A titled name

I've never been big on titles.  I have a doctorate in history, but I don't want to be called Dr. Matthews.  In an informal context (like birthday cards), I sometimes sign my name "Jas. Matthews, Esq.," in which "Esquire" actually means someone without a title!

The whole business of monarchy and titles doesn't appeal to me. (I'd turn Canada into a republic with no hesitation.) To me, "nobility" isn't a class of people but a class of behavior.  There's something pitiful about people who think having a title with their name means they're at some higher level.

Folk music

I've always liked folk music.  When I was young I often watched the Irish Rovers on TV. (We had their album The Unicorn and their live album.) Will Millar would end the show by saying "May you be half an hour in heaven before the Devil knows you're dead!"

I also watched a show with Tommy Makem and the Newfoundland group Ryan's Fancy.  At the end of that show Tommy Makem would say things like "May your cat have a long tail!" and "May all your duck eggs have double yolks!"

I also know some Scottish folk songs, having heard Gaelic songs from the summers we spent at the Gaelic College in Cape Breton.  And I love Robert Burns' Scots dialect songs, like the rest of the world does.

And I like the songs of Pete Seeger, a big figure in the 1960s folk revival.  He's one of my big heroes in real life.  During World War II fellow folk singer Woody Guthrie put a label on his guitar saying "This machine kills fascists." Seeger's banjo says "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender." (I also love Guthrie's songs, like the one that goes, "I ain't got a home in this world any more.")

Puzzles

(A subject I suggested.)

When I was little, we had some jigsaw puzzles.  There was one that made a picture of a canoer in the forest waking up in the morning and seeing a huge moose looming above him.  We also had one that formed a map of Canada, including a picture of a Mountie.  And there was a really challenging one, with thousands of pieces, that we got in England.  Its shape was round instead of rectangular, and it formed a group of pictures of old English inns.

I've done crossword puzzles from a pretty early age.  I came to like diagramless crosswords especially, for the extra challenge.  Today I subscribe to the New York Times crosswords, the only part of that paper worth paying for.  They have the easiest daily puzzles on Monday, and it gets progressively harder all the way to the hardest on Saturday.  I just do Fridays and Saturdays because the rest are too easy.  I used to do their famous Sunday crossword, on the chance that it would have an extra challenge like a rebus, but I've lost the habit.

I like a wide range of puzzles.  Sometimes I'll get a puzzle magazine with extra features, like a skillogram where you draw a mystery picture based on little sections.  I used to like logic puzzles ("Who drinks water?  Who owns the zebra?") but I've lost interest in them in recent years.

I've never got into sudoku.  But one Japanese puzzle I especially like is o'ekaki.  There they give you a grid with little squares and you have to figure out which to fill and which to leave empty, based on the length of the filled segments in each row and column, but they don't tell you the lengths of the unfilled segments.  You have to figure it out with logical thinking:  for example, if a filled segment is over half the length of its row, the row has to have some filled squares in the middle.  And when you're finished, you've created a picture!  A left-brain process with a right-brain result.

Horses

I've never ridden a horse.  They make me kind of nervous, because they're so big!  Elephants are bigger, but their size is so great that they're like a different order of magnitude.  Horses, on the other hand, are big on a human scale so they make a bigger impression.

I do admire people who can ride.  I've long found horsewomen attractive.  Maybe it's because for some women, mannish riding clothes can actually make them look more feminine!  Sort of like Marlene Dietrich in a top hat and a tuxedo.

Having a pet is always a responsibility. (I've never had one.) But imagine what a responsibility a horse is!  Its combining the responsibility of pets with the responsibility of driving a car. (I've never learned to drive either.) I once saw this movie serial where someone jumped a horse through a big glass window.  It wasn't real glass, of course, but the horse didn't know it!  He just trusted his rider not to put him in harm's way.  That's impressed on me a rider's responsibility.

How's your junk?

My mother collected antiques a lot.  I don't recall that we've ever sold them though we do sell our used books.  We have some porcelain figurines of little kids from a line that was originally designed by some German nun, which were mentioned in a book titled The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste.

We have a lot of junk down in the basement  We accumulated quite a few Parker Brothers board games, and I wonder if they're still down there somewhere.  I also wonder if we still have The Book of Knowledge, a children's encyclopedia from about a century ago that Mother had when she was a little girl.

And there's some junk in my room.  Some years ago I bought that mousetrap board game out of sheer curiosity, and it's up in my closet.  I also have a big cowboy hat that I bought from Malabar Costumes back when I was taking dancing lessons at the Arthur Murray studio a dozen years ago when they had a western-themed dance party. (I also bought a handlebar mustache and rented a poncho.) I think I also have a couple of cheap dance trophies there.

Lately my sister Moira has taken the lead with our used book business and removed several children's books from our list because they aren't worth much.  My room now has several books that she wanted to throw out, but they have sentimental value to me, since I read them when I was young.

I guess our family has "pack rat" tendencies.  I isn't so much that we're attached to old things, more that getting rid of them takes too much energy.

Learning music

When I was young, I played the piano.  I got most of my lessons from my sister Moira.  I did the Leila Fletcher and John Thompson and Michael Aaron series of piano books for learners.  I also went through some books of study pieces titled Technic Is Fun. (Wishful thinking.)  I got up to the seventh or eighth grade before my priorities changed. We had a book of piano pieces based on Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker suite, and I recall that I played the Arab Dance very well.  Another piece I did well was "The Policeman," from Healey Willan's Character Sketches of Old London.

For a while I tried to play saxophone in the school band, but the music teacher had it in for me.  I missed two practices for reasons that were out of my control, and he took to saying in front of the whole band, "So, Mr. Matthews, you decided to come today!" After one rehearsal where I felt I'd been singled out for vitriol I turned in my instrument (with my parents' approval). He wasn't pleased, but he didn't try to dissuade me.

I also played the clarinet for a little while.  Once I went to a week-long music camp where I was stupid enough to think I knew something about how to play.  At the start of the first class, the teacher was telling us how to tongue (touching the reed with your tongue), and warning against "frog-tonguing." That happens when the bottom of your jaw sticks out as your tongue.  Then he got us all to tongue.

A moment later the teacher asked me to stand up and tongue, which I did.  He then said, "This is what I mean by frog-tonguing." A minute later I was in tears.  We hadn't even got to playing notes yet, and I was already being exhibited as a negative example.  He said, "I don't want to discourage you by doing this," but how was I supposed to feel?  Encouraged or just indifferent? (Later on he took me aside and complained about my attitude.)

Most of the piano books I played are packed away downstairs.  We still have a piano and keep it tuned, so I'd like to bring them up someday.  I'd especially like to play the Japanese-style pieces in Yashinao Nakada's Japanese Festival because I've since learned to read the Japanese language.

In recent years I've taken singing lessons.  I sing in an Italian choir and a non-professional opera chorus. (We're putting on Carmen next month.) I also sing karaoke.

Evolution

I've never felt any reason to doubt the theory of evolution. (I once met a Jehovah's Witness who said "You can't expect a dog to give birth to cats," but that didn't convince me.) I don't see how the Bible is so incompatible with such scientific theories anyway.

On the subject of personal evolution, I suppose that people can change.  But I wouldn't bet the rent money on it.  I guess I've changed somewhat over the years.  But I change when I want to, not when people try to make me.

On the subject of political evolution, I get impatient with liberals who are quick to condemn revolutionaries and expect the whole world to wait for pressing problems to be evolved away.  They often talk about "the importance of nuance." But I say, "Change by any means necessary!"

Do I believe that things are getting better?  Yes, except when they aren't.  What depresses me are the people who think only in terms of what not to do, and hope that if we just avoid risk, things will get better naturally.  I say that sometimes you have to risk making a bad situation worse if there's to be any real hope of making it better.

Rules: good or bad?

When I was a schoolboy they once showed us a classroom film called Holiday From Rules. (You can find it on Youtube.) It's about a group of kids who are sick of rules, so they get put on a desert island without rules, resulting in anarchy and the kids learning the value of rules.  Micromanagement vs. anarchy seems a false choice to me.

In my family I don't recall that we had that many explicit rules, but do remember there was a rule against reading at the dinner table.  When Jimmy Carter got elected president, I was surprised to learn that in his family it was allowed! (Someone said, "If Amy Carter reads at the table, she should try reading Emily Post or Amy Vanderbilt.")

Personally, I respect people who are clear about the rules they're insisting on right from the start.  What I don't like is people who hope you'll be going by their rules without being told of them, so you only find out what the rules are when you've broken them.

Of course, sometimes people make rules just for the sake of making rules!  I read somewhere that in the 1950 the United States Marine Corps decided that grunts should all eat with one hand.  I fail to see how they're a stronger force with that rule then they'd be without it. (The 1950s was the golden age of micromanagement.)

If I could be anywhere in the world right now...

If could be anywhere in the world right now, I'd be in London, England.  In a museum.  In the National Gallery.  In the section with the eighteenth-century paintings.

Some of my favorite paintings are in that eighteenth-century area.  They have a lot of Gainsboroughs, including one of a well-off couple out for a stroll, looking like they own the place! (They probably did.) There's the biting satire of Hogarth's "Marriage a la Mode," about an arranged marriage that ends in cuckolding and suicide.  There's Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington, completely free of vainglory:  he looks haunted, bringing to mind his own quote, "A battle lost is the only thing worse than a battle won."

One painting I particularly remember is by Joseph Wright of Derby.  It shows a man conducting a scientific demonstration where you put a bird in a chamber and pump out all the air so the bird can't fly, to show the properties of air. (Tough luck for the bird.) The spectators include some little girls, who watch the proceedings with horror and turn away.  In a way they see things more clearly than the grownups.  It's a painting that dramatizes the dark side of the Enlightenment.

Of course, the National Gallery has a lot of other stuff that I like.  In the nineteenth-century section there's a French painting of a tiger in the jungle terrified by a storm.  In the seventeenth-century section there's a picture of Jesus facing a High Priest with an unusually intelligent look.  And the entrance has some delightful modern mosaics, including one of the twelve Greek muses among whom you can recognize Virginia Woolf and Greta Garbo.