No Kings

A few scenes from today's well-attended and upbeat demonstration in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which merged amicably with a scheduled street fair. I heard only one or two hecklers; the town was ours.

There was even music, courtesy of the Leftist Marching Band.

Human Geography US (Peter Blegvad & Anthony Moore)

Someone directed my attention today to this recording from a few years back, which had somehow escaped my notice. Human Geography US presents "spoken texts taken from the prose work of six 20th century American writers [Jack Black, Richard Brautigan, John Crowley, Edward Dorn, Thomas Pynchon, and Charles Willeford]; a booze-biased mapping of the US in a human geography of words, music and field recordings. The texts are recited by Peter Blegvad, poet, illustrator and musician. The guitar pieces, field recordings and concept are by Anthony Moore." The embedded version below is from a London radio station, Resonance FM; there was also a limited-edition LP version from Half-Cat Music, released in 2022 and presumably unavailable.



I find this project spooky and weird and beautiful (and calming), but given the current pathological state in which the "US" finds itself, it's hard to avoid the question of whether anything like this matters. (Presumably no more than a few hundred people have heard it, or ever will.) But if forced to make a choice of allegiance between the idiosyncratic vision of America that Human Geography US evokes and a disfunctional "republic" presided over by a sociopathic demagogue, I know which flag I'll be flying.

As it happens, I'm in the middle of reading Benjamin Nathans's To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, which recently won a Pulitzer. I'm reading it because the subject has always interested me, not because its depiction of the tyranny and moral squalor against which the dissidents struggled is somehow "useful" in our own situation. But in the end, all political lies are the same, regardless of the ostensible ideology they serve; they're all just tools to gain consent, masks for corruption and abuse of power.

Harry Mathews, re-issued

Dalkey Archive Press / Deep Vellum Publishing is re-issuing seven books by Harry Mathews, according to Publishers Weekly, which notes that "the reissued editions will feature new cover designs and never-before-seen archival photographs of the author, as well as introductions by such writers as Jonathan Lethem, Lucy Sante, and Ed Park." Three of the volumes will appear this year, with the others scheduled over the next few years.

I can't help adding, given the current climate in the nonprofit world, "if the money holds out." It's good to see Mathews getting respectful attention, although I wonder how many potential readers of his work are out there who don't already own earlier editions.

Landscape (Thomas Pynchon)

Thomas Pynchon:

They took the North Spooner exit and got on River Drive. Once past the lights of Vineland, the river took back its older form, became what for the Yuroks it had always been, a river of ghosts. Everything had a name — fishing and snaring places, acorn grounds, rocks in the river, boulders on the banks, groves and single trees with their own names, springs, pools, meadows, all alive, each with its own spirit. Many of these were what the Yurok people called woge, creatures like humans but smaller, who had been living here when the first humans came. Before the influx, the woge withdrew. Some went away physically, forever, eastward, over the mountains, or nestled all together in giant redwood boats, singing unison chants of dispossession and exile, fading as they were taken further out to sea, desolate even to the ears of the newcomers, lost. Other woge who found it impossible to leave withdrew instead into the features of the landscape, remaining conscious, remembering better times, capable of sorrow and as seasons went on other emotions as well, as the generations of Yuroks sat on them, fished from them, rested in their shade, as they learned to love and grow deeper into the nuances of wind and light as well as the earthquakes and eclipses and the massive winter storms that roared in, one after another, from the Gulf of Alaska.

Vineland

I first read this novel in 1990, shortly after it was published. I thinned one copy out of my library a few years ago but kept this UK edition with cover art by Stephen Martin and jacket design by Peter Dyer. By the time I picked it up the other day to revisit it I remembered little about the book except that it was largely set in California, which makes little illuminations like the one above all the more refreshing.

Pynchon is said to have a new book, Shadow Ticket, scheduled for publication later this year.

Thirst

The neighborhood where I grew up was built on a hill overlooking a small artificial lake, and at the summit of the hill, tucked into the woods, stood an old wooden water tower that stored drinking water pumped up from the lake. According to the kind of legend that kids make up and only tell each other, a creature lived inside the tower. What kind of creature it was wasn't made clear — an enormous serpent, a furtive carnivorous mammal, or some beast unknown to zoology — but most of the time it minded its own business, emerged nocturnally if at all, and posed no threat. One summer there was a terrible drought, the lake shrank to a stagnant pond, and the water tower went dry. It was then, one heard, that the creature emerged at night to slake its desperate thirst, and the hideously dessicated corpses of squirrels, cats, and other animals were found in the woods nearby. I'm not sure how it ended. Did a group of men from the neighborhood open the tower and evict its occupant, or did the creature resume its unseen existence when the rains came? The tower must be long gone by now, but I haven't been back.

Peculiarities

There's a curious disclaimer on the copyright page of the Dalkey Archive Press reprint of Vincent O. Carter's book about his experiences as an African-American expatriate in Switzerland. The Bern Book, written in the 1950s in part to explain the obvious question — Why Bern? — was published in 1973 by the John Day Company (a copyright date of 1970 is also listed), and sank with barely a trace. Carter died in 1983, leaving one unpublished novel, Such Sweet Thunder, which finally came out twenty years later. This Dalkey Archive volume, with a Preface by Jesse McCarthy, was issued in 2020 amid growing appreciation for Carter's work. The disclaimer states that "There are peculiarities of style in this book, which we decided to keep from the original edition."

It's not clear exactly what "peculiarities of style" the publisher had in mind, or why they would have even considered altering the book, but of course they made the right decision in not doing so. The Bern Book is unique, to be sure, but little on the Dalkey Archive list counts as conventional, and the book poses no major challenges to a reasonably open-minded reader. I half-wondered whether "peculiarities of style" was a euphemism for "offensive material," but there's no more of that in the book than in the writings of any other frank African-American writer of Carter's day.

It's true that once or twice Carter seems to lose track of a thought in mid-sentence, but that could only have been fixed in consultation with the author, and in any case the muddles are barely noticeable. The Dalkey Archive edition, which in general is commendable, seems to have introduced a few minor typographical eccentricities in the form of superfluous hyphens that were presumably line-breaks in the first edition, and because of an apparent OCR error the name of a Swiss architect appears alternatively as Brechbühler and Brechbiihler [sic] on the same page. But this is trivial.

I suspect that Carter himself may have slipped up at the beginning of this lovely paragraph:

I had seen the city at four A.M. and six A.M. I had heard the first streetcar rumble down the street and beheld with wonder from the center of the Bahnhofplatz the last magical moment when all the streetcars stood in the station filled with the homebound who had been to the movies and to the tearooms or dancing or to choir rehearsal, strolling or working late, huddled in a tight little group under the shelter when it rained, and ranging freely, leisurely, under the strain of a pleasant fatigue when the moon shone and a warm breeze wafted them on: waiting—having boarded now the streetcars, paid and pocketed their transfers—for the signal, a short blast of a whistle. It blew! as the bell in the tower of the Evangelical church rang, and all the cars moved silently in the eleven directions from the heart of the city, while the buses coughed and whined through the shifting crowds of pedestrians which dispersed like sparks of fire before the wind.

Carter perhaps meant to write "at four A.M. and six P.M.," but the Dalkey Archive editors, if they noticed the issue at all, were right to respect the original reading.

Vincent Carter apparently spoke only rudimentary German at the time he wrote the book, and while he was familiar with the writings of Goethe and Kant he implies that he hadn't read much contemporary Swiss literature. One writer I suspect he did not know was his fellow flâneur Robert Walser, whose death came, as it happened, during the years that Carter was writing the book. In spite of their very different backgrounds, there is a not-too-distant kinship in the mixture of innocence, formality, and irritability evoked in this passage:

One day I encountered a young man upon the street who approached me in a very familiar manner, addressing me by my first name, which I found a little uncomfortable because I did not recall ever having made the gentleman's acquaintance. He presented his card and asked me if he might speak to me. "Oh, I guess so," I replied, and we went into a rather pleasant café, which was near at hand, where he ordered coffee, over which he suggested that we might speak more comfortably. And when he made it clear to me that he was paying for the coffee I relaxed in my chair and gave the young man my undivided attention, for, as you can well imagine, I was a little curious as to the nature of his business.

The appalling comic outcome of the anecdote, however, would not have happened to Walser: the young man represented a chain of supermarkets and wanted Carter, as the one black resident in Bern, to provide publicity for the opening of a new branch by donning a colorful uniform and selling bananas. Needless to say, Carter declined the offer.

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025)

It's a fool's errand to try to be succinct about Vargas Llosa, who died on Sunday. Does one talk about the "giant" of literature that he indisputably was (both the BBC and the Guardian use that word in their obits) or about the increasingly grotesque political stances he came to adopt in the name of free-market "liberalism," an ideology that seemed to blind him to the fascist tendencies of Latin American figures of the extreme right like Javier Milei and Jair Bolsonaro? Does one talk about his spirited advocacy for other writers, including those — like his friend Julio Cortázar — who were firmly on the left, or engage, as some have done, in ad hominem attacks on his family life? For better or worse, there has been no comparable figure in the US. He was an inexhaustible novelist, literary and cultural critic, essayist, and — notably — candidate for president of Peru. (As much as I differ politically with Vargas Llosa, it's hard to believe that he would have been a worse president than the man who defeated him, Alberto Fujimori.)

I took a quick look on my shelves this morning and counted about thirty volumes of his work, in Spanish or in translation or both, including a few major books that I've never quite gotten around to (La casa verde, for one). Some I have no inclination to re-read, but nothing can change my opinion that Conversation in the Cathedral is one of the finest novels of the twentieth century, a work so ambitious in conception and sophisticated in technique as to be nearly impossible to account for. Few funnier novels have come out of Latin America than Pantaleón y las visitadoras, and even a relatively late work like El sueño del Celta (from 2010) shows an admirable humanism and mastery of narrative. Perhaps now that he's dead we can leave the unhappy aspects to his biographers and appreciate the excellence of his best work for what it is.