My Very Own Abenaki Round Table

 

When I was about 15, my mother hosted one of her many soirees in our living room. She was a high school teacher and I was accustomed to coming home to a raucous gathering of inebriated school teachers mixing up martinis by the quart, and raising their glasses to me as I tried to sneak past them, slipping in through front door, in a vain attempt to fly upstairs unnoticed to my room.

My mother provided a sort of social center for her high school faculty, and they teasingly called her "Pearl North," after Pearl Mesta, who threw elaborate parties for the Washington, DC in-crowd at her home in Spring Valley, which was just seven miles south, down Massachusetts Avenue. 

One day, the gathering had no men, which was unusual, and the teachers were much better behaved than usual, and better dressed. They were awaiting the arrival of Katherine Anne Porter, who drove up and parked her car on the street outside our house, and I watched from my bedroom window as she walked into our house. I wondered who she was, and what all the fuss was about. 

 Later, I read "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" and I knew.

Katherine Anne Porter

As fate would have it, when my first book was published, after having been rejected by 25 New York City publishing houses, the publisher who decided to take it on was Kathern Anne Porter's publisher, twenty years after publishing "Ship of Fools."

I thought that was a curious coincidence.

Now, in my dotage, I sometimes dream about playing that role my mother played, as a part of a group which gathered, enjoyed each other and organized the world, like Dorothy Parker and her Algonquin Round Table in New York City.

That would be fun. Real fun.

The Algonquin Round Table

So, when I read a book by some interesting author, I include that person in my list of Abenaki Round Table folks. (It's the Abenaki's up here in New Hampshire, not the Algonquins of New York.)

So far I have:

1. Jill Lepore

2. Adam Gopnik

3. David Remnick

4. Dudley Dudley

5.Tim Sebastian

6. Ken Decell

7. Paul Offit

8. Olivia Ostrich

The Algonquin Round Table had twenty or so who drifted by for lunch, and it included luminaries from the literary world, from Broadway and even Hollywood (Harpo Marx.)

They were, I supposed an in-crowd, a clique, a "cool kids' table."  Personally, I was never much into cliques or being a cool kid (no real possibility of that), never joined a fraternity in college--but the idea of having a group of people with whom you could look at the world and laugh--that was appealing. 

Also, key qualification: among this group you could say anything without fear of causing an eruption because you'd hurt someone's feelings, or because something you said might be construed to lead, if you followed its logic, to unhappy conclusions about the world, or about what is just or what is vile.

On that basis, I would disqualify some of the people I really love, some fellow Democrats, who have all the "right" values, but who refuse to discuss anything which would cause discomfort or possible hurt to others, e.g. discussing the case for or against trans athletes participating in women's sports. (In that, by the way, required viewing is the John Oliver piece on this subject.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flSS1tjoxf0&t=2204s

So, this would be a round table with only one rule: discussion is not restricted for fear of hurting anyone's feelings, but is aimed at following a topic toward a "truth" without regard to whether that truth might be perceived as being hurtful. And, there is always the understanding, we don't really mean some of the nasty things we say, as was true when someone arrived at the table and said, "President Coolidge is dead." And Parker said, "How can they tell?"

Dorothy Parker

The folks above include three New Yorker writers.

Dudley Dudley is the woman, now in her 80's, who stopped Aristotle Onasis  in 1975, from destroying the New Hampshire seacoast by building an oil refinery complex and when she spoke at a commemorative event a few years ago, she was just as hot wired as ever.

Paul Offit is the University of Pennsylvania pediatric vaccinologist who has tried to save American children from RFK JR among other crusades.

Tim Sebastian is a BBC newsperson I knew in Washington, D.C., fluent in Russian, with a cosmopolitan perspective unlike any I've ever met.

Ken Decell is a former editor of the Washingtonian Magazine,  born and raised in Mississippi, educated at Princeton, who was one of the first journalists to see in Barak Obama the stuff everyone else eventually saw, and who somehow absorbed all the vitriol in which his youth was marinated, and came out better able to to defeat it.

Olivia Ostrich is a New Hampshire woman who is simply the most pure bred scholar I've ever run across. I spent my youth in three different Ivy League institutions and never met a mind more curious, relentless, insatiable  or more open than hers. Mention a topic, cite a reference, and she will read it all the way through, google the footnotes and then read the footnotes in the footnotes. You never know where she'll come down on any issue, because she has always thought it through so much further than you have.

Lately, I've been thinking about adding a woman named Carole Hooven, PhD. 

Dr. Carole Hooven

Having read her piece in the Boston Globe about the question of whether or not there are two sexes, I googled her, read her piece, "Why I Left Harvard" and then I read her book, "T: The Story of Testosterone," which left the matter unsettled.

I hasten to add: it is a worthwhile book, worth reading, maybe even should be required reading for high school students. It is a book I read from start to finish, which in my case is a rarity, as I most often lose faith in the author and wind up throwing books against the wall and stomping off. Not so with this one.

Which is not to say it's a perfect book. I could have done without the stuff I am guessing got added because Dr. Hooven's (female) editor told her she had to add some "softer" elements, to "humanize" and "personalize" the material, which otherwise could be seen, and would be criticized by the media, as being overly dry and scientific.  

Personally, I could have done without hearing about Dr. Hooven's suffering a sexual assault, or her own struggles with depression, or her problems with breaking down into tears under stressful or emotional situations, or even about her son, who sounds like a wonderful kid, but really, why is he in the book? Her struggles with the imposter syndrome, (which so many of us who entered the world of science and medicine more or less disinvited suffer) are more relevant, but I would have edited those out. 

Ditto for her adventures tromping through the jungle as a latter day Jane Goodall, which are admittedly relevant to evolutionary biology, but most of us are not reading "T" for evolutionary theory.

Just as an aside: Jane Goodall was celebrated because of those photographs of her leggy blondness in the African jungle titillated and inspired women and men (for different reasons) not because huge worldwide audiences became suddenly enthralled with evolutionary biology. And I say that as an undergraduate biology student who was head over heels in love with Ms. Goodall's media personality. Still am.

What Hooven does exceptionally well is to develop the important role testosterone plays in human life, and she maps out how we become either male or female or possibly something in between or something else entirely, and she uses exactly the right examples (complete androgen insensitivity syndrome [CAIS], five alpha reductase deficiency, congenital adrenal hyperplasia.) I do not agree that male sex is defined by gametes, i.e. the production of sperm, because CAIS patients make sperm but they are clearly not male, but that's a quibble. There are some minor piffles--dihydrotestosterone (DHT) does affect terminal scalp hair, and in fact that is the basis for the drug Propecia being used to fight male pattern baldness. But, overall, this is a very solid, valuable and worthwhile book.

Overall, her book is a service, and her arguments ring true about the way in which feminist authors have fought against the basic facts she presents because admitting that we are propelled by biology in certain directions might imply that women are doomed to subservient roles in society, rather than arguing whether or not it is true that testosterone drives animals toward violence, domination and sex.

She uses the perfect line from the movie African Queen, when Katherine Hepburn tells Humphrey Bogart,  "Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were put in this world to rise above."

So, yes, Ms. Hooven is invited to the Round Table.

Other nominees will be considered as the Phantom  receives them.