Good kids

Scenes from a student-led anti-ICE demonstration in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, February 3, 2026. The demonstration began with a scheduled walk-out from classes.

A local news article quoted one of the leaders, high school senior Lyla Caldwell:

“I’ve seen that ICE is going into schools and waiting outside of schools to take teenagers,” Caldwell said. “If they’re going to make it the place, we’re going to make it the place. It’s wrong.”

Judging by the number of passing drivers who honked and waved, community support seemed to be strong. I overheard one woman say, I think approvingly, "They seem to be having a good time." And they were — for a good cause.

Tales Told Twice

In the 1980s, with his international reputation secured, Gabriel García Márquez agreed to write a series of brief syndicated essays that appeared, among other places, in the newspaper El País in Spain. His biographer, Gerald Martin, says that these pieces amounted to "a kind of serialized memoir, a weekly letter to his friends, a circular to his fans, an ongoing public diary." Some of the material in those columns was, in fact, later reworked into the pages of his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale.

In one of these columns ("Ghosts of the Road," August 19th, 1981) he relates an incident that was said to have happened some fifteen years before. García Márquez and his family were traveling from Barcelona to southern France, when an unexplained sudden intuition made him slow down in advance of a curve. Several cars whizzed by him, and he remembers in particular one "healthy-looking Dutch woman" driving a van.

After passing us in perfect order, the three cars disappeared around the curve, but we found them again an instant later one on top of another, in a pile of smoking wreckage, embedded in an out-of-control truck in an oncoming lane. The only survivor was the Dutch couple's six-month-old baby.

García Márquez connects the incident with another that supposedly happened "on May 20 on the Paris-Montpellier freeway": three young people pick up a woman who hails them from the roadside. After they drive for several miles, the woman, in terror, warns them of a dangerous curve ahead — and then simply vanishes. No accident occurs, but the young people report the mysterous disappearance to the police. The case is never resolved. García Márquez speculates that, after the accident he witnessed, the spirit of the Dutch woman might linger on the highway to warn future travellers of the danger ahead.

The tale of the "vanishing hitchhiker," is, of course, a well-known and well-travelled one, with many documented variants; it provided the title for Jan Brunvand's 1981 study of urban legends.

García Márquez briefly revisited the purported Paris-Montpellier incident in a column the following year entitled "Tales of the Road." In that piece he also touches on reports of a similarly eerie kind of occurence: a silent figure is seen sitting inside a car, apparently smoking a cigarette; the figure is later revealed to have been a corpse, posed to look like a living passenger to avoid the paperwork and fees associated with transporting a dead body from one jurisdiction to another. In one variant that García Márquez mentions a grandmother who dies during a beach vacation is wrapped up in a carpet and stowed on the roof rack of a car, which is then stolen when the family takes a brief break.

I recognized the gist of the corpse passenger story immediately: Cortázar had outlined a very similar tale in A Cetain Lucas a few years earlier (see my related post). It's possible that García Márquez had read Cortázar's version, or heard something like it directly from him (they were friends), but it seems more likely that both writers drew on urban legends that had been circulating for years and may well still be circulating to this day.

A selection of García Márquez's syndicated columns can be found in the posthumous collection The Scandal of the Century and Other Writings.

The Drowned Circus

Maritime disasters have long served as inspiration for popular songs and ballads, especially when the drama of the incident is multiplied by the presence among the victims of those whom we identify as "innocents," as opposed to professional or military sailors who are presumed, perhaps, to accept the risks as a condition of their service. Among others, there's Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," Woody Guthrie's "Reuben James" (about a warship), Toumani Diabaté's instrumental "Lampedusa" (memorializing the deaths of some 360 migrants off the shores of the island of that name), and several songs about the sinking of the RMS Titanic, including Blind Willie Johnson's haunting "God Moves on the Water" and the ditty variously known as "It Was Sad When That Great Ship Went Down" or "The Titanic," the lyrics of which prompted the parody containing these immortal lines, indelibly engraved in my childhood years:

Uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants,
It was great when the sad ship went down.

Outside the English-speaking world I can think of Zachary Richard's "Le ballade du Irving Whale," about the sinking of an oil barge in which no human lives were lost (as far as I know) but great environmental damage was done. The example below, a bolero written by the Cuban musicians Julio Gutierrez and Bobby Collazo (here performed by the Trio La Rosa) relates an incident of unusual pathos that has a surprising connection with an apprentice journalist who went on to become a Nobel Prize-winning novelist.

The Euskera or Euzkera was a cargo ship that had been first commissioned as a private yacht in 1891, then recommissioned as the USS Hawk during the Spanish-American War. The ship remained on reserve duty until 1940, when, according to Wikipedia, it was sold for scrap. Several years later, however, it was plying the waters of the Caribbean, and on September 1, 1948, en route from Havana to Cartagena in Colombia, it capsized and sank. Only a handful of the passengers survived (sources conflict as to whether there were six or twelve), and among the victims were most of the members of the renowned Razzore family of circus performers along with 59 circus animals. (Wrecksite has the most information, as well as a contemporary newspaper account.)

One member of the circus troupe who was not on board was its director and paterfamilias, Emilio Razzore, who had already arrived in Colombia to serve as advance man. Before the news of the sinking came through, he had appeared in the offices of the newspaper El Universal, where he peeled off his shirt to display the impressive scars he had received from the animals in his lion-taming act. There he met a twenty-one year old cub reporter named Gabriel García Márquez, who, according to the latter's memoirs, shared a meal with Razzore in a local restaurant and asked him, probably not too seriously, whether he could join the circus. Not long after that, the fate of the Euskera (the spelling García Márquez uses) became known, and the young writer remained with the devastated lion-tamer for several days, eventually accompanying him to Baranquilla, from where Razzore flew to Miami to try to rebuild his life. In Edith Grossman's translation García Márquez ends the account by saying "I never heard from him again," although the original is the more impersonal "Nada más se supo de él" (Nothing more was known of him).

The sinking was newsworthy enough that the New Yorker published a poem by an American writer, Walker Gibson, entitled "To the Memory of the Circus Ship Euzkera, Lost in the Caribbean Sea, 1 September 1948" (available behind paywall).

I haven't been able to find a transcription of the lyrics of "La tragedía del circo," only parts of which I can make out.

Daddy Fox

Last summer I chanced upon an interesting edition of the tale of Reynard the Fox in the free stuff shed in our local dump, and strangely enough this week I came across an account of one of his decendants in the same place. Bertha B. and Ernest Cobb's Allspice, originally published in 1925, was one of a series of books designed not just for children in general but specifically for classroom use, as what we might now call "easy readers." They were sturdily bound, printed in a large-size font, and made use of repetition and a somewhat limited vocabulary. The Cobbs were a husband-and-wife team who operated their own publishing firm (the Arlo Publishing Company) in the Boston suburb of Upper Newton Mills. The illustrations, which we'll get to, are by L. J. Bridgman.

When we first meet Daddy Fox, he has played a cruel trick on Roland Rabbit involving a hive full of hornets. Roland complains to the King (in this case a human, not a lion), who puts a bounty on the fox's head. A miller and his wife scheme to capture him and win the bounty, but with the help of a friend Daddy Fox escapes and miller and wife get their comeuppance. Daddy Fox isn't very honest or very nice, but of course we cheer him on. The title comes from a weak joke about putting salt — or spice — on an animal's tale to subdue it.

As childen's literature goes, Allspice is frankly pretty thin stuff; most kids would probably nod off if it was read aloud to them. The illustrations, however, are quite wonderful. I only wish their sharpness came through better in these scans.

Lewis Jesse Bridgman (1857-1931) was an accomplished artist based in Salem, Massachusetts; an article on the Streets of Salem blog has a brief bio and selections of his work. He's received less attention than some of his peers from the Golden Age of Illustration, but judging from his work for the Cobbs he's ripe for rediscovery. He managed to combine intricate naturalistic detail with a real feel for motion and expression; I particularly like the tenderness with which Ginger Bear rescues his friend from the box in which he is trapped, minus, alas, a bit of his tail. I didn't immediately notice that you can see the feet of the dozing miller and wife just beyond the base of the tree.

There was a time

Four stanzas from the medieval Irish legend Buile Suibne, variously translated as The Frenzy of Suibhne or Sweeney Astray:

There was a time when I preferred
to the low converse of humans
the accents of the turtle-dove
fluttering about a pool.

There was a time when I preferred
to the tinkle of neighbour bells
the voice of the blackbird from the crag
and the belling of a stag in a storm.

There was a time when I preferred
to the voice of a fine woman near me
the call of the mountain-grouse
heard at day.

There was a time when I preferred
the yapping of the wolves
to the voice of a cleric
melling and megling within.

The above is Flann O'Brien's rendition, as presented in At Swim-Two-Birds, where the story of Sweeny (as he spells it) forms just one element in the novel's set of narrative nesting dolls. Among other English-language versions, there is a notable (and more complete) one by Seamus Heaney, but I find Heaney's translation of the corresponding stanzas comparatively flat. O'Brien, a native Irish speaker and competent student of the medieval forms of the tongue, could be a bit cheeky in his treatment of the eccentricities of the literary style of the original — elsewhere he renders a line as "the saint-bell of saints with sainty-saints" — but in the quatrains above he plays it straight. As far as I know he translated and arranged the material himself; the definitive English version at the time, by James G. O'Keefe, is quite different. The curious "melling and megling," based on a comparison with other versions, is meant to evoke the bleating of sheep.

The story of Sweeney, to the extent that one can summarize it briefly, is the tale of an Irish king who, finding his peace disturbed by church bells, seizes a bishop's psalter and flings it in a lake (whence it is retrieved, miraculously undamaged, by an otter) and commits other violent assaults on the bishop and his acolytes. The bishop puts a curse on him through which he became a kind of Bird-Man or Wild Man of the Trees, undergoing various torments and adventures and fleeing the society of men and women for the space of many years. In time, however, he seems to prefer his new existence — which is perhaps why he is said to be mad. Finally taken in by another bishop, he is mortally wounded by an irate herdsman due to a misunderstanding. He speaks the lines above, atones for his sins, and dies in honor.

Does Arthur Clennam know?

Has biographer Claire Tomalin slipped up in her account of Little Dorrit? In Charles Dickens: A Life, she writes

Arthur Clennam, the unheroic hero, has been brought up by a ferociously pious mother whose creed is 'Smite Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them.' He discovers that his real mother, who died young, had been a poor singer training for the stage, and so dedicated to the world of art and imagination despised by his foster mother.

The problem is that although we as readers learn this information, via a dramatic revelation scene late in the book, it's not made explicitly clear that Arthur ever does. As the book approaches its climax, Clennam is confined in the Marshalsea debtors' prison, delirious from a fever, and being tended to by Amy Dorrit, the "child of the Marshalsea," who was born within its walls but who is now free. His ostensible mother, an invalid with whom he has long had a distant relationship, is being blackmailed by one Rigaud alias Blandois. In a breathless series of disclosures, we learn that Arthur is the product of an adulterous affair on the part of his father, that his real mother was treated with great cruelty, that Mrs. Clennam's sinister aged retainer Flintwinch has a previously unsuspected twin brother, and that Amy Dorrit is, by a string of improbable circumstances, the rightful heir to a legacy from the Clennam fortune. To force Mrs. Clennam to pay up, Rigaud has sent a letter with the details to Amy and Arthur, with instructions to open it if it is not retrieved by the time the prison bell rings that evening. When she learns of the letter, Mrs. Clennam somehow rouses herself from her chair and hurries across the Thames to the Marshalsea, where she instructs Amy to read the letter and implores her to keep its contents secret until she (Mrs. Clennam) dies. Arriving home, she witnesses the sudden collapse of the house where Rigaud is waiting for her return. Rigaud is crushed to death by the wreckage, Flintwinch vanishes, and Mrs. Clennam collapses in the street. She lives for another three years, unable to speak; we aren't told whether Arthur ever sees her again.

While Arthur slowly recovers, Amy receives a box of documents containing the original evidence behind the revelations. On their wedding day, she presents them to Arthur, but asks him to burn them unread, which he promptly does. Had he read them, he would have known, as he had always suspected, that his family had always been under some kind of obligation to Amy Dorrit, and that his inheritance — if it still amounted to anything — was in part rightly hers.

As far as I can tell, there's just one, almost cryptic, indication that Amy will eventually share part of the secret with Arthur. It comes at the exact moment when she receives the cache of documents:

Little Dorrit came in, and Mr Meagles with pride and joy produced the box, and her gentle face was lighted up with grateful happiness and joy. The secret was safe now! She could keep her own part of it from him; he should never know of her loss; in time to come he should know all that was of import to himself; but he should never know what concerned her only. That was all passed, all forgiven, all forgotten. [Emphasis added]

That is, though the scene won't be narrated in the pages of the book, Arthur will at some point at least be told the true story of his birth. Which may, in part, explain why he is never described as visiting Mrs. Clennam again in the few years that remain to her.

Scenes from the Life of a Planet

This may be the first time I've ever hunted down a book based entirely on a phrase that popped into my head. I'd been thinking about the state of the natural world, and how I'd like to be able to feel that it was not only surviving in the face of everything that human beings have done and are continuing to do to it but was actually teeming with life (a feeling that's of course increasingly hard to sustain). The words "nature abounding" came into my thoughts and I wondered if they had a history. As far as I can tell, this 1941 Faber & Faber anthology of nature writing edited by E. L. Grant Watson is the only book that has ever borne the phrase as its title.

Nature Abounding represents a kind of book that has largely gone out of fashion, an armchair or bedside reader of brief prose excerpts, aimed, I suspect, at a somewhat tweedy readership. The selections chosen range from Herodotus to the 1930s, and are accompanied by rather nice illustrations by C. F. Tunnicliffe, examples of which are shown on the front cover and spine of the dust jacket. The shortest pieces are only a paragraph, the longest run to ten pages or so. There's a brief Preface but no other commentary or biographical information on the writers.

No attempt at inclusiveness was made. The writers chosen — naturalists, travelers, and literary writers — are disproportionately British and almost exclusively European (Emerson and Melville are the most notable exceptions); more eyebrow-raising is that apparently no woman writers were thought worthy of excerpting, unless there are one or two hiding under their initials ( I think not).

In spite of those limitations, it's hard to dislike the book. Nature Abounding is organized thematically by the categories of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. A garish passage from Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, describing Egdon Heath, opens the book and sets the overall tone, which tends to the purple. (A bit too purple at times; I found the passages by Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas almost unreadable.) Selections on related topics flow into each other, so that, for example, there are three consecutive excerpts devoted to the hunting habits of stoats and weasels, and we get back-to-back descriptions of marine phosphorescence by Melville and Charles Darwin. Some of the writers are careful professional observers, but colorful nineteenth-century eccentrics like Charles Waterton and Frank Buckland are represented as well.

The editor, Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson, was at one time a well-known cultural figure. He was born in England but spent much of his life wandering from continent to continent, writing novels, poems, books for children, and works of natural history (several of which were illustrated by Tunnicliffe). He was a bit of a heretic, mixing Darwinian ideas with Jungianism. Most or all of his books are long out of print.