"Magnificent Desolation" by Buzz Aldrin

Buzz Aldrin's latest memoir, "Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon" holds nothing back as Aldrin reveals his struggles with depression and alcoholism following his voyage to the moon. Indeed, the events of July 20, 1969 occupy only about 20 percent of the book, the rest dealing with the inevitable letdown that followed the Apollo 11 mission. This book is honest and, though not as well-written as his previous memoir "Men from Earth," authentic and, for the most part, humble.

This is not to say the book is without flaws. There are places where a little more editing could have been used. Aldrin's seeming disdain in some places for medication to treat depression might be seen as blase. There are times where the moral seems to be that all that is required for a man to beat depression is the love of a good woman. The final third of the book often seems to be promotion for SpaceShare, a non-profit venture to promote civilian space travel.

Still, it is hard to fault him in his zeal for space travel and exploration, and as a rallying cry for progress in these fields "Magnificent Desolation" is valuable. One can forgive the occasional lapses in his humility, such as when he refers to himself as "a visionary often stymied by a bureaucratic maze" (311) if only because he is one of twelve people ever to have set foot on another world. And any voice attempting to rouse us to the greater exploration of space should be considered.

"I believe," he concludes, "that mankind must explore or expire. We must venture outward" Amen.

The Auctioneer (part two of two)

Part one here...

A pod of people formed on both sides of the first pile. The auctioneer set his hand on the tobacco, as though blessing it before it was sent out into the world. He began by calling out the number of the pile and an opening price, raising it by watching the subtle gestures of the buyers who stood around the pile. Within 10 seconds the pile was sold, for $1.94 a pound and he had moved on to the next pile. As he moved, another man called out the final price while a third reached for the card, wrote something on it, and threw it back on the pile.

The auctioneer seemed to fall into a trance, nudging the price gently higher until each pile sold. I watched in awe as he proceeded from pile to pile down the row, never running out of breath, always in the same cadence, raising the assembly like a charismatic preacher with his subtle shifts of tone. When we reached the end of the first row, we performed a precise maneuver; the auctioneer turned to face the pile of tobacco behind him while the buyers, opposite and outside the aisle walked around, like the pencil on the end of a compass. It was then, as the yin and yang of the auction shifted that I understood.

There are no coincidences. One night, not long before, I had been channel surfing between the halves of a basketball game. I stopped on one of the specialty channels in the nether regions of cablespace, transfixed by the image of a Tibetan lama, robed in saffron chanting over a mandala. Relaxing into the steady rhythm of his prayer, I was unaware that my then-girlfriend had entered the room until she leaned over the back of the sofa, her hair falling over my shoulder. She kissed my cheek and said, “I wonder what he’s selling.” I looked at her and raised an eyebrow. She smiled the smile of seduction and said, “Sounds like he’s having an auction.”

I turned off the television.

* * *

As I stood outside the knot of people around the auctioneer, I realized what had brought me here. I knew then why I would spend my coming days wandering from small town to small town across America, attending, when I could, a tobacco auction here or a farm auction there, perhaps an estate up for the bidding or a parcel of land for commercial development, listening to the singsong of the auctioneer’s cant. And finally, upon reaching the sea, perhaps voyaging across it to India or Tibet to hear the other holy men chant their chant, offer their wares. From there, perhaps, to the infinity I had just glimpsed.

In that moment I understood what the auctioneer could not have understood about himself, that it was not tobacco or drug forfeitures or pop art that he auctioned, but attachment. The auctioneer’s twang sang out to me, to all of us, as the buyers assembled thought they purchased a farm commodity, but were actually accruing parts of the divine. And the auctioneer, oblivious to his role, an unknowing boddhisattva, the catalyst, continued. He was an old man, who had surely been doing this for quite some time, selling his self and with that loss of self gaining entrance to another plane. Perhaps he would be reincarnated as an auctioneer in a larger venue, perhaps at Sotheby’s or Christie’s where the speedy murmur would give way to more measured and aristocratic tones. Or perhaps that was bad karma; perhaps he had already been there and this was his reward.

Maybe, I thought, he’ll simply go to the top. Moving up, becoming a lama himself, an auctioneer of his own soul, bringing upward along the great chain of being those whose lives he touched as this man in North Carolina. Or was this his final stop, having acquired and then discarded sufficient divinity, having peered over the wall into the jeweled city but not crossing into it, coming back to tell us all the way, giving pieces of himself to serve as a compass? I pondered these questions, but dared not ask him for fear of breaking the spell. Instead, as I left the building and found my way to the road that would carry me to Tennessee, I could only content myself with images of his next life, auctioning his divinity to the most willing bidders.

"Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue" by John McWhorter

This is an intriguing little book whose goal is to advance some interesting arguments about English, indeed a magnificent, bastard tongue. Unlike other books I have read on the topic, OMBT does not approach the history of English from the standpoint of vocabulary (though there is some at the end) but from the grammar. Specifically, he attempts to account for some of the quirks of English that are not easily accounted for by mainstream narratives of the development of the language.

English, in John McWhorter's view is a language spoken by Germans, heavily influences by Celtic-speakers, battered by Vikings and heir to a rich influence from Semitic languages.

He leads with his strongest argument: that, far from having a negligible influence limited to only a few words, the Celtic languages spoken at the time of the German invasions of England left their fingerprints everywhere. The most important evidence for this is the meaningless "do" (as in "Did you hear that Celtic languages exerted a lot of influence on English?) and the "ing" marker used to denote the present progressive. These features are not present in any Indo-European language, except for the Celtic languages.

From there he continues to show how Vikings ruling in England and speaking Northumbrian were instrumental in eliminating the case endings from the Germanic language of the English, leading to the simplified grammatical structure we have today. English is the least inflected language of the European languages, and it is because of these Viking influences.

Finally, and most controversially, he advances a notion that Proto-Germanic, the mother tongue of English and the other Germanic languages, was heavily influenced through contact with at least one of the Semitic languages, possibly Phoenecian. One-third of the vocabulary of Germanic languages is not easily traceable to the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European roots. Among these are words heavy in certain consonantal sounds and those which mark a change in tense by changing the vowel.

Along the way, McWhorter takes issue with the notion of "bad" grammar, scoring points against the whole notion in a way that makes this reviewer a little uncomfortable. He also effectively demolishes the notion that grammar is a wholesale representation of the way speakers of a language group think. The meat of the book is the three arguments above, and they are presented in the order of their strength beginning with the strongest and using the momentum to carry through the argument about Semitic influence. I am not enough of a linguist to evaluate them in terms of linguistics, but all seem worth considering.

Satisfying through and through, "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue" is certainly worth reading. McWhorter approaches a subject that could easily be subsumed in dry technical jargon and presents it with humor throughout, while not straying from his argument. Anyone interested in the history of this wonderful, messed-up language we know and love should find much to enjoy here.

Yorktown

A column by Jim Jenkins in this morning's News & Observer has me thinking about Yorktown and the importance of the place in my personal and (dare I say?) professional life. Not that this is the only time I have thought about Yorktown lately. In preparing my Master's thesis for North Carolina State University, I felt the need to pause and reflect upon those people who influenced me along in my continuing journey as a historian. The first of these was my father and it was through innumerable walks with him not only at Yorktown, but also at nearby Newport News Park, itself home to earthworks from the Civil War battle of Yorktown. Nearly every weekend, sometimes both days, for four or five years we visited these places, the walks ending on the precipice of puberty and the struggle for autonomy that begins then.

Those walks were my first history lesson, and one of the forces that led me to become a historian, albeit of medieval Europe. They also helped instill a love of country that endures despite constant disappointment with those in power of whatever party, as well as the respect and admiration for those soldiers and patriots who, for complicated and often contradictory reasons, fought for America's independence.

As the Fourth of July approaches it seems appropriate to think about this and just how fragile the seemingly solid edifice of history is. It would be easy to look back, see how things happened, and think that they could not have happened otherwise. But Yorktown offers a different lesson. The situation was precarious. Had the French fleet of Comte de Grasse not defeated the British fleet which had come to relieve Cornwallis, cutting off not only reinforcement, but also escape, the result could have been vastly different. Consideration of how close-fought this was, of how close-fought every pivotal moment is, should be a corrective against hubris, or claims of divine favor.

As I reach milestones on my personal journey as a historian, it is nice to pause and reconnect with those places that were important along the way. It is heartening to see that the place that touched my life so profoundly continues to touch the lives of others.

The Auctioneer (part one of two)

This is a story I first wrote sometime in the mid-90s, and which I revisit every few years to tweak, mostly because I seem to meet a dead end when I start a new one. I have the writing bug right now, so I am trying anything to jump start.

As I stood among the pallets of tobacco wrapped in burlap and baling wire, sweltering in the summer heat and enraptured by the singsong mumbling of the auctioneer, I had my epiphany. I looked heavenward—as though expecting a sign, but seeing only the movement of the large, steel ceiling fans in their futile struggle against the August air, their blades fused by motion as they spun at full tilt—teetering on the edge of awareness. On the periphery of perception, at the edges of my narrowing world, I heard the auctioneer rattling on and on, moving from pallet to pallet along the aisle, the rhythm of the words carrying the bidders to the climax of the game. And when the congregation reached the end of the second row, after a scant fifteen minutes of instruction, I understood.

When I first approached the building, really a large shed made of corrugated tin with a long-long faded and hard-weathered white paint job, I could not have told anyone what I was doing there. The morning air was still damp on the way to oppressive and dew glistened in the grass and in the trees. Passing through the farm town on the state highway, I had passed the warehouse and its sign bearing the name of the cooperative under whose auspices the sale was held. The sign, welcoming as at any church, read, “Sale Today, 9 A.M-?, Come on in!” I might have ignored the sudden curiosity the sign awakened had not my stomach grumbled, reminding me that it was time for breakfast.

* * *

The country diner was a country diner. There is really nothing to compare the species to except for other members of the species. A formica counter with spinning seats, topped in red vinyl; a handful of tables topped with red checked tablecloths, four chairs to a table; the smell of pork and eggs and hash browns in the air, so thick you feel your arteries clog when you open the door. I love a country diner. The place was crowded and as I sat down at the counter to order my own little portion of excess, I listened to the sound of the room.

Most of the conversation was about the upcoming auction, and how this could be the last. They talked about past sales as well. Some of them were, or at least looked like, ancient farmers, their faces permanently weathered by the sun and so on. I won’t bother you with details; the type has been described before and I have no special gift for faces. Their talk was the talk of old men, of better days when the auctions had real meaning, before the conglomerates began negotiating directly with the farmers, before the allotments had been bought up by the government. Soon the auctions, already a pale shadow of auctions past, would be extinct. They despaired that their way of life would endure.

* * *

Perhaps it was this despair that drove me to follow most of them back to the warehouse to watch the sale. The representatives of the tobacco companies had already arrived and were picking over the merchandise, rubbing it between their fingers and inhaling the scent. It struck me as futile, since the sweet smell of fresh tobacco was omnipresent, overpowering every olfactory nerve in the place. More than once a deep inhalation led to sneezing, the sound clearly marking me as an outsider.

Off to the side, serenely sitting in a lawn chair and stroking an old coon hound, taking everything in, was a man later revealed as the auctioneer. Occasionally someone would approach him and he would respond with a nod, looking at the supplicant and through him at the activity. They quickly realized that he was paying little attention to them, though his face never betrayed the slightest annoyance. With no apparent signal, he unfolded himself and walked over to the first pile. The auction had begun.

On to part two...