nanking and made the city his capital. He became increasingly erratic, and began killing off his lieutenants--one for demanding that Hung be whipped because he had kicked a concubine, another for just being generally haughty. In 1860, the Taiping troops failed to take Shanghai, which was defended by a Western-trained army. (One of the leaders of the anti-Taiping forces was a fearsome and ruthless man named General Tso, now reduced to a chicken entree.) Then in 1862 Nanking was surrounded. Hung--who had withdrawn to his harem--committed suicide, and Nanking fell in 1864.
It's an amazing tale. I imagine the million stories that have gone untold--what life was like if you were one of Hung's lovers, how the world looked from inside besieged Nanking. But above all, I'm disillusioned with the Britannica. I'm not sure it's equipped to deal with just how crazy people are.
terrorism
More horrible human behavior. Nearly two solid pages on the history of murdering innocent people.
The entry is one of the most disturbing--and oddest--in the encyclopedia. It starts with terrorism in biblical times, then ticks off terrorism through the centuries, ending with four sentences on September 11. It was a disorienting feeling, to read just a few sentences on September 11.
I happen to know from the Britannica publicist that the encyclopedia was at the printer when the World Trade Center towers fell. They had to pull the books off the presses and insert a couple of paragraphs. I'm sure next year's edition will have much more on the attack.
So maybe it's not fair to draw any conclusions based on this edition. Still, seeing the September 11 attack in historical context had a calming effect. It gave me hope that, as my parents' friend said, this too shall pass. I don't mean to trivialize September 11, which was probably the most awful thing I've witnessed in my lifetime. But seeing it among the thousands of other horrible--and great--events gives me hope that we can overcome it.
My reaction was, ironically, the exact opposite of the one I had to the Taiping Rebellion. The dispassionate tone I found so outrageous a few entries ago, I now found soothing. Such is the mental whiplash of reading the Britannica.
Tesla, Nikola
Our pregnancy books say that I should talk to my gestating boy so he'll get used to my voice. Tonight, I decide to read to him about electronics pioneer Nikola Tesla, the main rival of Thomas Edison and the inventor of alternating current. Embryos love electronics pioneers.
I lean toward Julie's stomach--which has just recently started to swell, and now resembles the gut of a man who drinks too many Bud-weisers on the weekends. I begin to read:
"He was quite impractical in financial matters and an eccentric." I'm using my best singsongy, reading-to-kids voice. I hope he likes it. "He was driven by compulsions and a progressive germ phobia."
"Just like Dad!" says Julie.
"Yes, just like Dad." I continue with the Tesla bio: "Caustic criticism greeted his speculations concerning communication with other planets, his assertions that he could split the Earth like an apple, and his claim of having invented a death ray capable of destroying 10,000 airplanes at a distance of 250 miles."
I look up at Julie. "Is he kicking?"
She shakes her head. No movement.
"He's probably rapt with attention."
"Yeah, that's probably it."
I realize I can't wait for this boy to come out. I can't wait for him to fall in love with learning and knowledge like the rest of the Jacobs men. The poor guy.
theater
In the 19th century, theaters featured a genre called "the racing drama," where live horses galloped on treadmills set into the stage floor. The chariot race from Ben Hur was staged this way in 1899. Too bad this was discontinued. Even I'd go to the theater to see that.
thing
In medieval Iceland, the parliament was called a thing. If I ever hang out with Icelandic historians, I'm prepared for some serious punning: "all things considered," "wild thing," "ain't no thing." I should call my Mensa friends--they'd appreciate that.
thinking
I've been thinking a lot about thinking lately. Or more specifically, I've been thinking a lot about thinking and knowledge and intelligence, and the relationship among the three. It comes back to that old question that my aunt Marti put to me--will stuffing my head with knowledge actually make me smarter, or is this a yearlong fool's errand?
I decide to contact one of America's foremost authorities on intelligence, a Yale professor named Robert J. Sternberg, who also wrote the Britannica's entry on intelligence. The perfect source. I e-mail Dr. Sternberg that I am reading the entire Britannica in my quest to become the smartest person in the world. I want to talk intelligence with him. A couple of days later, my computer gives its telltale "pling" to indicate that an e-mail has arrived. It's from Dr. Sternberg. He says: "I have read your e-mail. If you are familiar at all with my theory of intelligence, then you will know that I would not view this quest as worthwhile, nor would I view it as turning you into the smartest person in the world. Quite the contrary, I think it is a waste of time. Best, Bob."
Well. Dr. Sternberg may claim to know about intelligence, but he could learn a thing or two about etiquette. He's what I might call a complete German airplane (a total Fokker).
A second e-mail from Dr. Sternberg suggests that I read up on theories of intelligence. In spite of the snooty tone, I decide to do just that. I buy a couple of Dr. Sternberg's own books, namely the ones called Successful Intelligence and Handbook of Intelligence. The first thing I learn is that intelligence is notoriously hard to define. As a concept, it's as slippery as a pig covered in white, brown, yellow, bone, and garbage grease. Different cultures have different definitions. In Zimbabwe, intelligence means "to be prudent and cautious." In the Taoist tradition, humility is a key part of it. In Zambia, intelligence is linked to "cooperativeness and obedience." And the Western emphasis on verbal ability is far from universal--one African tribe thinks of reticence as wisdom.
Even in our own culture, the perception of intelligence is constantly shifting. The first "scientific" intelligence theorist was a man named Francis Galton, a cousin and friend of Charles Darwin. He believed intelligence meant better sensory discrimination, so he devised a test that measured, among other things, how well we hear high-pitched whistles, guess the weights of objects, and smell roses. Since Galton and his roses, there have been dozens and dozens of attempts to define it. One recent theorist broke intelligence down into such categories as muscle intelligence, musical intelligence, and kinesthetic intelligence (how well you move). Another theory boasted no less than 150 categories.
Perhaps the most famous intelligence theorist is Alfred Binet, a French psychologist who invented the precursor to the modern IQ test in the early 1900s. He devised his test to try to weed out mentally retarded children from regular classrooms. Dr. Sternberg thinks the IQ test is defective because it tests only one type of intelligence--analytical intelligence (the ability to solve problems). It neglects creative intelligence (the ability to come up with new problems) and practical intelligence (the skill of incorporating solutions into real life). I've got to like Dr. Sternberg for his IQ bashing, seeing as I did a belly flop on the Mensa IQ test.
On the other hand, I don't appreciate the harsh tone he takes toward what some call crystallized intelligence. Crystallized intelligence is the accumulation of knowledge--the kind of intelligence that I happen to be soaking up from the Britannica. Sternberg seems to hold crystallized intelligence in lower regard than fluid intelligence, which is the ability of people to mentally adapt to the situation and remain flexible when reasoning and problem solving. Most modern theorists agree flexibility is a major key to intelligence.
Fine. I'm all for flexibility. But here's one thing Dr. Sternberg should consider--the more knowledge I accumulate, the more I see the importance of flexibility. The two are linked. Flexibility is one of the major lessons of the Britannica. The Romans became a seafaring power because they were flexible--they adapted their land tactics to naval warfare by having their troops board the enemy's boats. Alexander the Great conquered the much larger Persian army because his soldiers were more mobile. Britain beat France in the Hundred Years War because the French were too heavily armed and couldn't move quickly. In warfare, in economics, in math, flexibility always wins out.
My second problem with Dr. Sternberg is that my greater pool of knowledge allows me to come up with more creative solutions to problems. I have more examples to draw on, more metaphors I can make. To give an example: I was recently typing on my Macintosh laptop, and the battery started to overheat. It seemed in serious danger of turning into a bubbling gray soup. Most people have probably already figured out a solution, but I'm not a very handy person by nature. I recently had to call the building handyman to open our washer/dryer. So my insight took longer. And it came in a roundabout way--thanks to my knowledge of machine guns. I remembered that machine guns, when they first were invented, got so hot they had to be cooled by water. A soaked Macintosh didn't sound like a good idea. But what about the fan? I trained one of our oscillating fans on my computer and, voila, saved my laptop.
I e-mail Dr. Sternberg with my argument. Thanks to the Britannica, I have in fact become more intelligent by his definition, as evidenced by the computer battery incident. Dr. Sternberg writes me back speedily. He starts his e-mail: "Great story!" All right! So maybe he's not such a Fokker after all. He continues: "I doubt that any of the great contributors in history--in the arts and letters, sciences, music, business--became great contributors because they read this or that encyclopedia." Damn. Well, that doesn't seem necessary--especially the detailed list of areas in which I won't contribute greatly. He goes on: "If it were me, I could think of many more useful ways to spend my time. But perhaps the encyclopedia will work for you, as the Bible or the Koran has worked for others. It gives one a certain security that is lacking in other methods." So he ends it on an upbeat, if slightly condescending, note.
Dr. Sternberg didn't really address my argument. Still, I have to admit: the man is intelligent. His theory about the encyclopedia-as-Bible is an insightful one. I've thought the same thing over the last few weeks. (See? I'm just as smart as Sternberg!) Consider: I read the Britannica every day, like a ritual. I criticize it here and there, but overall I take what it says as gospel. And most of all, the Britannica gives me a sense of stability and peace; the world may shift at a scary pace, but these paper-and-ink volumes have a permanence about them. When I look at them, I feel safe. Maybe that feeling is just as important as feeling smart.
time
The hour has not always been sixty minutes. In ancient civilizations--Greek, Sumerian, Roman, and so forth--daylight was divided into twelve hours. Thus, depending on the season, the length of an hour oscillated between about forty-five and seventy-five present-day minutes. I like this system. At least during winter, no Andy Rooney.
Tolstoy
I'm a big fan of the Britannica's coverage of great books. It's like the Cliffs Notes--but the summaries are even shorter and the level of shame while reading them is slightly lower. No need to trudge your way through all the characters and dialogue--the EB will give you the whole book in a paragraph, along with a neat little moral. A beautiful time-saver. I'm not really kidding; I do find it helpful.
Consider its coverage of Anna Karenina, a book I never got around to finishing. Or starting. The Britannica gives an elegant description of Anna's brother Stiva, who is "genial and sybaritic." It says, "Stiva, though never wishing ill, wastes resources, neglects his family and regards pleasure as the purpose of life. The figure of Stiva is perhaps designed to suggest that evil, no less than good, derives from the small moral choices human beings make moment by moment."
Though I can't be sure it's an accurate analysis of the book, this sentence in the Tolstoy section strikes me as a profound one. It's a gem of a sentence, the wisest one I've seen in hundreds of pages. I'm reading about Tolstoy at a little Formica table at a deli, eating a low-fat muffin. I mention this because, when it is time for me to go, I am about to leave the used napkin on the table. But then I think, that's the kind of small moral choice the EB is talking about. That's what Stiva would do. So I pick up the napkin and throw it away. I know, I'm a saint.
Over the next few days, I adopt a new mantra, my own version of "What would Jesus do?" I tell myself, Remember Tolstoy. (Incidentally, speaking of Jesus and Tolstoy: the Russian novelist published a "corrected" version of the Gospels in which he referred to Jesus as "the man Jesus." Not that it's relevant.) When leaving my office, I make sure to turn off the lights. Remember Tolstoy, I say. When I borrow a sweater from Esquire's vast closet of clothes to be used in photo shoots, I return it the next day. It's not enough to be moral about the big things, I decide. It's not enough that I refrain from murdering and robbing banks and giving PowerPoint presentations. I've got to be mindful of my smallest decisions.
We'll see how long this lasts. It crosses my mind that, as I approach the end, I'm scrounging for profundity, desperately searching for meaning. Maybe I am. But for now, I'm pleased with my new and improved Tolstoyan self.
training
As my son gets ready to make his out-of-the-womb debut, I go to Mom and Dad's apartment to pick up some of my own childhood toys--a big yellow Tonka truck, a Lego set, a pillow in the shape of a football. (That last one makes me nervous. What if it sways him to become a football player? I won't know what to say to him, except for Teddy Roosevelt's influence on the development of the forward pass.) While I'm over at the apartment, my dad does something surprising. Astounding, even. He asked me for help with their new DVD player.
This had never happened before. He's the engineer and I'm the mechanical imbecile. It's as if Bob Woodward called me and asked for tips on investigative journalism. "I just want a lesson from someone who's used it," he says. I had indeed used it. I pop in the Casablanca DVD and show him the fast forward, the pause, how to negotiate the menu--basic stuff he probably would have figured out in about four seconds without my aid.
"You know how Bogart got that stiff lip, right?"
"I think it was a war injury," says my dad.
"No, it was a wooden splinter, weirdly enough. Also, it's thought that Bogart originated the phrase 'Tennis, anyone?' "
Dad is busy testing the remote control. I felt good. Important. Here was my dad asking me for assistance. He wasn't too proud. Maybe someday I'll ask my son for tips on how to set up the holographic toaster.
triumphal marches
I am taking a break from my studies and I flip on my old pal the E! channel, a network devoted to twenty-four-hour breathless coverage of Hollywood. I hadn't watched this channel in months.
It seems stranger than I'd remembered it. The correspondents use an overabundance of hair gel and superlatives ("greatest, sexiest, hottest"). They move their facial features a lot. They talk about these events as if they have the historical importance of the Berlin airlift. I begin to feel a little ill, as if I've eaten some bad chicken marsala or something. Which I think might be a good sign, actually.
The E! channel is covering a story that involved Bruce Willis walking down a red carpet. He was smiling, perhaps winking, allowing his ecstatic public to touch his hands, his team of publicists and agents and hangers-on in tow.
Not long ago, I had read about the Romans and their official triumphal marches, and this seemed a weird modern echo, but without the slaves in chains, at least not visible ones. The Roman triumph was given when a general had slain at least five thousand of the enemy. That was the minimum. The victorious general, says the Britannica, rode on a chariot festooned with laurel, wearing a purple-and-gold tunic and toga, clutching a laurel branch in his right hand and an ivory scepter in his left.
But here's the part that fascinated me: "A slave held a golden crown over the general's head while repeatedly reminding him in the midst of his glory that he was a mortal man."
Brilliant. That's exactly what we need on our red carpets. We need some production assistant following behind Bruce Willis, whispering in his ear: "You're a mortal man. You're just some putz with good orthodonture who says lines from a script. You are not a god." We need some enforced humility in today's society. It seems to be a lost virtue.
triumvirate
A couple of more weeks till Millionaire, and I'm still cramming like Thomas Jefferson on a bender (as a young man, he studied fifteen hours a day, practiced violin for three, and spent the remaining six eating or sleeping).
I take time out to choose my lifelines. These are the folks who will be waiting by their phones to help me in case Meredith asks me a stumper of a question. My friend Mike offered to be my lifeline for any and all juice-related questions (he works for a smoothie company). A nice offer. But in the end, I settle on Ron Hoeflin--he of the nosebleed-altitude IQ--and Dave Sampugnaro, the five-time Jeopardy! champ.
Also Eric. Yes, my brother-in-law and nemesis (the original Nemesis, by the way, was a Greek goddess of vegetation who had sex with Zeus-disguised-as-a-
swan). I struggled with this one, but I figure we're talking about a million bucks here. A million bucks would soothe my ego just fine. The man just knows too much information not to be a lifeline. I accepted this a couple of weeks ago when, in response to his mom's question about the historical accuracy of Ben Hur, Eric gave a startling century-by-century history of the Roman Empire--from the first triumvirate (Julius Caesar, Pompey, Marcus Crassus) right on up to the death of the Holy Roman Empire. I tried to keep up--I threw in a reference to the Visigoths and another to the Ostrogoths--but Eric just trampled me. I went home and checked on his facts. Sadly, they were all correct.
Soon after, I pop the question. "Eric, would you do me the honor of being my lifeline on Millionaire?"
"You want me as a lifeline?"
"Yes."
"Well, if I help you win a million, what kind of financial remuneration will I get?"
I think for a second.
"Well, I'll give you ten percent of my winnings. But if you screw up, you have to reimburse me for the entire amount that I lost."
In that case, Eric said, he'd do it for free. Julie beamed. She was proud of my hard bargaining.
I figure I'd put Eric to work early. I had noticed a quirk in the way Millionaire pays out its reward money. In the fine print of the ream of documents they sent me, it said that $250,000 is paid in one lump sum--but $500,000 and $1,000,000 are paid out over ten and twenty years, respectively. If you factored in inflation and lost investment opportunities, could $250,000 actually be a better deal? I hope so. I figure that would be a great moment in Millionaire history: I stop at $250,000 and explain to Meredith the intricacies of amortized payments. So I ask Eric--the former investment banker--to crunch the numbers.
He e-mails back that $1,000,000 over twenty years came out to $540,000 in today's dollars. That's before taxes, mind you--but it is still more cash than the other options. Damn. Now I really have to try to win the million.
Trotsky, Leon
Julie's breasts have ballooned up so much that she walks around the apartment holding them in place with her hands. It's very distracting when I'm trying to read about trolls (they burst into flame when hit by sunlight) and Trotsky (killed in Mexico by an axe murderer).
Trump, Donald
I am watching an HBO documentary with Julie, and the Britannica makes a surprise cameo. Not a flattering one, though. The documentary is called Born Rich, and follows the frivolous lives of a bunch of young heirs--the heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, the daughter of Donald Trump (he owns more than twenty-five thousand apartments, by the way). These privileged tools were each sitting on some serious coin. Add up their trust funds, and it'd rival Pizarro's collection of treasures (the conquistador collected a ransom of twenty-four tons of gold and silver for the Inca emperor Atahuallpa--whom he then killed).
Anyway, the documentary features some guy from an obscure branch of the European ruling class. He has a superior accent, well-oiled hair, and a nice chunk of his parents' textile fortune. He spends much of his leisure time--which he has in abundance--ordering around his personal tailor; he tells us he found improperly positioned lapels "vulgar." Truly the most odious of heirs. Then at one point, he shows the viewers his eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and explains that this was the last time the Britannica was good. Since then, it had "become for the masses. Now, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is, you know...sheeet." What a putz. What right does he have to insult my beloved Britannica? Read 28 million words of it, then come back and talk to me.
This guy--whose name I don't remember--is a walking argument for the sweeping revision of inheritance laws. The Britannica's inheritance section says that primitive food gatherers destroyed a person's belongings--his weapons, his bowls--upon his death. Also, the Papua of New Guinea burned the hut of a dead man. Maybe we could learn something from this. Maybe we should burn the Jaguars and Nokia cell phones of these people's parents when they die. Or at least redistribute them.
It's possible our whiny aristocrat doesn't like the current edition because it points out that proinheritance arguments have lost a lot of force. Nowadays, you don't need inheritance to guarantee the continuance of business. In general, business is handed from CEO to CEO, not from father to son. So the economy would presumably keep humming if Ivanka Trump had to start driving a Hyundai and eating at KFC. The world's economy wouldn't suffer if this European nitwit had to join the masses he finds so sheety.
Tunguska event
This was an "enormous aerial explosion that, at about 7:40 A.M. on June 30, 1908, flattened approximately five hundred thousand acres of pine forest near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, central Siberia, in Russia. The energy of the explosion was equivalent to that of ten to fifteen megatons of TNT. Uncertain evidence of various kinds suggests that the explosion was perhaps caused by a comet fragment colliding with the Earth."
I had more than a passing acquaintance with the Tunguska event. For a couple of weeks there, when I was eight or nine, I was obsessed with it. I had read about the massive Siberian explosion in a collection of unsolved mysteries, and I can now recall the black-and-white drawing of thousands of trees splayed out on the forest floor. I looked it up in other books after that. I knew all the theories--that the Tunguska event was really the result of a UFO doing target practice, or that it was a chunk of antimatter that somehow took a left turn and sailed into our atmosphere. Naturally, I worried--if it can happen in Siberia, why can't it happen on Eighty-second Street in Manhattan? Who's to say that I won't be vaporized in the Upper East Side event?
And then, when that didn't happen over the next few weeks, the Tunguska faded from my memory. In the past twenty-six years, until just moments ago, I had given absolutely zero thought to the Tunguska event. I guess unexplained Siberian explosions don't come up too much in celebrity journalism.
turnip
It's Halloween today. In the British Isles, the Halloween jack-o'-lantern is made from a turnip, not a pumpkin. The savages.
By the way, another good thing about Julie being pregnant: she's too tired to go out. No pumpkin carving. No turnip carving. No costumes. (In the past couple of years I was enlisted to be Colonel Sanders, then Colonel Mustard from Clue, so who knows what colonel I'd be this year?) Instead, we get to stay inside and watch something scary on TV. We opt for a show about former child actors going out on dates.
tutelage
My friend Jamie has invited me to speak to an adult education class he's teaching. Finally, after enduring the speed-reading and memory fiascoes, a chance to be on the other side of the adult education table. This time I will be the one pontificating.
It's a writing class. There are about a dozen students who want to shed their real jobs and join the lucrative field of writing, where you can earn lots of money if your name happens to include both the words "Stephen" and "King." The students seem nice enough. One has spent a lot of time as a ski bum and wants to go into magazines, another wants out of her hellish PR job.
I decide to start with some good writing advice I'd culled from the encyclopedia. I printed my speech on little index cards to make myself look organized and professional. I begin reading.
First, I tell them to be aggressive. The poet Langston Hughes was a busboy at a hotel in Washington, D.C. While in the dining room, he slipped three of his poems beside the dinner plate of established poet Vachel Lindsay. The next day, newspapers announced Lindsay had discovered a "Negro busboy poet." The moral: get your writing in people's face--no matter how you do it.
Second, I tell them they can write anywhere. If you have a job at the Gap, steal a few minutes and write some lines in the sweater section. No excuses. Hugh Lofting wrote Dr. Doolittle while in the trenches of World War I. Amid exploding grenades and gas masks and rats, he created a lovely little story about talking animals that he sent home to amuse his children. Be like Hugh. Write everywhere.
Then I tell them that if you write with style and passion, you can make any topic interesting. Any topic at all, as William Cowper proved. Cowper was a poet whose friend challenged him to write a long discursive poem about a sofa. He did, and it was a smash success. Personally, I'd rather read a footrest-based novel, but I can see the allure of sofas.
Jamie's students all nod politely. But I notice a remarkable lack of movement of their pens. Every time I look up from my speech, all the pens are still lying on their desks. Notes are conspicuously not being taken.
Then one of them asks if I know anyone at The New Yorker.
Well, yes, I reply.
"How do we e-mail them?" he asks.
I don't feel comfortable giving out my New Yorker contact's name, but I tell them that all e-mail addresses at The New Yorker are made with an underscore between first and last names.
This time, the pens in the classroom begin scribbling: first name_lastname@newyorker.com. That they find interesting.
typewriter
I haven't touched one of these since my mom's electric Remington back in the early eighties, a machine that hummed so loud it drowned out anything resembling a coherent thought. It was like trying to write my high school essays about Huck Finn or the Whiskey Rebellion on the tarmac at La Guardia. Still, I feel I should pay some attention to typewriters, since I spend most of my day pecking away at the typewriter's electronic descendant.
I learn that Mark Twain was an early adapter, submitting the very first typewritten manuscript to a publisher. Those antediluvian typewriters were the size of pianos, and also had only capital letters. In 1878, typewriters finally introduced lowercase letters. Yes, the shift key was born--but mind you, it wasn't an easy birth. The shift key had to do battle with a rival, the double-keyboard machine, which contained twice the number of keys, two for each letter, a small and a large. After many years, the shift key won out thanks to the invention of touch typing.
I take a minute and look at the shift key on my Macintosh PowerBook G3. Good for you, shift key. I'm glad you trounced that evil double-key method. CONGRATULATIONS! There, I just used you. Thanks again.
That's a nice thing about reading the Britannica. I'm constantly learning to appreciate things that I didn't even know deserved appreciation. The lightbulb and the theory of relativity--they get more good PR than Tom Hanks's visit to a children's hospital. But it's the little things, the forgotten mini revolutions that need our thanks.
U
ukelele
The Hawaiian ukelele is adapted from the Portuguese machada and is quite unsuited to indigenous musical forms. In other words, Don Ho's "Tiny Bubbles" is not an ancient Pacific island chant. Disillusioning.
umlaut
It's time for my haj. Time to make the pilgrimage to the Britannica HQ. These thirty-two volumes have consumed the last months of my life, and I'm desperately curious to see their birthplace.
Well, the real birthplace is Edinburgh, Scotland. I won't be going there. But since the 1930s--when the Britannica was owned, briefly and improbably, by Sears Roebuck--the offices have been located in Chicago. I haven't been to Chicago since my days at Entertainment Weekly, when I visited the city to report on another highbrow cultural institution, The Jerry Springer Show. If I had to guess, I'd say the Britannica trip will involve slightly fewer lesbians wrestling in chocolate pudding. Julie wants to come--she has friends in Chicago--so we book a flight.
"You know, it's not called the Windy City because of the wind," I tell her. "It's because the early Chicago politicians were full of wind, as in hot air. That's how it got the nickname."
"A dollar, please."
I've lost about $20 so far on fines for irrelevant facts. But this one I'm going to fight.
"That's not irrelevant. That's useful meteorological information. I'm saying it's not as windy as you might think. Don't pack a windbreaker."
Julie shrugs, gives me that one.
The morning after we arrive in Windbag City, I wake up, put on a blazer so I look all professional, and go meet the Britannica's publicist, Tom Panelas, for breakfast. As a journalist, it's part of my job to think of all publicists as soldiers of Satan. But with Tom, that's not possible. He's a burly man with a booming, from-the-diaphragm voice and an easy laugh. As I mentioned before, Tom is smart--he's got a frightening vocabulary and range of references. I remember once, while talking to Tom on the phone, I mentioned my birth date for some reason--March 20, 1968--and Tom said, "That was right between the Tet offensive and MLK's assassination," which simultaneously dismayed me about my birthday and impressed me greatly with Tom's memory. He unabashedly carries three or so pens in his shirt pocket. He'll tell the occasional intellectual joke. Like: "Rene Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender says, 'Yo, Rene, how you doing? Can I get you a beer?' 'I think not,' replies Descartes. And then he disappears." After which joke, Tom will immediately apologize.
The only time I saw Tom even slightly rattled was when I mentioned an article that claimed that, at one time, the domain name encyclopaediabritannica.com had been swiped by another Web site--one that featured blond women doing things you probably wouldn't even find in the reproduction section of the encyclopedia. Linking Britannica and hardcore porn--that made him a little nervous. And he wanted to make quite clear any problem like that had long since been remedied.
In any case, Tom has scheduled a packed day for me, a breakneck tour of the Britannica's highlights. So off we go. It is an odd feeling walking off the elevator and into the offices. I've been reading the Britannica so much, it has become this disembodied mountain of knowledge. It seems somehow delivered from on high, whole and intact, like Deuteronomy. I almost forget there are people who put it together, people who put on their pants--often corduroy pants, it would turn out--one leg at a time.
But there are indeed editors, and they are indeed mortal. Also quiet. This could be the quietist office in America. Tom has told me that, at one point, the company that owned Muzak also owned the Britannica, which meant the office was constantly bathed in soothing cheesified versions of Simon and Garfunkel. But no more. All I hear is the click-clack of of computer keyboards and an occasional polite, low discussion of Gothic architecture, or what have you.
The offices are clean and clutter-free, not counting a smattering of highbrow cubicle knickknacks, like the foam rubber brain issued by the Britannica a few years before. The office walls are appointed with a tasteful selection of Britannica lore: a Norman Rockwell-painted ad showing Grampa reading a volume to his eager granddaughter; the first timeline (not the first timeline in the Britannica, mind you: the first timeline, which appeared in the third edition); and some of the original engravings for the 1768 edition--most notably some extremely disquieting images of old midwifery contraptions that look like something you'd find alongside a ball gag in an S&M closet. And so on.
My first stop is with the two top editors--Dale Hoiberg and Theodore Pappas. Dale studied Chinese literature, and his office has a print of Confucius on the walls. For some reason, Dale reminds me of the father on the eighties puppet sitcom Alf--a fact I decide to keep to myself. This is not the place for that. Theodore has a mustache and a blue vest and a tie and is very precise. You get the feeling his CD rack does not indiscriminately mix classical and jazz. Both Dale and Theodore are very kind, in that gentle academic sort of way.
I immediately decide I like them, partly because they seem very curious about me. What's not to like? I tell them my quest is going well. Their thirty-two-volume work is a great read, if incredibly challenging.
"The math sections," I say, "are my bete noir."
Bete noir? I can't believe that came out of my mouth. Who talks like that? I realize I'm more nervous than I thought I would be. I'm so desperate to impress these guys, to prove I'm no lightweight, that I've resorted to the injudicious use of absurd French phrases.
When we start talking specific things I've learned, somehow the first fact that springs to mind is one about embalming. In particular, the tale of the crafty widower who kept his wife aboveground so as to inherit her money (see embalming). I'm a little embarrassed that--out of all the thousands and thousands of facts in the EB--this is the one I share. On the other hand, at least I don't tell them the one about the five-butted abalone.
"I found that embalming story fascinatingly morbid," I say, trying to recover by using a well-placed adverb.
They chuckle graciously. They didn't know about that one.
Didn't know about it? That takes me aback. Somehow, I assumed that the editors of the Britannica would have a handle on pretty much everything in the encyclopedia. They edit the damn thing, right? Well, if I give that notion more than three seconds' thought, I would realize it is moronic. The editor in chief couldn't possibly read or remember all his books' 44 million words. But hearing it in person--getting proof that I have at least one piece of knowledge Dale and Theodore don't have--well, it's a huge relief.
Emboldened, I decide to forge ahead. "I've got to say, the accuracy is remarkable. I found very few errors in the Britannica."
They seem pleased.
"But I did find some."
I tell them about how Robert Frost is listed as a Harvard graduate even though he dropped out, and about a backward quotation mark. I watch their faces for shock or hostility, but they just seem curious. They want to fix them. Theodore actually takes notes. This is a huge feeling of power, a strange and great sensation. Can you imagine? I am going to have an impact on the esteemed Encyclopaedia Britannica. It has always seemed so imposingly static; to be able to change it was unthinkable, as likely as changing Teddy Roosevelt's chin on Mount Rushmore. But here I am, doing it.
"Also, my wife is upset there's no mention of Tom Cruise."
Again, Theodore jots down a note. This one is much more of a long shot. But Theodore did say they want to beef up the pop culture coverage, to make the Britannica more accessible without sacrificing the gravitas or dumbing it down. Man, if I got Tom Cruise in, I would be golden with Julie. I could forget a half dozen anniversaries, but I'd always have that.
I spend an hour chatting with Dale and Theodore--during which I start to understand a smaller and smaller percentage of what they are saying, since they begin to discuss the theory of databases. I also, embarrassingly enough, have to ask what the word "ligature" means--it's when two letters are smushed together, like the a and the e in the official title of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (I've used the nonconnecting ae in this book, partly because I can't figure out how to get the ligature on my Macintosh keyboard.)
But there is much more to see, so Tom hustles me out of Dale's office. He shows me the illustration department (I particularly like the disemboweled laser printer being used as a model). And the animation department, which makes short movies for the Britannica CD-ROM (I comment that the video of a dragonfly eating its prey reminds me of a Bruckheimer movie, a reference I immediately wish I could take back). I am whisked to the indexing department, which is still riding high from its Wheatley Medal, the Nobel for index people (I get them to show me how they indexed the concept "index," since I still enjoy a little postmodernism). I talk to some fact checkers (and learn about the time they were confirming the population of a tiny Scottish town, and they called up some guy in the town, who told them, "If you hold the phone a second, I can count," and he went out and counted). I meet a handful of editors (each has an area of expertise, and assigns the articles out to specialists in the field). I visit the library (a book on Indian treaties, a Malay-to-English dictionary--generally, the oddest collection of books I've encountered).
And then Tom has a surprise for me. The wily folks at the Britannica are going to put me to work. They want me to really understand how this encyclopedia is built, so they're going to have me lay a couple of bricks myself. I'm led to a cubicle, which is all set up for me with two red pencils, a highlighter, a stack of books, and a Britannica mug. And I am left alone, in the silent Britannica offices, listening to the clacking keyboards of other employees.
My first task is to fact check an article on the history of sports. I can do this; I spent several months as a fact checker at the New York Observer. I start by trying to confirm that sumo wrestling uniforms were designed in 1906, not the Middle Ages as many assume. I scan the table of contents of my stack of books. No sumo there. I start clicking though Web sites, spending several tantalizing minutes at one Drexel University page before coming up empty. I begin to sweat. Not metaphorically, but actual perspiration, at least a sponge worth. I get that panicked, I'm-flubbing-this feeling I haven't gotten since the Mensa test. I want to dazzle these Britannica folks, show that I'm worthy of reading their book. And I'm failing.
After forty minutes--during which time I confirm exactly two of the fifteen facts--I switch to my next task: editing. I've been given an article on international criminal law, and been charged with adding "meaningful cross-referencing." This I can do. Cross-referencing is the art of adding "see such-and-such" at the end of a sentence. If there's a mention of broccoli, I'd add "see vegetables"--that kind of thing. I start adding cross-references with near giddy enthusiasm, filling up the page with red pen marks, trying to compensate for the fact-checking Chernobyl. International airspace? See sovereignty. Now that's what I call "meaningful cross-referencing."
After twenty minutes, I'm called back to Theodore's office, where I boast about all the references I crossed. He seems moderately pleased.
"Was there anything you would have changed in the international law article," asks Theodore. "Any big suggestions?"
Damn. I was so busy with my meaningful cross-referencing, I didn't devote any brain space to the grand picture of whether this was actually a good article. See moron.
"Maybe, um. Well, it could have talked more about the history of international criminal law. Like, did they have the concept in ancient Greece?"
I kind of think this isn't a half-bad answer. But it isn't the right one.
"Did you feel that there could be more examples of international criminal law?" asks Theodore. "To bring it down to the reader?"
Shit! That is the right answer.
"Yes," I say, going into ass-kissing mode. "Definitely a great idea. Like Slobodan Milosevic. When I think of war criminals, that's who I think of."
"Well," says Theodore gently, "we want to make sure we're not just a newspaper. We've got to take the long perspective."
Jesus. Screwed up again. I was chasing the headlines like some hack journalist instead of thinking like a Britannica editor.
Soon after, I have to leave to catch a flight back to New York.
As Julie and I sit in the airport, my humiliation fades. That wasn't what I'll remember most--they were too kind to make my failure sting. What I'll remember most is the refreshing, genuine, unfettered enthusiasm of the Britannica folks. I've never seen people get so excited about diacritics--those little lines and accents on letters, the umlaut, the tilde, that diagonal slash through the L. Dale talked about a database called Information Management and Retrieval System the way teenage boys might discuss Christina Aguilera's cleavage. He was into it. They love information--reading it, digesting it, and most of all, organizing it.
And you get the feeling the Britannica staff believes--perhaps naively, perhaps a little pretentiously, but sincerely and strongly--that they are engaged in a noble pursuit. It's not just a business. To them, it's not the same as selling deoderant, which is what a lot of publishing is nowadays.
At one point during our conversation, when I was speaking in sentence fragments and "uhs" and "ums" as those in my generation tend to, Theodore stopped me cold by reciting a quotation. People in my social circle just don't recite quotations, unless they're from Fletch or Spinal Tap. Theodore's quotation was a dedication in a 1940s edition of the Britannica that he thought was relevant, and it went like this: "To the men, women, and children of the world who, by increasing their knowledge of the earth and its people, seek to understand each other's problems and through this understanding strive for a community of nations living in peace, the Encyclopaedia Britannica dedicates this volume." Word.
university
The first one was in Bologna, Italy, in the 11th century. When universities began, teachers charged fees for each class, which meant they had to appeal to the students. Now that's a brilliant idea that needs to be resuscitated. Open classes up to the free market! Set up a ticket booth outside Psychology 101 and Advanced Statistics and watch the professors scramble to spice things up. I think that would improve education immensely. At the very least, I'd get to see the nap-inducing course I took on the The Faerie Queen flop like an academic version of Gigli.
urine
Dalmatian dogs and humans have strangely similar urine (they're the only two mammals to produce uric acid). This could be useful if I ever smoke pot, apply for a government job, and have access to Dalmatians. Regardless, the unexpected connections continue to amaze.
utility
It's official. I made my dad proud. He was at a benefit last night, and he told an acquaintance that his son was reading the encyclopedia from A to Z. The guy refused to believe it, figuring it was just another Arnieism. Another one of my dad's practical jokes.
So this morning, I got on a conference call and confirmed that, yes, I am reading the encyclopedia. My dad was delighted--I had helped him pull off a practical joke. Or actually, an anti-practical joke. If there's one thing that my dad likes better than a well-played canard, it's when he tells an outrageous truth that nobody believes.
I'm honored. I may not have impressed my dad with my knowledge yet. But the quest itself came in quite handy.
Uzziah
The last of the Us--a king of Judah for fifty-two years in the 8th century B.C. As I reach the end, I keep trying to impose some sort of plot on the Britannica. I keep hoping that there will be some sort of resolution at the end. I know that's deluded, but a man's got to dream.
V
vaccine
Brunch at Grandma and Grandpa's. The talk at the meal is of a tremendous feat of publishing: The Complete Family News. The Family News is my grandmother's two-page newsletter, published monthly since 1950, with a circulation of about twenty-five loyal readers. My aunt Jane has tracked down most of the five hundred total issues, xeroxed them, and bound them in a massive, Britannica-sized volume.
It's fascinating reading, at least for those in my gene pool: births, marriages, job accomplishments, details about which baby sucked the toe of which other baby--which sounds a little kinky now that I type it in, but did actually happen.
The Family News doesn't have a tremendous amount of scandalous information. It's sort of like Pravda under Khrushchev, but with fewer stories about heroic factory workers. You won't read about cousins getting downsized or kids experimenting with hallucinogenic mushrooms.
But still, it's great to flip through. Julie's been particularly fascinated by the coverage of my first few years of life. This consisted almost exclusively of the announcement of which disease I had that month. I had, in no particular order, an ear infection, "the grippe," an eye infection, "the germ," and something called "the croupe."
"I told you I get sick a lot," I say. "I'm not a hypochondriac."
Grandma has been reading it herself. She says she was surprised, when reading about my parent's courtship, that my father was so young when he entered college.
"How old were you again?" she asks.
"I was sixteen," he says.
"Wow."
I take the opportunity to make my requisite passive-aggressive remark--namely that both Cotton and Increase Mather entered Harvard when they were twelve. "The Mathers were also pioneers in smallpox vaccinations," I added. "Which was controversial at the time. An angry opponent threw a bomb in Cotton's window."
For his part, Dad says he was struck by something else when reading The Complete Family News.
"What's that?" says Grandma.
I prepare for whatever silly joke is to follow.
"I was struck by how much you two have accomplished," says my Dad. "It's really remarkable how many great things you've done, and how you've made the world a better place."
Huh. I was not expecting that. A genuine emotional moment from my dad. I've seen it a few times--more and more in recent years, it seems to me, most notably after the kayaking incident. I've read about something called a "joking relationship" that exists in some societies--it's a way to keep a safe distance. But Dad has broken through the joking relationship. This is admirable. Maybe I need to do the same, like the famous follow-the-leader goslings studied by ethologist Konrad Lorenz.
Van Buren, Martin
Amid all the castrations and blindings and beheadings and bribes and other discourteous means of attaining power, Martin Van Buren is a refreshing commander in chief. The eighth president of the United States proves that sometimes--not often, but sometimes--it pays to be nice.
In 1828, Andrew Jackson appointed Van Buren (along with his huge muttonchops) secretary of state. It was a strange year in Washington, the year the city became embroiled in a scandal that would be called Peggy-Gate if it happened today. Peggy Eaton--who got a few sentences back in the E section--was a humble gal, the daughter of a tavern keeper. But she had the audacity to marry out of her class, getting hitched to Jackson's secretary of war, John Eaton. Rumors about her alleged misconduct swept Washington, and snooty Washington hostesses snubbed her at their parties. The anti-Peggy brigade was led by the wife of Vice President John Calhoun--a fact that outraged President Jackson, who considered himself a man of the people. Jackson had originally favored Calhoun to succeed him as president, but thanks to the Peggy Eaton affair, Jackson soured on Calhoun.
There was one man in the cabinet, however, who was gracious to Peggy Eaton: Martin Van Buren. And he became the Jackson favorite. Jackson made Van Buren vice president in 1832 and supported him for president four years later. It's a weird path to political power--being nice to a blue-collar woman. But it's a heartening one.
Of course, Van Buren was a pretty bad president. And Peggy Eaton, after the death of her husband, married an Italian dancing master who defrauded her of her money and ran off with her granddaughter. So the story's not exactly a fairy tale. But I try to ignore that part. Be nice to people--that's the takeaway here.
Vassar College
Just a couple of days till Millionaire. I'm still freaking out, still making arbitrary lists of things I've forgotten. Which are the Seven Sister schools? What's the biggest volcanic eruption (it was Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, not Krakatoa). Who are King Lear's three daughters? Which one of Shakespeare's kings was a hunchback? I know they're going to ask that. Oh, yes. Richard III.
vegetarianism
My aunt Marti calls me at home tonight and asks what I am doing.
"Just hitting the books," I say.
That doesn't go over so well. She scolds me for the violent metaphor--no need to use the word "hit."
"Okay, I'm performing gentle acupressure on the books," I say.
She seems to like that better.
I love Marti, but a conversation with her always includes a list of what I'm doing and saying wrong, and how it supports the phallocentric power structure. She's got some opinions, my aunt. There's liberal, there's really liberal, then there's Marti, a few miles further to the left. She lives out near Berkeley, appropriately enough--though even Berkeley is a bit too fascist for her.