January 20, 2013
from today's Bookshop Journal

Glenwood, the cat, and I have been at the home of Lauren and Joshua Ling, on Walker Avenue. I caught the flu a week ago, and brutally cold, nasty weather was on its way, so Mo pleaded with me to find some place warmer and safer than my mancave in the belly of the bookshop. Lauren and Josh took Glenwood and me in. And fed us and looked after us for 6 days and 6 nights.
     Then, when we were to return, came a big snowfall and the break-in at the shop, which also serves as our "home." But here we are at last, me at my familiar stance typing into Microsoft Publisher, albeit with many a sneeze, and Glenwood perched near my left shoulder on top of a woolen blanket draped for his comfort over our futon. Glenny would prefer I played "Retrieve!" with a rolled-up paper ball he brought in to show me. Or pour him some more Kibbles or, yum-yum, maybe a few of his favorite "Temptations" treat. Or why don't I make myself some dry cereal with yoghurt and cream, then he gets to lick the bowl? I can just hear him muttering, "These humans are so dumb!" We just don't get it, clueless creatures with big, stomping feet. Well, he's teaching me. I try, I try, Glenwood. He yawns, and he stretches, and he gives me a jaundiced eye. Oh, I know that look. Glenwood isn't the first cat whom I've served.
     The first were George and Monkey, so named because Hans and Margaret Rey lived in the pretty little building on Washington Square that I did, 82 Washington Place. They were the creators of Curious George. So the cats were named George and Monkey. You can get a good idea of those two cats from the portrait Teo Savory drew of them in her fable, "The Alley Cat and the Laws of Status." For George was a regal cat, with a long pedigree. And Monkey was the son of Hazel who was, alas, an alley cat to be sure. Once we took Hazel to the Vet, and the Vet said, "This cat isn't pregnant. She's psychotic." So she was. But Monkey was a sweetheart, as George said, "one of nature's gentlecats."
     Monkey was three-colored, just like his Mom. Once we mentioned to our neighbor in the country, Martha Fadding, that Monkey being three-colored and her cat, "Yellow," being who she was, maybe they could mate? Martha and Yellow were both offended at this city offspring of an urban gutter mating with her Yankee manor aristocrat. After all, Hazel, Monkey's Mom, was found under a car on Sixth Avenue. Martha looked Monkey up and down and said definitively, "I guess he doesn't have it in him."
     There are countless Martha stories in my new journal I am beginning this month, Berkshire Journal. For Teo Savory and I were privileged characters. It wasn't enough we lived in Greenwich Village in the winter. For the summer, we had purchased a home in Western Massachusetts, in the Berkshire Hills, the first New Yorkers to buy a summer home in the working-class immigrant village of West Stockbridge (1956), now, 'most 60 years later, half full of New Yorkers and Bostonians who pay a few cents more for the privilege than the $5,000 we did. A'ya, as those Yankees say, we bought a 1850 house and two acres on The Williams River with a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage of 4%, $150/year it cost us, plus $500 taxes and insurance. That was before Martha made us drill a well, because she shut off the water supply we were entitled to share with her from her spring up-mountain. When we threatened to sue for our water rights she said, "Winter's the time for lawing. Anyway, you'll lose, 'cause they know who I am." When we went to the lawyer in Great Barrington, he shrugged his shoulders and said, "They know who she is." He gave us a business card for Holder Well Drilling in Hillsdale, New York . . .

January 12, 2013   

Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

 When Kuhn came on the scene in 1962, Karl Popper and Behavorism and Scientific Method had been the godlike basis of science and the scientific method. Kuhn dramatically attacked this seemingly faultless universally acclaimed accomplishment of modern science and, indeed, modern life, which was credited with all our impressive advances, or what were then seen as "advances."*
      Kuhn agreed that "scientific method" might exist but, if so, it isn't nearly as important as it is made out to be. Kuhn noticed that many science breakthroughs came about independent of rigorous methodologies. For some scientists and their discoveries these so-called methods weren't even known! And so Thomas Kuhn set out to discover what it was that gave birth to scientific discoveries. He came up with ideas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,  that are still current 50 years later and, in fact, is probably the leading sourcebook in all introductory science study, a theory based on the concepts of paradigms, normal science, anomalies, and scientific revolutions, and this is the theory he set forth in 1962. Paradigms, Normal Science, and Anomalies. Throughout history, Kuhn argued, and he invented "paradigm" to describe each set of separate beliefs. From this he developed the logical idea of "dominant paradigms." You can see how foundational and practical Kuhn's insights were, much like the historian Herbert Butterfield, whom I have mentioned, thirty years before, in his "Whig Thesis."
     Kuhn adopted the term "scientific revolution" to describe the event of a new paradigm overtaking a previous one. It is not hard to see how the "scientific method" was all but scrapped in this new way of looking at invention. Interestingly, falsifying was the first step in a scientific revolution. A little verification of the new was built on a little falsification of the old! An elegant twist. Paradigm change is really a conversion.
     Ironically, Kuhn's work emphasized that most scientists who achieve remarkable results know little or nothing about the history or philosophy of science. In this way, he explained why the nature of "breakthroughs" is consistently misrepresented especially by the more creative and curious thinkers. A false impression is given that one proceeded logically from one fact to another, linearly. What is new, according to Kuhn, is what he called "puzzles," because behind every new paradigm or scientific revolution is a scientist or scientists puzzled by things that previously were not puzzling; that's how I put it, anyway.
     David Ricci explains that the failure of political scientists before Kuhn forced them to miss the salient features of politcal life : "the really 'big' issues of the past twenty years - foreign policy, nuclear policy, civil rights (including McCarthyism), the relation- ship of government to the economy." If so, you can see how important and useful Kuhn is to us. For Kuhn, progress in science is movement without a goal.
     Of course, Academia being what it is, you can imagine how far Kuhn is followed in such reactionary institutions. Political Science for example must be the laughing stock of all the other foolish disciplines.

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* A typical but by no means exceptional survey of Popper is found in the opening pages of David Ricci's "Reading Thomas Kuhn," Western Political Quarterly 30:1 (March, 1977), 7–34

** Ibid.,20. "From this point of view, the scientific method is not the midwife of knowledge, although it may have an important role to play somewhere in the day- to-day work of normal science. Moreover, the knowledge in question, no matter how attained, is not objectively reliable. In fact, scientific communities agree to espouse certain paradigmatic "truths" at least partly for sociological rather than methodological reasons. This is why, instead of speaking of public tests and rea- soned discourse, Kuhn described the acceptance of new knowledge in terms of conversions, gestalt switches, transfers of allegiance, and acts of faith, an explicit argument against the scientific method."

 
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January 11, 2013

From Al's OUT JOURNAL
 

     Before I got the idea of opening a scholarly bookshop, founding a Free University, and fulfilling my teaching ambitions that way, I began teaching at UNC-G and taking courses in their graduate school to qualify for more teaching. (I had a vague goal of getting enough of what these academics call "ed cred" to qualify as a instructor in Women & Gender Studies at G.T.C.C., the local community college. I have always desired a serious study of Art History, so for two semesters I took art history courses with my oldest friend, Carl, whom I've known since he was a freshman in Brooklyn College. Carl is now a very serious professional indeed, has released three important books with Cambridge University Press, has served as Head of the Art Department and is, I would say, the most important elder of the local university's world of art. He is at least 75, but remains a vigorous intellect and hard worker and professor. I learned a lot in my two classes with him and enjoyed them immensely, partly because my fellow students were so bright and creative–Garima from New Dehli, for example–but mainly because of Carl's erudition and sense of humor. He's Brooklyn-born, and I miss the Yiddische Kopf here in Southern Baptist Land.
     I think of all this because of an essay I just read in the current issue of Arion. Arion is one of those precious university "Humanities" mags, this time from Boston University; it's been around for decades and is usually pretty dull, as you can imagine. But there was an inoffensive little thing on Vasari, and it reminded me of a funny incident in my recent academic immersion with my friend, Carl. Because a large part of Carl's course in Art History began of course with the very founder of Art History, the Florentine genius, Vasari.*
     Professor Barolsky didn't take Vasari as seriously as my friend, Carl, and in fact tweeked him on his piacivoli inganni, Vasari's "pleasurable deceptions," claiming, unlike Professor Carl, that Vasari was quite aware that the little anecdotes and stories he told were embellished for the amusement of his readers.
     Carl, on the other hand, had us take Vasari very seriously indeed. He concluded his lecture on Vasari by having us notice that in the 450 years since Vasari very little has been found to contradict or refute any of Vasari's many insights into Renaissance Art (Carl's specialty by the way).
     I raised my hand and said I agreed with Carl except for one thing. Vasari does not mention a single woman artist of the Renaissance.
     Students like me are at a rhetorical disadvantage in such exchanges with Herr Professor. Carl stood at the head of the class, in front of the blackboard, behind a little podium. I was in row two, seat four of some thirty narrow, uncomfortable stackable chairs in the room, all facing front.
     Carl thought a minute, and then he said, "But there were no women artists of the Renaissance." And he said it with quite a bite of finality.
     Perhaps it was that little "bite" that caused me to mutter, "But in my bookshop I have a recent volume of over 1,000 pages with the title, "Women Artists of the Renaissance."

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* Paul Barolsky, "Burlington Magazine and the Death of Vasari's Lives of the Artists," Arion 20:2
(Fall, 2012), pages 63–80


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January 10, 2013 (excerpt from SEX JOURNAL)
 
There still exists a traditional division of labor by gender and sex. My friend Lyn told me that when she brought her mother into a Unitarian Universalist Church at which she worships, the mother couldn't stand the presence of a woman minister. A minister had to be a man, she felt.
However, my spouse, Rev. Liz Brown, who raised her children in a pagan religion, told me they once had a visiting male leader, and her son said excitedly, "Look, look, Ma! There's a man in the pulpit!" Aries concludes, "Certain work, activities, privileges, and responsibilities are still assigned to individuals on the basis of sex." And she says, "Communicative behaviours are strategies that evolve from situational constraints to meet social expectations."

What about non-verbal communication? To understand the sex and gender aspect of non-verbal communication, I turn to Judith A. Hall, a Ph. D. from Harvard, where she taught–also Johns Hopkins and Northeastern University. Much of her experience was psychologizing M.D.s.1
      The study of gender and sex, it is important to note, is in flux, and there is not a whole lot of agreement. The Nature/Nurture Wars continue. You may agree with me that after thousands of years of men deciding gender, and men deciding sex, women have had only a few moments to set the record straight. Therefore, men being as tenacious as they are, and women hardly being listened to, it is not surprising that the new and proper insights have not been embraced and complimented. The more misogynist my men friends are, the more stubborn they are. Moreover, as Dr. Hall shows, it is difficult to even express such differences, let alone explain them.
     What are nonverbal communication skills, at which women excel? "They include the ability to judge accurately the affective meanings of nonverbal cues, the accuracy with which one's nonverbal expressions (face, body, voice) can be judged, and the ability to know a face that one has seen before. For all these three skills, females are more accurate than males."
     I remember reading a study years ago which explained that if you smile at someone, for example when passing in the street and making eye-contact, if it's a woman, she will smile back 2/3rds of the time, but a man? Only 50%.
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1 Judith A. Hall, "On Explaining Gender Differences: The Case of Nonverbal Communication," in Sex and Gender, edited by Shaver & Hendrick, (N. Y.: Sage Publishers, 1987), 177–200.

January 9, 2013

From Al's Sex Journal:

Alain de Botton has released a new series of books which remind me of my journals, although he hides behind the Expert's Mask and reveals little about himself. Nor does he write all the books in his new series, which were brought to my attention by a well-written book review in The New York Times January 4th, by Dwight Garner.How To Think More About Sex is the third Botton bottom.

     Ah, ha! This crude pun on Alain's last name–not the first I'll bet anything –reminds me of an Ezra Pound anecdote I heard exact;y 60 years ago from my friend George Penty. And. thinking of George Penty, the first Southerner I ever knew, reminds me of still another hilarious incident for the Sex Journal.
     First, the Pound Pun. George was being picked up by some friends in Paris, this was in the 1930s sometime, and he was standing on a street corner awaiting their vehicle. It came, and he was directed into the back seat, where Ezra Pound was sitting. As he stepped into the car, the driver introduced him to E. P. George quipped, "Pound? I bet that's a name that's often punned."
     It turned out Ezra Pound hated puns, and he told the driver either George Penty left the car or he would. Of course, it was George who was evicted.
     I met George in Book Land, where I worked from atge 17-19, on Times Square, my first bookshop job. Turnover was high in such a joint, and George left, but we had become friends. His next part-time pick-up job was editor of what were called in those dark ages, "Girlie Magazines." A truly awful thing. George was much older than I, and he liked to tease me about what a prude I was. So he placed in the Girlie Magazine he edited, under "Letters to the Editor" a fake letter, purporting to be from me!
     Dear Editor, Liked those shots of Tiffany Tyler naked. Let's see some more!!! Thanking you in advance, Alan Brilliant.
     And he put my address too. And it appeared in his magazine!

 

January 4, 2012

from Al's Childhood & Old Age Journal (today's entry):

A brand-new website arrives on the internet, and I email the woman, Heather O'Donnell responsible: company name, HoneyandWax.com. She had posted an announcement on a special collections librarians' listserve I'm attached to . . . her first catalogue is available. It's the most creative website I've ever found in the world of books. Miss Heather is an antiquarian bookseller, offering things like a first edition of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary (1755).

Here's a recent edition–there have been hundreds--two volumes. 2,500 pages. Turns out Ms. O'Donnell wants a Unicorn Press book, Apollinaire's Calligrams, which I published in French and English in 1969. There is suddenly a lot of interest in this book, almost 50 years after I published it, because the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) has decided it's important in the history of the development of Abstract Art, and they are displaying a first edition of it this month in Manhattan.

     The main reason I mention Miss Heather and her new enterprise is that she's located in Brooklyn. This morning I emailed her the book is on its way, and I told her the three times I had lived in Brooklyn.

     My mother, Sara Birnbaum, was born in Vienna, in the 19th Century–in those days in a European city like Vienna, Jews had to live in a ghetto just for Jews, and it was locked up, locked in, at night. Her father was a rabbi there. But in 1900, he moved his synagogue and his family to the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

     Consequently, my mother went to Washington Irving High School. Her 1917 graduating class was probably the brightest in the history of education, giving us all the good guys and the bad guys that are responsible for the good and the bad in our american world today. Mom was the Valedictorian. But her Orthodox Jewish father, wouldn't let any of his eight daughters go to college. Men, he felt, were ordained by G-d for study, women for drudgery to free men for study.

     Sara's sisters all went into the Garment Industry (today it's called The Fashion Industry in a wealthier america). Tilly was some kind of clothing broker, and Gussie was a tailor, and Vivy was a seamstress, as was the oldest, Anna. The one son, Moe–well, I was there the day The Pope (that's what my father called Mom's rabbinic Cohanite father) threw him out of the family–Moe became a plumber, and paid off enough of the corrupt Brooklyn politicians to land several plump plumping jobs and became a rich man. What goes around comes around. His eldest daughter Gloria married a fellow, Gene Levy, and when my brother, David, killed himself, Gene, whose wife had died from cancer, married Dave's widow. Yes, mine was an enormous, incestuous family. All those wonderful aunts . . . I had 53 first cousins.

     Mom was too bright to be a mere tailor, she became a secretary! Meanwhile, Dad had run away to New York from the farm on which he was "incarcerated" (to hear him tell it) for 18 years.

     In those days, in The Russian Empire, Jewish men had to serve 24 years in the Russian Army, so my grandfather, Dad's father, Jakov brought his family to Ellis Island. They were all Russian peasants, so the JNF (Jewish National Fund) bought them a farm in Connecticut, from which, as we have seen, when he was 18, Matthew Brilliant, my father, Jakov's son, ran away to work in the Garment Industry in New York.

     Dad needed a secretary. He had been born in Russia, in the Ukraine. In fact, his mother was born a slave, because when she was born, Russian serfs were still slaves; they were freed by Czar Alexander in 1962. Dad, too, was a 19th Century Jew, from a little village, Tiraspol, that you know all about if you ever saw it portrayed in Scholem Aleichem's short story, "Tevye and His Daughters," which became the movie, Fiddler on the Roof. The author, you see, was also born in the little village of Tiraspol, 20 miles west of Odessa, on the Black Sea, a village of 12,000 souls.

     

     Dad needed a secretary, because he owned five factories. A "factory" on 7th Avenue in those days (right after WW I, which Dad claims he missed being conscripted into by one day) wasn't what you think of when you hear "factory." It had a dress designer, and a model who came in occasionally, a pattern-maker (usually the designer), a cutter, a presser–all male professions–and a few sewers, usually women. Dad's brother, my Uncle Jesse, was a cutter all his life. His son went to Harvard, but Dad's son only to Columbia. Dad's sister's boys also went to Harvard. Aunt Cecelia married a dress salesman, probably the richest member of the family, my proud Uncle Terry. Jack, the oldest of Dad's siblings, also owned dress factories, but he held on to his when The Depression hit.

     "Macky," as my father was known, was quite a lady's man, but Sara was strictly brought up–she was really a religious addict–and she wouldn't sleep with him, even if she was his secretary. So he had to marry her.

     I was born, 1936, in St. Louis. Dad had lost his little factories and was one of the 25% unemployed in this country where the streets were paved with gold.

There was a rumor of a job in St. Louis, but when that didn't pan out, Sara found succor in Bensonhurst, where her father and mother and all her sisters now lived. No more Lower East Side. Brooklyn now. So I spent ages 1 and 2 in Brooklyn.

     Still no job. So, in 1939, the Brilliant Family bought Dad a car (a '39 Pontiac) and a farm. And I got brought up in Franklin Township, New Jersey, a two-hour drive from Bensonhurst through the Holland Tunnel. It was "back-and-forth" even though gasoline was soon rationed.

     I think had the Depression not come, had I been a typical bright Jewish boy from the Lower East Side, had there been no farm, I'd be a boring college professor today, like my oldest friend, Herr Professor Goldstein, whom I've known since he was a freshman in Brooklyn College. But I had a garden at age three, and learned from Brownie my cow and Spotty, my Beagle dog, from the farming families on Davidson Road, an 8-acre family farm, two miles from Bound Brook, in Central Jersey, on the Raritan River and its Canal, ten miles from New Brunswick where our farming co-op was. Mom saw to it the shochet came regularly (for ritual slaughter of the animals)–chickens and eggs were the cash crop, a smart move when World War II came along.

     And when WW II ended, they sold the farm, alas, and I was moved back to Brooklyn, where the family bought an apartment house in Boro Park. That only lasted two years, for Dad finally got a job, in (ugh) Camden, New Jersey. So I got to go to the worst high school in the history of education–and in the worst city in america. Later, I'll tell you all about that. And how a hoodlum like me became a poet and a printer and a publisher, just like Camden's Walt Whitman.

January 3, 2013

From my Out Journal today:

JOURNAL OUT: January 3, 2013

I'll begin four full days out starting tomorrow! Mo wants some relief from my living here in Glenwood Coffee & Books–and she needs space, time, room in her head to figure out all her plans and layouts for the New Year. She also needs some relief from worrying about me all the time. She worries a bad 'un will break into this retail store, little dreaming someone lives herein, and she will arrivetop find me dead on the floor, my head bashed in. She looks me over and owrries I'm tired and worn out. That the punk rock music she brings in is driving me crazy . . .

     "Mo," I tell her, "I'm fine. I'm happy. I;m content. All is well. Don't worry!"

     She worries.

     "Mo, what can I do?"

     "You can go away," she says, in years. And she asks me to leave, just for a few days, so she can "get on with it."

     Of course I say, "Fine," although I'm a little shocked. She loves me, she worries about me, so she wants me to get lost?

     What will I tell my friends? Of course they'll all assume Mo can't stand me, maybe I grabbed her ass, and she made me go away!

     "The landlord is doing some rennovations," I tell my friends, "I have to move out for several days."

     "What will become of Glenwood the Cat?" they want to know.

     "Uh? Well, uh, Mo is taking care of Glenwood," I say inspired.

     My fellow Unitarian congregants, The Minkoffs, Craig and Lyn, are nice enough to take me for four days and four nights, January 4-5-6-7.

     I'll miss banging away on my computer in all these journals I'm in the midst of. Fortunately, I only yesterday completed printing another one, Occupy Journal so I can take that with me and begin sewing it. One hundred copies, first printing. It will take half a week of solid sewing.

     And I have a book I want to read, Feminist Politics and Human Nature by Alison M. Jaggar, a forgotten book written after the fabulous 1970s decade, when intellectual women were still activists, revolutionaries, artists, in there! Now, of course, all those Second Wavers are conservative as hell, making hay in Academia–behaving just like palominos instead of mules.*

     Alison M. Jaggar–I wonder what became of her?–was a professor of philosophy, and the Political Science gurus wouldn't let her teach a course in "political theory," telling the Dean of Arts & Sciences she must stick to Philosophy and leave "Theory" to The Political Science Department. So she published her "course," and it's a good one, in which she codifies the first decade of feminist theory into four ideologies: liberal feminism; traditional Marxism; radical feminism; and socialist feminism. She quite properly decides that socialist feminism was the best option, but of course by now we know that feminists and Feminism opted for the worst, "liberal feminism." Probably Dr. Jagger did, too!!!

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* "At first the two burros had tried to find the mule who had told them, back on the farm, about the benefits due them, thinking that there was something they had not understood, or, perhaps, some further effort they might make in order to achieve them. But they did not find the mule and one of their neighbors told them that he had been made Minister of Education. And one evening, on his way from his daytime to his night-time job, the father had seen the mule coming down the steps of some government building, carrying a calfskin briefcase and dressed in a silk suit–looking, in fact, just like a palomino."

Teo Savory, "Little Brown Burros," from A Clutch of Fables (Greensboro: Unicorn Press, 1977), page 26

 Say, here's a handmade Christmas Card, my friend and fellow Occupier, Kate, sent me last week. Pretty neat, just like Kate herself!