So that was my religious journey, such as it was.  By 1970, it was over (although I have to admit to a year of backsliding into belief in the late 70s).  Looking back, I'm struck by how short the period was: from the time I told the minister I couldn't sign the pledge in the workbook to my skipping from one religion to another to abandoning religion altogether; it comprised just a few years.  For over forty years now, I've been a contented atheist.  As I said last time, no god, no religion, no heaven, no hell, no soul, no spirit.  It drives me crazy when believers say, "Well, you may not be religious, but I can tell you're a deeply spiritual person."  Nope.  Not a spiritual bone in my body.  I know many atheists who are interested in debating and defending our position.  Just as I was surprised by the existence of an Atheist of the Year award, I was pleasantly surprised and heartened to discover that the park closest to my house is sponsored by the Atheist Community of Topeka.  But except when provoked or when talking about organized religion and its effects, I am content to leave philosophical debates about god's existence to others.  I don't have an open mind on the subject, and I assume others don't either.  Occasionally, though, the subject would intersect with what I was teaching (you can't understand American literature, said Robert Frost, hardly an enthusiast for religion, without knowing the Bible), so here are some random examples of what everyone now calls "teachable moments" (a phrase that seems awkward and inexact to me):

When I first started teaching freshman comp. in 1966, there was an essay in the text by the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich.  I loved teaching the essay to my generally religious Oklahoma students.  Tillich defines God (the capital letter is just for convention) as one's "ultimate concern."  He argues, unconvincingly, I think, that since everyone has an ultimate concern, everyone has a god.  More effectively, since God is infinite, man is finite, and the distance between the infinite and the finite is itself infinite, man must find ways of approaching an otherwise inscrutable God.  This he does through myth and symbols.  The Bible must be read in this light: a way of approaching the infinite; thus, anyone who reads the Bible literally is committing idolatry.  I'm not sure the students were convinced, but I took a perverse pleasure in watching their reactions.

There was also an essay by Martin Buber, who defined God as the Eternal Thou.  Buber talks about the replacement of Thou with It, of I-Thou relationships with I-It ones, and he describes this as the "eclipse of God," a phrase also used by Emily Dickinson.  For Buber, the fault lies with man.  For Dickinson, it is God who "hid his rare life from our gross eyes" in what she describes as a "fond Ambush."  This is a poem that begins, "I know that He exists."  What could be more definitive than that?  And she ends her affirmation with a period--a rare mark of punctuation in Dickinson's poetry.  The short poem darkens quickly, as the oxymoron "fond Ambush" would suggest.  We've all seen enough bad Westerns to know that it isn't the good guys who lie in ambush.  And by the end, if there is a god, perhaps it's better that he has been eclipsed.

Dickinson has much in common with Frost, whose sonnet "Design" (and what could be more traditional and designed than a sonnet?) takes the most common argument for the existence of God (the argument from design) and turns it on its head.  For twelve lines, Frost describes a scene of morning predation (a spider eating on a moth while perched on the ironically named flower a heal-all), and then in the thirteenth line suggests that if this synecdochal scene is designed, it's "a design of darkness to appall."  And then Frost concludes, as if a merest afterthought, "if design governs in a thing so small."  The thought that there is no designer, so horrifying to the religious, seems less terrifying than the notion that the world is indeed designed.

To give the other side its due, Flannery O'Connor, devoutly Catholic herself, turns an atheist's most common argument against the existence of God (if there is an all-knowing, powerful, benevolent, etc., god, why is there evil in the world) and uses it for her own religious purposes in her story "Good Country People."  The main character of the story, Hulga (who has changed her name from Joy) is a nihilist with a prosthetic leg.  A mysterious stranger, suggestively named Manley Pointer, arrives, supposedly selling Bibles but with other conquests in mind.  By the end of the story, he is revealed as pure evil, and Hulga's nihilism leaves her literally and figuratively without a leg to stand on.  For O'Connor, evil is indeed real, and if you believe in nothing, you're as helpless as Hulga to fight it. 

And while I'm giving the gods their due, it was always fun to teach St. Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God.  Anselm first stipulates a definition of God: that of which nothing greater can be conceived.  And then we list his attributes: he's good.  How good?  He must be all-good because if he weren't, we could conceive of something greater and therefore would have contradicted our definition.  He must be powerful.   How powerful?  All powerful.  And the list goes on until finally we get to this attribute: existence > non-existence.  Therefore, existence must, by our definition, be an attribute of God. 

But all of these examples and many more, including almost anything by the later Mark Twain, were interesting or fun to teach, but only reinforced what I already believed if they were by writers like Dickinson, Twain, or Frost or didn't touch my beliefs at all if they were by writers like O'Connor.  I was (and am) the kind of reader that Flannery O'Connor most complained about: I think "Good Country People" is a great, witty, thoughtful story--but I don't believe a word of what it's saying.  O'Connor hated readers like me, evidence, she always thought, that the story had failed. 

And that's as deep (and as haphazard) as my interest in philosophical debates about god's existence goes.  There are more interesting things to contemplate: in an hour SCOTUS reveals its health care decision and the guy who tiled the bathrooms will come to seal the grouting.  To amplify Richard Wilbur, love (and disease and justice and practicality) calls us to things of this world.

If there were few Catholics in Story City, there were no Jews.  Well, there was a moment of ambivalence for the good Protestants when Abe Mezvinsky, a Jewish grocer from Ames (and the grandfather of Chelsea Clinton's husband), opened the town's first supermarket.  But he didn't live in Story City, and somehow convenience and practicality trumped "moral qualms."  At about that time I went off to the State College of Iowa (now the University of Northern Iowa).  I have always had nothing but affectionate memories of my time at SCI, though recently, looking back, I don't think I got a great education there.  I remember only two professors that were outstanding (one more for his lovable eccentricity than for what he taught), and the atmosphere in the English department was extremely chilly.  The chair was a pompous blowhard to put it tactfully.  I'm not unbiased, as he gave me a C in Shakespeare.  When I went to talk with him about the grade, one of his three secretaries informed me that he never met with students.  We were all so naive that we accepted that as if it were normal.  There was no advising, and when it came time to apply to graduate schools, I had no understanding of the process.  I applied only to Virginia and Duke, and, although I was accepted at both, I couldn't begin to meet the tuition costs.  The only faculty member who took an interest in my plight was a new Jewish American literature professor, Joel Salzberg, who steered me toward large public universities that had teaching assistantships.  So I wrote last minute applications and chose the University of Oklahoma for no particular reason that I can remember.

If I was happy during my three years at SCI, I loved my six years at OU.  First of all, the atmosphere in the department, which I assumed would be like that at SCI only perhaps even more formal, was the complete opposite.  The professors were friendly, open, and relaxed.  The department chair, Victor Elconin, was a courtly, elderly Jewish professor (and later my disseration adviser) who was always available for both serious and informal chats.  At the time, OU had a very large Jewish population.  There were three Jewish fraternities and three Jewish sororities, all with their own houses.  After Oklahoma and Texas, the next highest states sending students were New York, New Jersey, and Illinois--almost all of the students Jewish.  The best and most influential professor I had was David Levy in the history department.  He had co-edited the letters of Justice Brandeis; that sort of project fascinated me and later helped lead me to undertake the years long project of co-editing Karl Menninger's letters.  For a naive, small-town Iowa kid, my new Jewish friends and professors seemed to represent a different world of sophistication.  Friday nights, the Hillel campus center was a  hip place to hang out.  I had my English and French department friends--a wonderful, smart, lively group; my gay friends (I had finally come out, and in the era of "if it feels good, do it," coming out had been relatively easy and a huge relief); my hippie friends; and my Jewish friends (there was quite an overlap between the last two groups). 

Jill, a student in the first class I ever taught and a friend still, taught me dozens of Yiddish words and phrases, and, since I love languages, I remember them all.  When it came time to do my disseration, I chose Bernard Malamud.  I spent the year before actually writing reading Jewish American literature--from Bret Harte (surprise! Mark Twain said of Harte that he was "a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward . . . [who] conceals his Jewish birth as if it were a disgrace"), Abraham Cahan, Henry Roth, and Michael Gold through the great explosion of Jewish literature after WWII, both popular (Wouk, Wallace, Uris) and literary (too many to begin listing).  Malamud was a perfect dissertation subject: a small but interesting body of work and a finite amount of criticism.  I had an original thesis, which I rode to death in the disseration, novel by novel, story by story, in completely old-fashioned, straightforward explication.  Once it was finished and defended, I put it in a drawer, and I've never looked at it again. 

Years later, I met my brilliant and militantly atheist Jewish friend Norma; she prides herself on being the second of three generations of atheist (more than just secular) Jews.  She was kicked out of AOL chatrooms after infuriating the members of a Jewish forum.  She used to worry about the strangers I met in gay chatrooms; I worried more about her after reading some of the vitriolic and threatening responses she got from religious Jews to her arguments.  Norma's daughter-in-law (Julia Sweeney, "Pat" from the old SNL) was named Atheist of the Year, some years ago at a convention of atheists in Kansas City.  Who knew we had conventions?  Norma thought I was incredibly amusing: a sheygetz from the Midwest who knew more Yiddish than almost anyone she knew.  Once, to my great pleasure, she compared me to the Jewbird of Malamud's story of that name--a scraggly black bird, resembling a crow, who appears in the apartment of a New York Jewish family, announcing that he's a Jewbird.

But I didn't finally convert.  I talked to the rabbi in Norman about conversion, but being attracted to culture or history or personalities isn't the same as believing.  And I didn't believe. 

Since 1990, all the important men in my life (with one exception) have been Muslim, both Arab and non-Arab (Pakistani, Iranian).  It's important to remember, I think, in our highly charged policitcal atmosphere that only 20% of Muslims in the world are Arab.  So no one can say I haven't been exposed to Western religions--and have rejected them all, as I have the whole notion of god, theism, and religion.  No god, no heaven, no hell, no soul, no spirit--but yet another posting on the subject next time.

It feels as if it's time to do a posting or two about the "atheist's perspective."  Some background: in my small Iowa hometown there were four churches, three Lutheran and one Methodist.  There were so few Catholics that the only nearby Catholic church was in the country and served people from several small towns.  Most of the town was Norwegian Lutheran, and the Methodist church was something of a catch-all for those who weren't Lutheran (and often thought the Lutherans were suspiciously close to being Catholics--such was the time).  My parents were nominally Methodist, though they weren't very active.  They were believers, but I never remember them going to church at the same time.  For a few months, my father would go; for a few months, it was my mother; and then for a while neither would go.  For a kid in a small town, though, the church provided a lot of entertainment.  One night there was choir practice, another there was youth fellowship (I have no memory of what we actually did at YF meetings, but I went for years).  Sunday morning there was Sunday school and then, like all my non-Lutheran friends, I sang in the choir during church.  One night a week there was Cub/Boy/Explorer scouts; one or two nights there were football or basketball games.  It kept us busy and made for a fun childhood.

Still, it was all social for me and most of my friends.  When we were thirteen, we all went to catechism classes, at the end of which we were "catechized"--like confirmation, but without the Lutheran or Catholic connotations.  We had a workbook, and at the end there was a statement that we had "accepted Jesus Christ as our personal lord and savior," which we were supposed to sign.  I must have been rebellious even at thirteen because I told the minister that I hadn't accepted Him (I'll keep the capitalization just to avoid ambiguity) and couldn't sign.  The minister began reasonably enough, trying to convince me that of course I believed, but I couldn't be budged.  He got angrier and angrier and finally said the equivalent of "I don't care whether you believe or not.  Just sign the book so we can get on with it."  I had another run-in with the minister when three of us, all Scouts, decided that we'd get the God and Country Award.  All of us had gone through years of scouting because it was another way of socializing and every spring we got to travel someplace for a week-long camping trip.  None of us took the Scouts seriously--we didn't try for merit badges and mocked anyone who actually got enough badges to become an Eagle Scout.  So I don't know why the idea struck us to work for the God and Country award.  One of the requirements was that we put in a certain number of "service" hours.  The minister interpreted service to mean that we'd clean the parsonage, so for several weeks, every Saturday morning we would spend three or four hours scrubbing the floors in the parsonage, vacuuming, etc.--whatever the minister's wife didn't want to do herself (and, of course, all this work was beneath the minister).  And every week, as soon as we got home, the minister would call and say that he had run his hand over the tops of doorframes and found dust and that we needed to come back to do the work correctly.  I think he called one too many times, as our parents finally put an end to our "service."

When I was a senior in high school, I decided to become a Catholic, and somehow I made an appointment with the priest to discuss conversion.  Someone ratted me out, and at about four o'clock on the afternoon of the appointment, the Methodist minister appeared at my house and wanted me to come out to the car.  He tried to show me the error of my ways and then asked me to get down on my knees and accept (a Protestant) Jesus Christ.  What this would have looked like--a teenager on his knees with the minister seated behind the wheel--is bizarre to say the least.  I refused on all counts, but when I explained to my parents what the visit had been about, they were horrified and said that I absolutely could not meet the priest.  But a few months later I went off to college, and once there, I went through conversion classes, was baptised a second time, and became one of those more-Catholic-than-the-Pope converts.  I think the attraction was partly just to the lavish rituals, but probably more important, I was struggling with my sexuality, and there were no psychologists in rural Iowa.  The idea of confessing and then being forgiven must have sounded therapeutic.

I had a couple of years of being devoutly Catholic, and then one night after some sort of campus Catholic get-together, an older man (probably 35 or 40, but in those days that seemed much older) asked me whether I wanted to go for a ride.  As we drove out in the country, I knew exactly what was going on.  On the one hand, I was excited that I was finally going to have my first experience (except for teen-age boys' playing around); on the other, I was already feeling terribly guilty.  We parked, we explored, I panicked.  The evening abruptly ended.  The next day I called the priest, Father Gregory, and said I needed to go to confession.  He said he had a cold and asked whether we could put it off.  I said that I really would like to talk and confess; he said he had a bad cold.  I persisted.  (I must've been a real pain to clergymen.)   So I went to the campus center and met with him, though he didn't seem to see the gravity of what for me was very confusing.  I finally said that I would like to confess, so we went through the ritual:  "Father, forgive me, for I have sinned."  He assigned some sort of penance, and I headed back to the dorm.  Somehow, though, I didn't feel as relieved as I expected.  The Church hadn't really taken the guilt away.  And then I realized that it was the Church that had given me the guilt in the first place.  Why not just do away with the middle man?  No church, no guilt.  No guilt, no need for the church.  That was the epiphany of a 20-year-old and the end of my days as a Catholic.

Next, I decide I'm Jewish, but this post is getting long, so I'll save that till next time.  I can see that becoming a happy atheist is going to take more than two entries.  I'll get there, though.

When I first began the blog in late January (and before the current 3,007 pageviews, he said proudly), it had a clear focus.  When I had finally received the correct diagnosis of my cancer in April 2011, the prognosis was 10-11 months--and the cancer had already metastasized to the bones and other organs six months earlier.  The blog seemed a good way to talk about cancer and the imminence of death from an atheist's perspective.  But after several months of being able to say cancer, shmancer, abi gesund, I've realized that the blog has become much more diffuse--a lot of entries are what has Howard read this week or what has he been thinking.  Partly, of course, it's just that--thankfully--things have been pretty stable for a long time, and it's boring (and slightly embarrassing) just to catalogue the number of my bathroom visits or how many naps I take a day.  It's fun to have the forum, and it does help keep my mind active, though it's also somewhat self-indulgent.  A reader commented that I hardly ever bring up atheism, so maybe next time I should say a few unkind words about gods and religion.

Just to stick with health matters today: for a week or so after the break from chemo, I felt quite a bit better.  My stomach was more settled, and my appetite came back.  I still needed to crash a couple of times a day, but that's been just a given for the last year.  The last few days, however, seem to be a reversion to the pre-break conditions.  Food doesn't look appealing, and I can't seem to find a good balance between Imodium and what happens when I don't take enough.  If I take too many, I spend the evening groaning from cramps--at least I think there's a cause-and-effect relationship there, though I'm not even sure about that.  (If I ever made any PMS jokes in the past, I promise never to do so again.) 

Last night, we drove to Lawrence to have drinks with our friend, Sarah--young, cute, smart--one of my hires as chair and a friend to both of us.  It was half an hour over, two hours over a Manhattan (my drink of choice, though I hardly drink at all these days) with lively conversation, and thirty minutes back.  It was a fun and invigorating evening until the ride back.  By the time I got home, I was barely functioning.  In my head, I made a list of what I had to do: change clothes, fold a little laundry that had been drying, take two pills, fill the dog's water bowl--10 or 15 minutes of "work."  And it all seemed so daunting that I just stretched out on the bed to gather my energy for those tasks.  I finally summoned my strength and got up-to-speed (which is still in first gear), and then came an hour or so of Mohamed's asking me what I wanted for dinner, which was the last thing I wanted to think about.  I ate a muffin, but even with just that in my stomach I was up a couple of times in the night. 

See why I don't write about the quotidian much?  We'll see how today goes...and the next...and the next.  And then maybe it's time to again give some serious thought to a reduction in meds--back to the old question of quality v. quantity of life.

Thursday I went to the dentist for my six-month cleaning.  This is the same dentist who two appointments ago said, "Do we even need to make another appointment?"  This time, the hygienist greeted me cheerfully with, "You look good.  I see you're still kicking."   I think the office may need a sensitivity training session.

Several posts ago, discussing the book Why Nations Fail, I mentioned that one of the authors' top ten phrases was "the iron law of oligarchy."  It's a term coined by a German historian, Robert Michels, to explain how, despite revolutions and reforms, the oligarchy retains its power.  For the authors, the phrase is too strong: it's a powerful tendency, not an iron law.  But it's a tendency that's hard to overcome.  As F. Scott Fitzgerald memorably said, "The rich get richer and the poor get children."

I came across the reference to Michels's law again this week in reading an excerpt from Chris Hayes's new book, Twilight of the Elites.  Hayes is the host of the weekend morning program "Up" on MSNBC, the most intelligent news/info show (IMHO) on TV.  In the part I read, he uses as an example of how what was meant to be pure meritocracy became another example of the powerful preserving their advantages.  Hayes is a product of the Hunter College magnet middle and high school in New York.  Students are admitted from all five boroughs solely on one criterion: the results of a test they take in sixth grade.  There are no legacies; there is no means testing.  There is no lottery, no quotas.  There is only one test, one score.  It was designed to be a system of pure meritocracy.  And what have been the results?  Because the school is so prestigious and the students who graduate have so many advantages, an entire industry of test preparation for just this one test has emerged.  Parents who have the money can pay thousands of dollars for their ten-year-old children to take classes that have no other educational goal than to prep them for this test.  Do the prep classes help?  Absolutely.  But what we know is that even the actual tests like the SAT have only one axis of predictability: students who do well on them will do well on other similar tests.  They won't have higher g.p.a.'s or assume leadership positions.  And for the Hunter magnet school the results has been ever decreasing numbers of minority and disadvantaged students and consistently increasing numbers of wealthy, already privileged students whose parents can pay for the prep.

That story, along with my comments on the unqualified Acocella being paid to write on linguistics and with some nice remarks from readers about the Bishop poem "In the Waiting Room," which I mentioned in the last post, led me to think of my own (though quite different) example.  Four times I rented a studio apartment in Paris from a woman in Los Angeles; her daughter lived in Paris and taught an occasional class at one of the "new" Paris universities created after the dissension of 1968.  These are located in the suburbs, which is where, in the reverse of the American pattern, the poor and immigrants live.  The daughter, whom I met only a couple of times, was attractive, but not exactly a deep thinker.  She was, however, having an affair with the editor of a famous American magazine, and so she was published several times.  Her first essay was deliberately provocative: she argued that the classroom was an erotically charged space (fraught and imbricated) and that the latent sexuality was a positive good that ought to be encouraged, especially in relationships between professors and students.  The first time we met in person, she told me that she was writing an article on modern poetry for the magazine, and since she knew nothing about poetry of any kind, she wanted to pick my brain.  I asked her whether by modern poetry she meant Modernist or something more general, but she had no idea what the question meant.  And so we met, after she had asked me to draw up a reading list for her so she could get her feet wet.  Our dinner meeting got off to a bad start when she told me she had begun her reading with the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, understood none of it, and thought it was therefore awful poetry.  She particularly disliked "In the Waiting Room."  I love Bishop, and I love that poem.  But, as Whitman said, "logic and sermons never convince," and I don't think I made much headway.  Never-the-less, a few months later, I found her article in the magazine. 

I can't not interest myself in politics.  And as I watch the Republicans, who seem on the one hand to be appealing to an ever diminishing demographic and yet to have consolidated so much power and money that demographics may lose out, I wonder whether we're seeing the Iron Law of Oligarchy at work once more.

Mohamed asked me yesterday before we left for the KU Cancer Center whether I was nervous about the appointment.  The answer, as always, was no.  I'm not sure why, but it all just seems like part of the routine, and I never really think much beyond the immediate, practical questions.  It helps a lot, I think, that I like and trust Dr. Van, the oncologist, and Jennifer, the physician assistant.  When I do read information on the Net (rarely, but a couple of weeks ago when things weren't going so well, I went back to the clinical studies of Votrient and some articles on kidney cancer), my treatment and the side effects are exactly what are described as the most cutting edge available with the most common consequences.

We arrived at the Center a few minutes early, but I was called immediately for drawing the blood.  And then there was a half hour wait before the consultation.  Luckily, the waiting room was filled with interesting characters.  One woman was wearing very tight capri pants and a skimpy bright chartreuse halter top which, in addition to its usual contents, was also rather tenuously holding her cellphone.  Another woman, who weighed well over 300 pounds, was a two-fisted drinker with a Big Gulp in one hand and a Snapple in the other.  She, too, was wearing capri pants, but she couldn't get them down over her calves.  There was a guy with an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips.  Across from us was a well-dressed couple, though the man was obviously in competition with the New Jersey "tan mom":  he made John Boehner look pallid.  We felt somewhat uncharitable in giggling (not the most common reaction while waiting at a cancer center), but it did fill the time. 

Before we knew it, my name was called, and it was time for the consultation.  All the vitals were good: my blood pressure was fine, and I had actually put on 3#, which made Mohamed, who is always worried about my weight loss, happy.  The blood work was also basically normal; the hemoglobin and thyroid counts were slightly low, but nothing that is worrisome or requires medication.  Mohamed thought I worried Jennifer at first because when she asked how I was doing, instead of my usual cheery response, I launched into a recitation of the troubling side effects and of my break from chemo and its consequences.  (I had e-mailed Dr. Van a few weeks earlier about taking a break.  He has said that it might be a good thing, so I had his approval, but at first I decided just to tough it out before changing my mind and taking three days off, so Dr. Van and Jennifer didn't know that I had taken the break.)  I recited the statistics that I'd memorized from the GlaxoSmithKline website: 42% of the subjects had to interrupt or suspend treatment because of the side effects and the average length of treatment was 7.4 months.  But, of course, those data didn't come as any surprise to Jennifer.  I also asked whether, once one medication becomes too difficult to support, patients sometimes switch to another.  She said that although that was a possibility, Sutent, the other most current treatment, usually has more severe side effects than Votrient and hasn't been shown to be more effective.

What we decided was to play it by ear: I'm going to continue the Votrient at 600 mg. a day for the moment.  I've been feeling better the last ten days--a stronger appetite and less frequent, though no less unpredictable, diarrhea.  The fatigue hasn't abated, however.  As long as I feel this way, ok.  If the side effects become worse again, then we'll cut the dosage to 400 mg. and see whether that ameliorates the effects. 

So that's where it stands now.  We stopped at McDonalds for a slushie for Mohamed and a McFlurry for me (you can't have too much ice cream when you're trying to keep the weight on).  And then, just outside KC, I crashed and slept till we got back to Topeka.  That is scary--and one reason why I almost never drive: one moment I think I'm wide awake and completely alert; the next thing I know, I've been awakened from an hour of being slumped over, probably snoring and drooling--no more attractive than the rest of the waiting room crowd.

Btw, here are two great waiting room works: Flannery O'Connor's short story "Revelation" and Elizabeth Bishop's poem "In the Waiting Room." 

Reader beware:  today's posting has nothing to do with cancer and everything to do with language.  It's going to be long, pedantic, and overly detailed.  Skipping or skimming is definitely permitted.  My justification is that one, the May 14th issue of the New Yorker published a review by Joan Acocella of a book on the descriptive v. prescriptive language disputes.  Ms. Acocella is the magazine's dance critic.  I know absolutely nothing about dance and have read her dance reviews with great pleasure and enlightenment.  But just as I wouldn't be assigned a book on dance to review, she shouldn't have been assigned one on language, as her review is badly misinformed and, hence, misinforming.  I was infuriated by the review and have been brooding about it for the last month (better than brooding about cancer), so finally I'm going to have my say.  Second, I'm afraid that my comments about language in this blog suggest that I'm a fussy prescriptivist, when, in fact, I'm firmly on the other side.

The review doesn't get off to an encouraging start when Acocella says "purists" complain about people saying 'distinterested' when they mean 'uninterested.'  It's the other way around.  Her opening history isn't any more accurate.  She says that the "language wars" broke out fully in the 1950s, which, considering only English, is 200 years off.   In academia, she writes that one cause was the "newly popular" theory of structuralism.  No, after several decades, structuralism peaked in the 1950s and then virtually disappeared with the arrival of Noam Chomsky's theories in 1957.  (Chomsky is nowhere mentioned, though surely his distinction between 'competence' and 'performance' is related, though in a new way, to prescriptivist and descriptivist ideas.)  Moreover, there are two logical fallacies in just her one sentence: because all structuralists are descriptivists does not imply that all descriptivists are/were structuralists.  And simply because an interest in language usage continued in the 1950s and later doesn't mean that the structuralists caused the interest.  I doubt that popular prescriptivists like William Safire and Edwin Newman even knew who Saussure and Bloomfield were. 

Acocella consistently blurs the definition of "rules," confusing the constitutive rules (i.e., those parameters that enable language) with normative rules (i.e., pre- and proscriptions) that a small minority are always trying to impose on the half billion speakers of English.  Here's a constitutive rule that Acocella seems to think is proscriptive: in English, we do not put a single word adverbial between a verb and its direct object.  We do not say, "I read carefully the article" or "I rejected vehemently its conclusions."  If a grammarian says that it is a rule, he is not proscribing what to say; he is describing how English works.  Acocella also ignores the phonological and morphological components of grammar, an omission that would be acceptable if her examples didn't require explanations based on phonology and morphology.  Here are three examples (all used in Acocella's review) of what a descriptive linguist does--one of phonology, one of morphology, and one of syntax.

Acocella mentions (and implies that descriptivists would be accepting of) the word "drownded."  No academic is going to suggest that a Harvard Law School interview is going well if the applicant says, "My father drownded."  What he is going to say is this: at the phonological level (as at all others) language changes.  And then he might describe five common phonological changes that have taken (and are taking) place in English.  One is metathesis: the transposition of sounds.  In Old English 'bird' was pronounced 'brid' and 'third' was 'thrid.'  Over the centuries, those sounds were transposed, and the metathesis stuck.  A look at the OED shows that for centuries, some English speakers have said 'aks' for 'ask'; that change did not stick and is, of course, today highly stigmatized.  A second change is assimilation, making sounds resemble those around them to facilitate pronunciation.  That explains why the plural morpheme [s] is sometimes pronounced /s/ and sometimes /z/ and describes the regular and predictable pattern of choice; it explains what we say 'impossible' and not 'inpossible' but 'inconceivable' and not 'imconceivable.'  A third change is dissimilation, which explains why we don't pronounce the entire consonant cluster in 'cupboard' and normally omit the /t/ in a word like 'postponed.'  A fourth change is epenthesis, the insertion of an extra sound in a word.  It explains why Paula Deen always says 'paparika' and why all of us insert a /p/ in 'comfort' but not in 'combat.'  It is why the names Thomson and Samson are often spelled Thompson and Sampson.  And the last patterned change (which finally gets us to 'drownded') is epithesis, the insertion of an extra sound at the end of the word.  Again, some of these changes "stick"; some do not.  In Old English, for example, there was no /d/ in the verbs 'lend' or "bound.'  The present tense of 'bound' was, hundreds of years ago, 'boun' and 'bouned' or 'bound' was the past tense.   But people heard a /d/ at the end of 'boun' and the past tense eventually became 'bounded.'  Had there been any language purists around in 1300, they would have been upset by "the stock market rebounded" last week--at least linguistically upset.  The same happens with 'drown,' where some people hear the present tense with an epitehtic /d/, thus making the past tense 'drownded'--not standard English, but easily described, which is where a descriptive linguist stops.

Acocella mentions the use of 'hisself,' but fails to understand (because she doesn't even mention morphology) how that form evolved.  We all learn language by generalizing rules from specific examples.  A native speaker unconsciously learns how compound personal pronouns (those that end with -self or -selves) are formed.  The rule seems to be that we add the suffix to the genitive form of the personal pronoun: myself, ourselves, yourself, yourselves.  All that someone who says 'hisself' or 'theirselves' has done is overgeneralize the rule because, for no apparent reason, when we get to the third person, the suffix is added to the objective case form.  Again, the descriptivist isn't going to tell a native speaker that his law school application will be enhanced if he adds, "My father drownded hisself."  He's only interested in describing the rules that constitute our language as it's now spoken and describing the patterns that exist and have existed.

Finally (at last!), Acocella, of course, mentions the who/whom distinction.  But again, she totally ignores the history of how English has evolved and hence misunderstands what's happening.  English used to be a highly synthetic language, i.e., one that depends on inflectional endings rather than word order for meaning.  Nouns and pronouns were inflected (as in Latin, Russian, and Finnish, for example) to show their function.  But over the centuries, those inflections almost entirely disappeared, and English is now (almost) completely analytic, i.e., a language that depends on word order.  If I enter the class and say, "Me your teacher this semester," you might doubt my competence and consider changing to another section, but you understand what I'm saying.  No nouns retain a distinction between nominative and objective cases, and only five or six pronouns do (I/me, he/him, she/her, we/us, they/them, and, in a few cases who(ever)/whom(ever)).  And with these choices, many native speakers are confused (language is always changing, and although there aren't many changes going on right now in English, except lexically, this is one logical place where distinctions are blurring).  And although I may cringe when I hear, "Him and I went to the movies," there's a logical reason why I do hear it and why I understand perfectly well that the speaker is trying to say.

As native users of English, descriptivists have just as many pet peeves as anyone.  But as linguists (or the more out-date grammarians), descriptivists don't think it's nearly as interesting (or productive) to pre- and proscribe as it is to describe and, where possible, explain.

I'll give props to Acocella for one thing: she pans the book under review.  And if she's learned as little from reading it as her review indicates, she must be right that it's truly uninformative. 

There.  Now I feel much better and can return to brooding about more important matters.

Yesterday, I resumed the chemo therapy (Votrient) after a three-day interruption.  I have to admit I loved the break, and both the psychological and physiological effects seemed important, though sorting out the two isn't easy.  All three of the primary adverse reactions (at least the ones that most affect me) were mititgated: my appetite was better (though no meal tasted as good as that first steak once I had stopped); I still crashed, but the naps didn't seem as frequent or profound; and the diarrhea abated.  I felt almost like my old self.  Votrient also raises the blood pressure, so once on it, I had begun taking three anti-hypertenison meds; I continued with those, since I didn't monitor my blood pressure over the three days.  We go to the KU Cancer Center on Tuesday, and one of the oncologist's thoughts is that we might lower the dosage (from 600 mg. to 400, with 800 mg. being the standard starting dosage, one that drove my blood pressure up to intolerable levels so that I was on for only a month or so).  If we continue with the 600 mg. dosage, I need to know how often (if at all) I can take a hiatus.

The Internet is a mixed blessing.  One of my friends who was diagnosed with breast cancer said that her doctor at Johns Hopkins told her to stay off the Net: there was too much misinformation, and even the accurate information was only generalization.  But I think for most of us the doctor's advice is impossible to follow, and I went back a couple of times over the last few days to read about Votrient, the first time I'd done so in several months.  The GlaxoSmithKline site was the most complete, though between the medical terminology and the many abbreviations, much of it was impenetrable to a layperson (or at least to me).  The side effects it has with me are exactly the most common ones observed in the clinical trial, though luckily I've been spared nausea.  The median length of treatment was 7.4 months (I'm in month ten); the longest was just over two years, certainly an encouraging figure.  Interruptions or cessation of treatment was necessary in 42% of the subjects.  Many of the subjects required an immediate reduction of the dosage, which was normally from 800 mg. to 400 mg., so, given the overall statistics, if the oncologist decides to reduce my dosage from 600 mg. to 400, that wouldn't seem to be disheartening.  Now if I can just remember these statistics till next Tuesday, perhaps I'll be able to ask more intelligent questions.

There were links on all the sites to others on kidney cancer.  I ventured a few samples, but just as had happened a year ago, they were too discouraging to pursue very far. 

Language matters.  A lot of us academic types, I've noticed, have favorite words.  My friend Carol is bravely involved in an unpleasant, but necessary task, which she described yesterday as "fraught and imbricated."  I love the word "fraught"--what a solid, rich, one-syllable word.  I think that it almost disappeared from usage for a while, but now I hear it often.  I'm embarrassed (well, at least in front of Carol) to admit that it takes me a few minutes to drag 'imbricated' from my old critical vocabulary and remember what it means; I'm pretty sure I've never used it and can manage without it.  When I was writing books with Virginia, she had the uncanny and very useful knack of remembering, when on page 18 I used the verb 'suggests' ("This interpretation suggests..."), that I had used it on page two and thus we needed to find a synonym.  Sometimes I'd get lazy and say to myself, "Oh well, Virginia will fix this."  Virginia's favorite word was 'adumbrate'; there were rarely ten pages when one thing didn't adumbrate another.  And my own favorite jargon word was/is 'perspicuous.' ("Meaning is never perspicuous" was a sentence I wrote more often than I--or anyone--needs to.)

One of my current pet peeves is all the war reporters who think 'cache' is pronounced like 'cachet.'  During the first Gulf War, Connie Chung talked about the 'Calvary' so many times that the crawl at the bottom of the screen actually replaced 'cavalry' with 'calvary.'  I've also liked to think that my immediate and indignant e-mail helped get her fired as military commentator.  I also embarrass my friends in restaurants by (helpfully, in my opinion) telling servers that the final 's' in 'vichyssoise' is pronounced and that 'bruschetta' has a /k/ sound, not a 'sh.'  I don't like 'anyway' as a marker of a change of topic, but 'anyways' makes me cringe.

Chemo and lingo--today's subjects, one probably more important than the other.

Thursday and Friday were really tough days.  I crashed more often than had been the case before and slept longer once I had made it to bed.  I visited the bathroom so many times I lost count, even though I had no appetite and had barely eaten.  I managed a bowl of cereal Friday night, but nothing else seemed even remotely appealing.  I did manage to finish Roth's "American Pastoral," but even a new New Yorker and a New York Review of Books could hold my interest only briefly.  Mainly, I just stared into space and felt sorry for myself.

Yesterday morning, despite my earlier decision just to tough it out till my next doctor's appointment (a week from Tuesday), I decided to give myself a three-day vacation from the Votrient.  I had the oncologist's approval, and worries about possible negative consequences aside, I needed the break.  I don't think I can express how good it felt to look at the bottle of Votrient and think, "HA!  No thanks."  Whatever the physiological effects, psychologically it felt wonderful: three fewer pills.  Hopes that maybe my body would thank me too.  I don't really want nature to take its course, and there were still eight pills to swallow.  But instead of my feeling like a walking chemistry lab, for three days at least maybe some semblance of normality will reassert itself. 

Mornings are always my best time, and I felt energized.  At 11, I took a brief nap, but it was brief, and I felt good once I woke up.  We were a little slow getting organized, but by 2, we were ready to go out for a late lunch.  Usually, this involves ten minutes of wondering where to go, followed by resigning ourselves to one of the three or four places that are our regulars.  This time I knew exactly what I wanted: steak.  We usually go to an old roadhouse outside of Topka, but it's a long drive and probably wasn't open at that time, so we went to a chain restaurant.  There was fresh bread, a sweet potato not marred by sugary toppings, and what seemed to me at the time the best 8 ounce sirloin (medium rare) that I had seen recently.  (Yes, I know: by Kansas standards an 8 ounce steak barely qualifies as an amuse-bouche, but my mouth was amused, and I cleaned up my plate and thought wistfully about ordering another one.)  True, it had been 24 hours since I had eaten, so no wonder I was hungry.  But it was the first time in a long time that I actually had been hungry.  In my head, I chalked it up to the reduction of chemicals in my system.

I can't say that the rest of the day was marked by other confirmatory changes.  As soon as we got home, it was difficult to decide which was more important: finding the bathroom or curling up in bed.  (Actually, it wasn't a serious debate.  Bathroom trumps bed every time.)  By the time the day had ended, I had taken four Imodium and had gone up and down the stairs more times than I want to count.  And even though I was convinced that I hadn't really napped after lunch, when I looked at the clock, it was 90 minutes later than when I lay down.  The routine of the rest of the day wasn't all that different from that of the day before, even though I tried to convince myself that I was feeling peppier.   So today is day two of my break.  I'm hoping for a continued appetite, and after that, we'll see.  But I again had that moment of gloating this morning when I looked at the bottle of Votrient and left the cap firmly in place.

And now for something completely different: there was an article in the NYR about the well-documented influence of the Texas Board of Education on the way textbooks are written for the national market.  Most of what the article said wasn't new, but it did make one point that I found very interesting.  Mohamed has taken the two semester sequence of American history at Washburn for his general education requirements.  Browsing through the texts, I was amazed by the number of breaks in the narrative for boxes and sidebars, in addition to the expected maps and charts.  On some pages, it was almost impossible to follow the main text, and even if a student could, the experience was constantly interrupted by all the sidebars.  As an old-fashioned reader, I found it all extremely confusing.  I chalked it up, however, to my being just that: old-fashioned.  What Gail Collins points out in her article is that textbook publishers, in trying to satisfy the demands of Texas and yet include information that more "liberal" states might want, discovered that re-writing and re-formatting an unbroken narrative was extremely expensive.  Much easier and much cheaper was just adding all these sidebars and boxes, the content of which can be switched out with much less trouble and expense.  As she writes, "All around the country, teachers and students are left to make their way through murky generalities as they struggle through the swamps of boxes and lists."  Consolation that I'm not such an old fogey after all?  Or really discouraging?