Notes & Queries (Gabriel García Márquez)

A brief but evocative passage from Gabriel García Márquez's Cien Años de Soledad is missing from Gregory Rabassa's US translation, One Hundred Years of Solitude. The affected passage, which can be found on p. 282 of the 2003 Contemporanea / De Bosillo edition of the original novel, and would have appeared on p. 240 of the Harper & Row hardcover had it been there, is set during the period when the first Yankee banana plantation has been established in the vicinity of Macondo, and concerns the unearthly young woman García Márquez calls Remedios the Beauty, whose extravagant charms — and disinclination to wear much in the way of clothing — are suspected by the inhabitants of Macondo of having potentially lethal effects on the men in the community. The original reads:

La ocasión de comprobarlo se presentó meses después una tarde en que Remedios, la bella, fue con un grupo de amigas a conocer las nuevas plantaciones. Para la gente de Macondo era una distracción reciente recorrer las húmedas e interminables avenidas bordeadas de bananos, donde el silencio parecía llevado de otra parte, todavía sin usar, y era por eso tan torpe para transmitir la voz. A veces no se entendía muy bien lo dicho a medio metro de distancia, y, sin embargo, resultaba perfectamente comprensible al otro extremo de la plantación. Para las muchachas de Macondo aquel juego novedoso era motivo de risas y sobresaltos, de sustos y burlas, y por las noches se hablaba del paseo como de una experiencia de sueño. Era tal el prestigio de aquel silencio, que Úrsula no tuvo corazón para privar de la diversión a Remedios, la bella, y le permitió ir una tarde, siempre que se pusiera un sombrero y un traje adecuado.

The US text reads as follows:

The occasion for the proof of it came some months later on one afternoon when Remedios the Beauty went with a group of girl friends to look at the new plantings. For the girls of Macondo that novel game was reason for laughter and surprises, frights and jokes, and at night they would talk about their walk as if it had been an experience in a dream. Such was the prestige of that silence that Úrsula did not have the heart to take the fun away from Remedios the Beauty, and she let her go one afternoon, providing that she wore a hat and a decent dress.

On a close reading, the translation does not quite make sense: what novel game? what silence? The problem is that the second and third sentences of the Spanish original have been skipped, an easy mistake to make because, as one reads along the page, the beginning of the fourth sentence is so similar to the beginning of the second. With those sentences restored, the English text would read (loosely) like this:

The occasion for the proof of it came some months later on one afternoon when Remedios the Beauty went with a group of girl friends to look at the new plantings. For the people of Macondo it was a recent amusement to wander the humid and interminable avenues lined with banana groves, where the silence seemed to have been carried from somewhere else, still unused, and was for that reason less reluctant to transmit the voice. At times you couldn't hear something that was said from half a meter away, which was, nevertheless, perfectly comprehensible on the far side of the plantation. For the girls of Macondo that novel game was reason for laughter and surprises, frights and jokes, and at night they would talk about their walk as if it had been an experience in a dream. Such was the prestige of that silence that Úrsula did not have the heart to take the fun away from Remedios the Beauty, and she let her go one afternoon, providing that she wore a hat and a decent dress.

Since the passage does not fully make sense except in its complete form, the longer version is almost certainly not the result of authorial second thoughts after the book's original publication; since it contains nothing controversial or obscure, the omission in the translation must have been unintentional. The two sentences had to have been present in their entirety in the original manuscript or in a version prior to publication. I have not been able to examine an early edition of the original text to see if the error began there and was subsequently corrected in later Spanish-language editions such as the one I have at hand, or whether it was overlooked by the American translator or compositor. The omission was carried over into the Avon paperback edition (which is differently paginated) and is retained in what I believe is a QPB paperback edition, bearing the Harper & Row imprint and apparently directly reproduced from the original plates.

Graham Parker in Japan

I bought Graham Parker's Live Alone! Discovering Japan a few years back mostly because I wanted one song (“Watch the Moon Come Down”), listened to the record once or twice, decided I wasn't really all that wild about Graham Parker, and stuck it in a box. There it stayed until I started hearing the same song in my head again and disinterred the CD from its resting place in my basement. I figured I'd copy that one cut to my hard drive and be done with it, but just out of curiosity I played the whole thing once through. Now I've been listening to it repeatedly for a couple of weeks, and enjoying it a great deal. I don't think the record has changed much, so it must be me.

Parker has made a lot of records, most of which I've never heard, and is probably better known for working with a band than as a solo act. He gets lumped together with Elvis Costello as one of the Angry Young Men of 1970s British rock. The similarities are there — they're both gifted melodic songwriters with a sardonic sense of humor — but Parker has stayed closer to his musical roots; you can't really imagine him crooning Burt Bacharach tunes. That may be part of the reason why Elvis Costello is more or less a household name, at least to anyone under sixty, and why Graham Parker isn't.

This CD was recorded in Tokyo sometime in the early '90s. The crowd — mostly male from the sound of it — is rowdy and responsive, and evidently familiar with his songbook. Although there were reportedly some technical problems with the recording, the end result sounds quite good (better than the rather tinny Live! Alone in America from a few years earlier, which also has a weaker song selection.) Accompanied only by his own guitar and harmonica, Parker sounds as merry as the crowd, if not as inebriated. During one interval between songs someone yells something in Japanese and he quips “Yes, I understand. I woke up this morning understanding Japanese perfectly — without any studying.” He sings two songs with Japanese themes (“Discovering Japan” and the throwaway “Disposable Chopsticks”), as well as one song “Mercury Poisoning," which in spite of its title isn't an allusion to the notorious Minamata disaster but rather a vicious kiss-off directed at his former record label.

Parker is excellent at crafting taut pop melodies; his lyrics are clever and biting but also a bit trashy. He doesn't brood too much over details; if a song has a throwaway line or two that's fine with him, as long as it holds your attention for three minutes. His attitudes can be a bit trashy too; the sneering pose of “That's What They All Say” and ”Platinum Blonde” is a bit of a tic, and yet both of those songs are gems, crafty and unabashedly below the belt. Being tender isn't really something he's interested in; even when when he comes closest, as in “Long Stemmed Rose,” which compares his lover to a solitary blossom, he ends with these lines:

Wonder where you are who knows
in another bed I suppose
lying like a long stem rose

Still, it's not all nastiness; “Just Like Herman Hesse,” which alludes to Steppenwolf, is deft and intriguing; there's a fine antiwar number (“Short Memories”); and then there's the song that caught my attention in the first place:

In this dirty town there's nothing going for me
No shows going down that I would want to see
Nothing but the midnight train

In this shady street on a top floor flat
Women take their sheets down to the laundromat
And as the night falls on this town
I'm going to watch the moon come down
Watch the moon come down
I'm gonna watch the moon come down
Watch it come down

There's another verse or so, but that's about all there is to the lyrics; the hook is in the repeated descending lines of the refrain. Parker's singing is particularly vigorous and soulful on this track, and the record preserves a great moment, a one-on-one of a songwriter-performer and his audience.

Roughing it

Passing overland through Guatemala in 1839, the American explorer John L. Stephens and his travelling companion, the British artist Frederick Catherwood, spend a night in a rustic homestead, where they bravely bear up in the face of unfamiliar customs.

"Our host was a don; and when we presented our letter he received us with great dignity in a single garment, loose, white, and very laconic, not quite reaching his knees. The dress of his wife was no less easy; somewhat in the style of the oldfashioned shortgown and petticoat, only the shortgown and whatever else is usually worn under it were wanting, and their place supplied by a string of beads, with a large cross at the end. A dozen men and half-grown boys, naked except the small covering formed by rolling the trousers up and down in the manner I have mentioned, were lounging about the house; and women and girls in such extremes of undress, that a string of beads seemed quite a covering for modesty.

"Mr. C. and I were in a rather awkward predicament for the night. The general reception-room contained three beds, made of strips of cowhide interlaced. The don occupied one; he had not much undressing to do, but what little he had, he did by pulling off his shirt. Another bed was at the foot of my hammock. I was dozing, when I opened my eyes, and saw a girl about seventeen sitting sideway upon it, smoking a cigar. She had a piece of striped cotton cloth tied around her waist, and falling below her knees; the rest of her dress was the same which Nature bestows alike upon the belle of fashionable life and the poorest girl; in other words, it was the same as that of the don's wife, with the exception of the string of beads. At first I thought it was something I had conjured up in a dream; and as I waked up perhaps I raised my head, for she gave a few puffs of her cigar, drew a cotton sheet over her head and shoulders, and lay down to sleep. I endeavored to do the same. I called to mind the proverb, that 'travelling makes strange bedfellows.' I had slept pellmell with Greeks, Turks, and Arabs. I was beginning a journey in a new country; it was my duty to conform to the customs of the people; to be prepared for the worst, and submit with resignation to whatever might befall me."

Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan

Sweet As the Showers of Rain

I picked up a copy of this book by the blues historian and poet Samuel Charters in the Strand Bookstore in the 1970s, at a time when I was living in New York City. I had never heard of it, or him, at the time, but the book has stayed with me ever since. My urge to hear the records of the old blues musicians of the '20s and '30s comes and goes; there have been periods when I've hardly felt like listening to the blues at all, as well as times when I listened to little else. Whenever I do get the urge, though, I dig out my battered old paperback copy, and I've never really found anything that comes close to this book in capturing the spirit of the music and of the men and women who made it.

Charters, who's now well into his eighties, has written a number of books on the subject, and this is almost certainly not the best known (that would likely be his first, The Country Blues, which was published in 1959), but I have a special fondness for it. It's actually Volume II of an aborted series, one that was projected to survey a variety of regional blues styles through chapter-length profiles of the most interesting or most significant players. Volume I, which was published as The Bluesmen, covers many of the now well-known bluesmen of Mississippi, including Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, and Booker White (the last of whom, however, mysteriously appears on the cover of Volume II, in which he is barely mentioned). It also encompasses the musicians of Alabama and Texas. Sweet As the Showers of Rain, published in 1977, focuses on the Memphis area as well as Georgia and the Carolinas, and includes profiles of the Memphis Jug Band, Willie McTell, Blind Blake, and a number of less familiar figures. Both books have been in and out of print several times, at one point in an omnibus volume called The Bluesmakers.

Though the two regional volumes are similar in approach I think it's in Sweet As the Showers of Rain that Charters really hit his stride. A number of the players covered in its pages were still around when he began his researches, and he got to know several of them pretty well. (Regrettably, he just missed meeting McTell, who died in obscurity in 1959 just as The Country Blues was being published.) Charters may have been a blues enthusiast and a musicologist, but he never let his interest in the music blind himself to the fact that his subjects were people — even when they didn't have a guitar in hand. In his pages, bluesmen like Gus Cannon, Will Shade, and Furry Lewis — all of whom Charters knew — come through with their flinty dignity intact, as they look back on more than their share of hardships but also some good times spent carousing, travelling, and music-making. Some of the stories are grimmer than others; here's part of Charters's sobering encounter with the great Tennessee singer John Adam “Sleepy John” Estes:

Winfield Lane was a rutted, unpaved farm road running through the red-brown clay earth outside of Brownsville, Tennessee. Most of the farms had been abandoned and there was only a scattering of houses along the road, some of them deserted cabins with fallen-in roofs and peeling tar paper. There were small stretches of cotton, some grazing land, but most of the land was overgrown with brush and trees. The cabin John lived in was about a mile and a half from the turn into Brownsville, a sagging wood shack that had been painted red. The ground in front of it was bare of grass, an open mud space with a refuse of dirty dishes, old clothes, a chair that had gotten broken and left outside the door. It had only two rooms, one of them empty except for a bundle of rags on the filth of the floor, the other room with a chair, a rusted wood stove, and two beds piled with the same rags that were on the floor of the other room. A metal plate with bits of food stuck to it had been left on the chair, and flies clustered around the rest of the dishes left in a bucket on the floor. There was no electricity or water. In the daytime most of the light came in through the cracks between the cabin's warped planks. It looked like any of the abandoned cabins left in the fields, but John Estes was living in it, with his wife and five small children.

Many of the old bluesmen who were found still living in the 1950s and 1960s were living in ghetto buildings, or in shabby houses in small towns in the South, but Estes's poverty had a desperateness to it. He'd long been troubled with his eyes, and he'd finally become completely blind. Even knowing that he was in poor health, blind, and living in a poor shack, I still wasn't prepared for the sight of him, a gaunt, tall figure in dirty farm clothes, a shapeless straw hat on his head, sitting alone on a bare wooden chair in front of the cabin of a neighbor. Because he'd been told someone wanted to see him, he had an old guitar across his lap, the strings rusted, a pencil tied around the neck as a kind of capo. One of his sons, who was about nine years old, led him back and forth from his house to the Meaux house, and it was painful to watch him stumbling along, holding his guitar, his feet scuffling with uncertainty over the dirt and the stones.

A few months later John was able to move into Brownsville, and with the earnings that came in from concerts and recordings he was able to add to the welfare check he received from the state of Tennessee, but the years of darkness and poverty on the country road left their marks on both his health and spirit. The man across the road, a sharecropper with a family of his own to feed, had tried to do what he could for John, but he felt that it was John's blindness that had left him so helpless. “People cheats him, you know, when he goes and buys things. If he gets some butter they makes him pay four times what it says on the counter; then they don't give him his right change.” He had grown blind when he was older, and he hadn't developed any of the ways to deal with his blindness that someone younger learns. He was only fifty-eight years old, that afternoon at the cabin on Winfield Lane — but he looked and moved like a man in his seventies.

After his “rediscovery,” Estes began performing again, this time for the new audiences of the folk and blues revival, and he went on to record several LPs before his death in 1977. But passages like this bring to mind exactly what the stakes were for a poor black man in the rural South, in the American century.

Update (2015): Samuel Charters died in Sweden on March 18, 2015. The New York Times has an obituary.

Soehnée

Charles-Frédéric Soehnée was born on November 3, 1789 in Landau in the Rhineland, to a respectable family who several years later relocated to Paris, where the young Charles-Frédéric studied art. During 1818 and 1819 he painted a series of curious watercolors, filling the pages of three notebooks with scenes set in a mostly barren landscape peopled by human figures whose faces are often obscured or turned away from the viewer and by a bestiary of fantastic creatures. In 1822 he published a volume of researches into the painting techniques of antiquity, specifically the employment of encaustic and varnish. He developed and marketed a varnish formula of his own, which was subsequently adopted by a number of artists, including Delacroix, and which made him a wealthy man. He lived to a great age, dying in Paris, in 1879. As far as is known, he never painted again.

The image above is captioned première halte (“first stop”). The shaggy beast of burden, which appears to be nursing one of its dismounted riders, has a vaguely insectivorous snout. There are other variations. In one painting the animal has an elongated trunk like an elephant's; in another it appears to be breathing fire. There is also an elongated slug-like creature, bearing at least a score of riders on its back, as well as outsized pink crustaceans and beasts whose living bodies are nothing but skeletons. In most of the more developed images there is a single bat, or occasionally more than one, soaring somewhere above. In one tableau a bat, its enormous wings outspread, gapes forward from its perch in the prow of a boat crowded with passengers, some of whom appear to be fishing using some kind of rodent-like mammal as bait.

I don't know much about the sources and traditions Soehnée may have drawn from when he created these paintings. In what appears to be the only volume devoted to his work, a catalogue issued (in French only) by the Galerie Jean-Marie Le Fell, several antecedents are mentioned, notably Goya. He may have had a grand design in mind, or perhaps he was just playing around, amusing himself as young doodlers often do. A number of Soehnée's pages are collections of figure studies, often not colored in, but whether finished or unfinished there is a unity to everything by his hand that has survived, a like desolation, a whimsy undercut by an unwavering emotional remoteness. Like the enigmas of the Voynich Manuscript and the Codex Serafinianus, Soehnée's paintings are fragments of an alien world that will never really quite be ours to enter.

Open road

The title of Peter Case's new CD brings to mind, of course, the Walker Evans / James Agee Depression-era collaboration, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, itself taken from Ecclesiasticus. Not being much of a Bible reader I haven't a clue how the author of Ecclesiasticus intended the phrase, but the Evans / Agee appropriation of it was clearly ironic, the idea being, more or less, how can you sing the praises of the mighty when human beings are living in the way this book documents?

I think it's safe to say that Case, on the other hand, intends his praise sincerely. The “Sleepy John” of the title is John Adam Estes, the great Tennessee blues singer whose heyday, at least as far as his recorded output goes, was in the 1930s, though he was eventually “rediscovered,” as they say, by blues fans and made some more records before he died in 1977. Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John is not, however, a Sleepy John Estes tribute record. In fact, there's only one blues cover here and, strictly speaking, no Sleepy John songs on it at all, though that's not quite the whole story either (but I'll get to that). It's more of a tip of the hat, or the discharging of a debt, an acknowledgment, I imagine, of the late bluesman's role as an influence and as a model, perhaps, an example of how to make music with integrity and originality and by using the material of your own life and the things you see around you instead of hand-me-down notions about how you're supposed to live and think and pursue your craft.

Case has performed and recorded Sleepy John's material in the past, but I think the real kinship between them is less direct. Estes, after all, is the guy who made up a blues song about the local attorney (“Lawyer Clark Blues”), about a car mechanic (“Vassar Williams”), about the day he nearly drowned (“Floating Bridge”). It wasn't that he didn't draw from the common repertoire of Southern black (and white) music. Whatever our latter-day romantic notions about blues musicians as oracular folk poets, like every working musician of his era he had to keep an audience happy, and that would have meant playing lots of jug band tunes, novelty numbers, and above all plenty of music you could dance to. But Sleepy John found a way to carve out a space for something more personal too. What's more amazing is that somehow he managed to get a good chunk of it on record, which must have been quite an accomplishment given that record companies in the 1930s were not exactly staffed by altruists and the amount of creative control exercised by the musicians was basically nil. As hard as it may be in retrospect to understand, there had to have been an audience back then that appreciated the uniqueness of what Estes was doing, that dug the fact that he was singing about the particular, about people who resembled the people they knew and whose lives resembled the way they were living. (But hell, the guy could just flat out sing.)

Peter Case has had a lot of different lives as a musician, fronting a rock band, busking for change, making records as a singer-songwriter, but his music has always had a similar, unpretentious connection to the lives of people who won't ever make the cover of People magazine. There's probably a reason for that. As chronicled in As Far As You Can Go Without a Passport, the excerpt from his memoir-in-progress that was published earlier this year, Case left home in his teens, headed West, and wound up living rough in the streets of San Francisco in the early 1970s. He slept in flophouses and abandoned cars, battled addiction, spent mornings hanging around outside of liquor stores waiting for the doors to open. Since those days he's cleaned up and moved on, but many of his best songs, from Blue Guitar's “Entella Hotel” and “Poor Old Tom” to “Green Blanket, Part I” from Full Service, No Waiting, have roots in that part of his life. Never afraid of getting his hands dirty, or of encountering the unwashed (not to mention unhinged) he stands squarely in the same great, messy, democratic tradition that produced those restless spirits and bards of the common man, Walter Whitman and Woodrow Wilson Guthrie.

Rough and ragged at times but always vigorous and direct, Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John is the record he says he's always wanted to make; recorded largely solo (but with a few well-chosen collaborations) it's an unflinching, high-stakes, one-on-one with life. It's not a “live” album, in that it was recorded in a studio rather than before an audience, but with only minimal overlaying of tracks the record winds up being all the more intimate for that. There's no cheering audience here to remind you that, after all, you're not really there; it feels instead as if Case is sitting in your living room, or, more likely, playing in a small club (as he often does). That feeling is heightened by the homemade feel of the packaging (which uses hand lettering and Case's own drawings) and by the little quirks and bumps in the performance, things like hearing a fleeting chuckle in the singer's voice at something he must have seen in the studio, or the way Carlos Guitarlos's earthy background vocal, at the end of “Underneath the Stars,” lingers for a priceless second after Case stops singing.

The album's opening cut, “Every 24 Hours,” is a splendid guitar and vocal duet with the veteran British songwriter and guitarist Richard Thompson, now, like Case, a transplanted Californian. Both musicians have strong, and long established, musical personalities that wouldn't, at first glance, appear to have a heck of a lot in common, but the truth is the combination works amazingly well. Case provides the sturdy rhythmic backbone, and Thompson contributes 4 1/2 minutes of characteristically inventive acoustic guitar work that never gets in the way of the song's momentum. In form, “Every 24 Hours” is a road song, narrating incidents of a journey between gigs, or maybe on the way home.

Drivin' twelve hours after the show
Hit the border at dawn and kept goin'
As the moon hit my path I was doin' the math
Will I make it? There's no way of knowin'

Being out in the world, whether that means on the road or on the street, is one of the strands that hold these songs together. Other strands are faith, fate, justice, being away from the ones you love, and that troublesome pursuit that most of us past a certain age can't seem to avoid, of looking back at the years of your own life and seeing how (or if) the pieces fit together. The rest of the songs pick up the threads, one or two at a time: “Million Dollars Bail” is about the special kind of justice this country makes available to those with the money or the clout to afford it; “Underneath the Stars” is about the last hours of a homeless woman; “The Open Road Song” looks back to a childhood encounter with a bum that left Case aching to follow in his footsteps. “Just Hangin' On,” which dates from 1970 and is said to be the first song Case wrote, gives a glimpse into how it all started; and then there's “Ain't Gonna Worry No More,” which begins with a typically vivid Peter Case word-picture:

Bare feet poppin' on a pinewood floor
A tumble-rush of desert flowers 'side the door
Music boxes pretty with the piebald stripes
Dust mote diamonds in a shaft of light
Come on down
I ain't gonna worry no more
Come on down
I ain't gonna worry no more

Everybody's laughin' now, it won't be long
We seen a lot of troubles, now the ghost is gone
Come on down
I ain't gonna worry no more
I ain't gonna worry no more

According to the press material from Yep Roc Records, the recorded take contained here is distilled from a 20-minute performance of the piece. The refrain — but little else, least of all the mood — is borrowed from an Estes tune, recorded in 1935 as “Ain't Gonna Be Worried No More.” It's not one of Sleepy John's more typical, personal songs, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if it was just a traditional Memphis night club staple, something you could have heard any night of the week on Beale Street in its heyday. The 1935 recording, which features several accompanying instruments including a kazoo, is ragged and carefree, the kind of thing that would appeal to people who wanted to let off steam after working all day for little money and less dignity — assuming there was work at all, that is.

Case's song, on the other hand, which he performs with just his own acoustic guitar, is intimate and wistful; it's one man's recollections, looking back at his ups and downs and reflecting on the state of the world around him. The lyrics range widely over events in his life, from trying to buy a bottle of schnapps at the age of fourteen to taking in a Lightnin' Hopkins concert to walking with the woman he loves on Mission Street in San Francisco. The song also touches on the Vietnam War and the price of bananas — and remember, this is just the short version. Some of the verses are as as polished and inspired as anything Case has written, others less so, but that's only to be expected, as the song feels like a work in progress, in parallel to a life in progress, the kind of thing that by definition can never really be finished. It's quite unlike anything he's ever recorded, and it's likely to leave you craving more.

There are other gems here. “I'm Gonna Change My Ways,” which is the only cut on the album to feature anything close to a rock arrangement, nods at Sleepy John's “Everybody Oughta Make a Change,” though, once again, Case takes the barest suggestion from the original and takes it somewhere else entirely. Finally, “That Soul Twist” closes the record where it began, on the road, with “another night, another show”:

Pressure's on
Money's tight
Everything will be all right
Stay awake
Stay alert
Do the things you know will work
The only strength is the strength to live
The only life is the life we give
We live to give
That's the word
And all the wisdom that I heard

But perhaps an even more apt summing-up can be found in these lines, from “The Open Road Song”:

I seek my fortune in the wide world
Take my chances in the cold
Come what may I'll be okay
If I could only find a stretch of open road.

John Craxton covers

John Craxton is a British painter of some note, but I doubt I would know his name at all were it not for the splendid book jackets he has created over the years for the works of his compatriot, the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.
These first covers are for the two books in which, many years after the fact, Leigh Fermor recollected the initial stages of the journey he had made, as a very young man in the 1930s, from Holland to Istanbul, largely on foot. Craxton's informal approach seems very apt for the story of a young, talented, largely self-taught Englishman vagabonding across Europe, encountering remnants of old ways that were soon to be lost forever. I'm guessing that the river depicted is the Danube.

The next two images illustrate a briefer book narrating a later trip to South America, and Leigh Fermor's only novel, which I still have never got around to reading.



A Time to Keep Silence is another shorter work, one that recounts Leigh Fermor's visits to monasteries in France and Cappadocia.


Finally, the paperback cover of A Time of Gifts below has a slightly different color palette than the John Murray hardcover. As I remember, the Viking hardcover edition in the US didn't use Craxton's art at all.


I don't have copies of the Penguin editions of Leigh Fermor's two books on Greece, Mani and Roumeli, or his book on the Caribbean, The Traveller's Tree, but I think at least some printings of those books had Craxton art as well. The Harper hardcover editions I own don't, although Roumeli has a map of Greece drawn in his hand on the endpapers.

The preponderance of blue in these covers is likely no accident; both Craxton and Leigh Fermor have lived in Greece for much of their lives. They are very old men now, and I don't know how likely it is that the concluding volume of Leigh Fermor's account of his journey to Constantinople will ever be published. If it is, though, I hope John Craxton will still be around to do the cover.

Postcript (2013): John Craxton died in 2009, Patrick Leigh Fermor on June 10, 2011. The narrative of the last leg of the journey was never completed, but portions left among Leigh Fermor's papers are being published, by John Murray in the UK this year, and by New York Review Books in the US in 2014, as The Broken Road. The Murray cover keeps to the spirit of Craxton's work.

Souvenir of the Ancient World

Thirty years ago, Dr. Generosity's was a bar on Manhattan's Upper East Side. New York City had Irish bars, punk bars, biker bars, gay bars, sports bars, even a bluegrass bar. Dr. Generosity's was a poetry bar. That fact aside, I don't remember anything particularly distinctive about it, not that I was ever in there more than once or twice. A fairly wide room, when you first walked in, tables spread around, and then the bar itself in the middle towards the back. I don't remember sawdust on the floor or an odor of peanuts, like there was at McSorley's, the long running establishment in the East Village. Were there framed, autographed glossies of famous poets on the walls, smiling in their Oxford shirts and fedoras, suit jackets slung over their shoulders? Probably not.

A guy named Ray Freed, a poet and a waiter, ran a series of poetry readings at the bar for a number of years. He also published some chapbooks under the Doctor Generosity Press imprint; I have one, Spencer Holst's On Demons, with drawings by Beate Wheeler, which was published in 1970. But I didn't buy it at the bar, and I didn't know who Ray Freed was at the time. The only reason I ever knew anything about the place was because a group of friends and I once went there to hear Mark Strand read.

Strand's name first came to my attention when I read a poem of his in an anthology I found on the shelves of my high school library. It was the early '70s, and high school libraries didn't really know how to react to all this youth culture that was suddenly popping up all over, and so they were buying some very strange things with titles like Killing Time: A Guide to Life in the Happy Valley that the librarians probably couldn't make heads or tails of but that sounded like they might have something to do with all these changes that they were hearing about, and it was in that anthology or a similar one that I found Strand's poem “Eating Poetry,” which amused me sufficiently that I went to our local public library, which had a better than average poetry section, and found Strand's collections Reasons for Moving and Darker, both of which I came to know almost verbatim for a while.

I don't remember anymore whether I bought Strand's slender paperback volume of translations from the Brazilian modernist poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade after the reading at Generosity's or before. A little before, I think, but in any case it was around the same time. Souvenir of the Ancient World was published, in an edition of 500 copies printed letterpress by Samuel Antupit, by Antaeus Editions, an imprint briefly used by Daniel Halpern, the publisher of Ecco Press and Antaeus magazine, which, at least in its heyday in the '70s, was about as interesting a literary quarterly as any you could find. I bought it at the Gotham for five dollars; the pencilled price is still on the first page.

So when Strand stepped to the podium to read, on the heels of the much less interesting Howard Moss, a fellow poet who is now long dead, I was probably already familiar with his translations of Drummond, poems like “The Elephant” and “The Phantom Girl of Belo Horizonte,” both of which I'm fairly sure he read that day, or “Quadrille,” which is brief enough to quote in its entirety:

John loved Teresa who loved Raymond
who loved Mary who loved Jack who loved Lily
who didn't love anybody.
John went to the United States, Teresa to a convent
Raymond died in an accident, Mary became an old maid,
Jack committed suicide and Lily married J. Pinto Fernandez
who didn't figure into the story.

Strand was, and most likely still is, a mesmerizing reader: he spoke to the hushed saloon in a sonorous, measured voice, with a delivery that was dramatic without ever being hokey. It didn't hurt that he was tall and good looking and assured; the women must have been lining up for him, maybe some of the men as well. He must have read some of his own work on that particular day, but if so I have no recollection of it; it's the translations he read that have stayed with me when I think back on that day.

Regarded as one of the foremost poets Brazil has produced, Carlos Drummond de Andrade was born in Itabira in 1902 and died in Rio de Janeiro in 1987. In addition to Strand's versions, several other English-language translations have been made of selections of his work, with mixed results. There is much that remains untranslated. From what I've been told a good deal of his early work is “proletarian” in nature, not surprising for a lifelong socialist who was raised in a mining town. Though he never abandoned his political affiliation, in later works he turned to more universal matters as well, notably love, longing, and the inevitable approach of oblivion, and it was poems along those lines that Strand picked out to adapt.

Drummond could be very funny, in a sweet, dapper sort of way, and he could be wistful and haunting; frequently he is both at once. At his best, he perfectly captures both the lightness and the weight of being, as in this poem called “Your Shoulders Hold Up the World”:

A time comes when you can no longer say: my God.
A time of total cleaning up.
A time when we no longer can say: my love.
Because love proved useless.
And the eyes don't cry.
And the hands do only rough work.
And the heart is dry.

Women knock at your door in vain, you won't open.
You remain alone, the light turned off,
and your enormous eyes shine in the dark.
It is obvious you no longer know how to suffer.
And you want nothing from your friends.

Who cares if old age comes, what is old age?
Your shoulders are holding up the world
and it's lighter than a child's hand.
Wars, famine, family fights inside buildings
prove only that life goes on
and nobody will ever be free.
Some (the delicate ones) judging the spectacle cruel
will prefer to die.
A time comes when death doesn't help.
A time comes when life is an order.
Just life, without any escapes.

The interesting thing about that one is that Strand apparently had second thoughts about how he translated it. The problem was that the line “and nobody will ever be free” isn't really what the original (e nem todos se libertaram ainda) means, and when Strand's translations of Drummond de Andrade were reprinted in a later collection (Looking for Poetry, 2002), it was revised to the more accurate, less fatalistic, and infinitely less memorable “and not everybody has freed himself yet,” proving that, in poetry at least, when a translator finds himself caught between sense and sound, he should come down firmly on the side of the latter.

One of my favorite Strand renditions of Drummond is the poem called “Residue.” It's too long to include in full here, at least under any reasonable interpretation of “fair use,” but basically it's an enumeration of things that are left over, in a variety of contexts, along with the poet's rather desperate wish that, when he is gone, something of himself might remain as well. The poem begins with these two stanzas:

From everything a little remained.
From my fear. From your disgust.
From stifled cries. From the rose
a little remained.

A little remained of light
caught inside the hat.
In the eyes of the pimp
a little remained of tenderness, very little.

And so forth. My favorite bits may be this one:

A little remains dangling
in the mouths of rivers,
just a little, and the fish
don't avoid it, which is very unusual.

and of course the final stanza:

Still, horribly, from everything a little remains,
under the rhythmic waves
under the clouds and the wind
under the bridges and under the tunnels
under the flames and under the sarcasm
under the phlegm and under the vomit
under the cry from the dungeon, the guy they forgot
under the spectacle and under the scarlet death
under the libraries, asylums, victorious churches
under yourself and under your feet already hard
under the ties of family, the ties of class,
from everything a little always remains.
Sometimes a button. Sometimes a rat.

Those last two lines, I think, pretty much say all there is to say.

As Far As You Can Get Without a Passport

This chapbook by songwriter Peter Case is the first installment of a promised book-length memoir, a few additional sections of which have been appearing of late on Case's blog.

After an opening chapter that narrates his premature departure from high school in Buffalo in 1970, a departure that may have been precipitated in part by drug-induced hallucinations, Case skips ahead to 1973, when he took a train west, toting a duffel bag and a Gibson guitar, and arrived in San Francisco. With no particular prospects or plan except to make music in the holy city of the psychedelic era, he is soon sleeping in flophouses, hanging out on the street with an assortment of winos, hippies, and buskers, and playing for coins. A black man he never meets again gives him some tips on playing the blues and helps him exchange his Gibson for something more useful on the streets. Case moves into a junkyard along the waterside, spending the nights in an abandoned school bus. Drink is his constant companion. He wakes up one morning, hungover, a bottle 151 proof rum cradled in his arms, and immediately takes a swig. Some days he hangs outside at dive at six AM, waiting for its doors to open so that he can begin his day's drinking.

These pages will seem very familiar to anyone who knows Case's music. Nick the Cop strolls in from the lyrics of “Entella Hotel,” and the whole book could be suitably read to the accompaniment of “Green Blanket (Part One),” from Full Service, No Waiting:

you know I can't tell you
I promised it's secret
besides you don't really care
but the place that I sleep
it's the size of a quarter
it's down 'neath the top of the stairs
& where do you think you're goin' with that?
your little girl's waitin' for sure
I'm numb and I'm cold and I'm so goddamn old
& it's too late tonight for a miracle cure
if this rain keeps on falling it'll wash me away
down through the gutter & out to the bay
where the red & the gold & the silver fish play
that's someplace where no one will find me
someplace where no one will find me

Eventually Case leaves San Francisco for a ragged sojourn into Mexico in the company of his ostensible manager, who at one point barters the singer's sunglasses for a couple of watermelons to slake their thirst. They wind up sleeping on a beach, out of money and almost out of gas, but the book ends on an upbeat note, with Case heading out to the streets of a Mexican town, guitar in hand, feeling that, in spite of their dire straits, something is bound to come along.

John Doe, in his introduction, has it right when he says that As Far As You Can Get Without a Passport displays “simplicity of style and purposeful avoidance of artifice.” He could have added that those qualities can be surprisingly difficult to achieve, and are almost impossible to fake. But it would also be a mistake to underestimate the writing. What could easily have been, in other hands, an awkward, disjointed, self-justifying exercise in nostalgia instead turns out to be a clear-eyed, unsentimental, closely observed recreation of how life on the streets looked and felt to a young man in a crazy time. Not much is said about anything else; family and girlfriends are mentioned only in passing; even what must have been Case's own deeper or darker reflections at the time are mostly left unspoken. We see the world through the eyes of someone who, for all his rough living, was still essentially an innocent, and Case wisely leaves that young man to face the world as he was, without benefit of hindsight.

A lot of people jumped down the rabbit hole in those days, and a good number of them never made it back. Peter Case climbed out. He had the benefit of talent, as well as a bit of luck, but in the end I suspect that what got him through was the one thing that seems to have been constant in his life: a burning need to make music, whether that meant playing blues covers on streetcorners or bashing out rock 'n' roll in a crowded club or traveling the US and beyond playing his own songs. Though it lies outside the scope of these initial chapters, three years after arriving in California he became part of an important if short-lived West Coast punk band, the Nerves. When that broke up he formed his own renowned band, the Plimsouls, then embarked on a successful solo career that continues to this day. He beat the bottle, got religion, had kids, made records, spoke his mind. To his credit, though, he doesn't seem inclined to deplore who he was when he was sleeping rough, drinking hard, and busking for small change.

As Far As You Can Get Without a Passport is published by everthemore books under the For Now imprint, and can be obtained from A Capella Books in Atlanta.

Notebook

We drove along the edge of the reservoir. I looked out across the open water, frozen only here and there in patches along the shore, at the monochrome bare woods on the other side. We passed the abandoned steel trestle of a railway that no longer exists. A few dozen small waterbirds, in uniform black and white, rested in the shallows, heads aligned in the same direction.

We turned off the main road and into a grove of pines, then turned again, ascending against the flow of a small stream that snaked through the woods. A mile or so on I saw the dark hawk rise from the ground and settle on a branch, and, instantly, its pure white companion, an albino redtail, which came to rest on another tree nearby, both just a few yards in from the road.

We pulled over and watched. The white hawk clutched a kill with its talons, bent down to tear off a piece. One of the pair — I couldn't tell which — let out a high-pitched screech, and the other answered with a deeper, more raucous note. We watched them for five minutes or so, until our presence seemed to spook them and they flew off together, but not far, just up the hill a bit on the other side of the road.

Among the Ainu

In his preface to Ainu: Creed and Cult, B. Z. Seligman has this to say about the author:

Neil Gordon Munro was born in Edinburgh in 1863, where he was educated and eventually studied medicine. Soon after qualifying he began to travel in the Far East, first in India and later in Japan. In 1893 he became director of the General Hospital in Yokohama, and, although he returned to Europe occasionally, from that time until his death he made Japan his home. He became interested in Japanese prehistory, and it was during his many visits to Hokkaido towards the end of last century and in the first two decades of this century that he met the Ainu.

The eventual posthumous publication of Munro's work on the Ainu is a bit of a tale in itself. The notes, specimens and photographs he had compiled during his researches were destroyed in the earthquake of 1923. Nine years later, after Munro had resettled more or less permanently to Nibutani in Hokkaido, has house burned down, again destroying all his materials except, this time, his notes on the Ainu, which he was able to rescue. His health and financial situation declined, though he was able to obtain grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Royal Society, and other institutions to continue his work.

Munro compiled a brief documentary film about the Ainu Bear Ceremony, which survives though I have not seen it; much other footage is said to be lost. In 1938 he mailed to Seligman the partial manuscript of a work he planned to eventually publish under the title of Ainu Past and Present. When World War II began Munro remained in Japan, where he died in 1942. Subsequent contact with his Japanese widow after the war led to a few more papers, but not enough to encompass the work as Munro had envisioned it. The surviving manuscript material was published with the assistance of Seligman and of the anthropologist Hitoshi Watanabe, in 1963 by Columbia University Press in the US and Routledge and Kegan Paul in the UK. Its revised title indicates its narrower scope.

Most of the book as published is devoted to the rich religious and ceremonial life of the Ainu. The Ainu were animists in the fullest sense; everything, every plant, animal, every pebble, was possessed by some kind of power or spirit. One class of these were the kamui, a word that apparently is similar in meaning to the kami of Japanese Shinto though whether the words are cognate I don't know. These were deities both great and small; Munro classifies them as follows:

1. Remote and traditional kamui.
2. Familiar or accessible and trustworthy kamui.
3. Subsidiary kamui.
4. Theriomorphic kamui.
5. Spirit helpers and personal kamui.
6. Mischievous and malicious kamui.
7. Kamui of pestilence.
8. Things of unutterable horror.

Notable among this last, ominous sounding class, according to Munro, was a certain caterpillar, known in the Ainu language as ashtoma ikombap. Though evidently harmless, this insect was regarded by the Ainu, young and old, with pathological dread; Munro surmises, for reasons that I don't quite follow, that they associated it with their traditional enemies and conquerors the Japanese.

Ainu: Creed and Cult is illustrated with numerous photographs as well as several drawings. Many of the photos present what was one of the more interesting aspects of Ainu religion, the effigies or offerings know as inau. These were carved sticks, figurative only in a very schematic way but fashioned according to a rigorous symbolism depending on the particular deity they were supposed to represent or to propitiate. Their classification is highly complex. Their meaning might depend on the kind and number of curled shavings that were left dangling by the carver; the shavings themselves, detached, bore their own significance.

The Ainu had no written language of their own, though they apparently had a rich oral literature, some of which has been preserved. Their language, which is an isolate not related to Japanese, now hovers on the verge of extinction, and much of their traditional culture has been lost. To Munro, and a handful of other early anthropologists, we owe an enormous debt for documenting something of the fullness of that unique and ancient culture before it gave way to the modern world.

Notebook

Twice a day I pass the tiny pond. It can't be more than fifteen yards long and less than that across. There's an island in the middle, just a clump of dirt and grass with a little wooden shelter on top. The two white domesticated ducks are either in the water or on the island or just resting in the bit of lawn between the pond and the fence on the other side. Sometimes they're out of sight when I come by, but even now, in the middle of winter, they're always there again the next day.

The pond hasn't frozen and maybe it won't this year. I don't know what happens if it does, or if a snowstorm comes; will the people from the house at the top of the lawn come down and take the pair inside, or shut them up in an outbuilding somewhere out of sight until the weather improves? I guess I'll find out when it happens. For now the ducks seem content enough with the situation.

Sometimes there are visitors on the pond, a pair of mallards or even three or four. I don't know if ducks have a pecking order like chickens do, but I've never seen any sign that these visits are unwelcome; in fact the mallards rest on the water right alongside their hosts and everyone seems quite calm about it. I suppose that after a while the wild ducks, obeying their own reasons, fly off elsewhere.

Nymphs

The M Press has released a fine new collection of eight stories by Elizabeth Hand, the author of Winterlong, Mortal Love, and the forthcoming Generation Loss, as well as a number of other books. Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories contains four more or less independent tales (one of which, “Cleopatra Brimstone,” provides the entomological occasion for the splendid critter on the cover) and four that are gathered under the heading of “The Lost Domain: Four Story Variations.” According to Hand's afterword, these latter four are inspired by an epistolary friendship with a man she has met in person only a few times, as well as by the conception (borrowed from Alain-Fournier) of a domain perdu, a lost world.

The first and briefest of the quartet, “Kronia,” (the title may be a reference to a Greek harvest festival of the same name), serves as a kind of overture, giving an indication of the general plan through which Hand will work her fictional variations. Addressing an unnamed man and outlining the course of their relationship, the narrator at one point refers to her own children, then states several paragraphs on that she is childless; she says that she has never left the US, then immediately contradicts herself. Narrative possibilities alternate, overlap, exclude each other, but the two poles — the woman and her distant correspondent — retain the same orientation, circling each other in opposition. The three more conventionally developed stories that follow, “Calypso in Berlin,” “Echo,” and “The Saffron Gatherers,” explore at greater length other possible trajectories for the same couple under different guises.

Though each of the three has a contemporary setting, they are constructed on a substrate laid down in the ancient Greek world. This is most evident in “Calypso in Berlin” where the nymph who once held Odysseus captive for seven years has continued her career into the present day, but it is there in the other two as well. “The Saffron Gatherers,” for instance, is set in California, but there is much talk among the characters of ancient Thera, where a volcanic explosion in the second millenium BC entombed a thriving city in ash. The female figure here, Suzanne, is a novelist with a background in archaeology; she has been to the ruins of the city once, and is about to make a return visit. Her lover — he is called Randall — makes her a present of a rare illustrated volume, The Thera Frescoes by one Nicholas Spirotiadis.

The narrator and central figure of of “Echo” could easily be Calypso's sister, and though the title of the story itself may be ambiguous her monologue explicitly alludes to the myth of Echo and Narkissos/Narcissus, as well as to the story of Jason and Medea. Living on an island in Maine with a wolfhound for her only companion, she addresses a man who had apparently been at one time her lover, then a distant and increasingly sporadic correspondent. It is a few years from now, and away from the island things are not well; there is talk of global warming, terrorism, perhaps worse. Communication between the island and the outside is dwindling; the woman has stocked her cabin with provisions and will fend for herself. It is apparent that she will never see the man again.

“Echo” is, I think, a little more, and a little darker, than it first appears to be. I won't risk spoiling the reader's pleasure of a first encounter with the story, except to ask whether, in two brief, seemingly innocent sentences on page 215, and in three unexplained words on page 218, there is not a suggestion of something sinister, and also very Greek, that might not have been immediately evident?

The stag

It wasn't that late, just a little after five, but on that evening in the last days of November it was already dark. There was too much traffic on the two-lane highway to use my brights, and as the oncoming cars approached the glare of their headlights made it even harder to see the road ahead. I drove on faith and memory.

I took a glance at the intersection ahead to the left, looking for any hint that the car waiting at the stop sign was about to pull out. Then my eye caught something directly in front of me twenty yards on, something indistinct that blocked the headlights coming the other way. I slowed down and saw the yearling stag step across my lane, moving without hurry, looking straight ahead. By the time I crossed its trail it had passed across the double yellow line. It continued on, taking no evident notice of my presence, and disappeared into the darkness and scrub before the car in the other lane drew near.

Only the day before I had seen a deer dead on the road, a mile or so on, another young stag. It had blundered into our world and, unlike this one, hadn't survived the encounter, the crossing of vectors of the known and the unknown.

In the valley

They may have come from the north, those first ones, passing along the shore of the great deep lake and into the marshes between the mountains, searching in small boats for beaver and elk or for other game now gone forever from earth. Or perhaps they came from the south, through the low hills, in small numbers, camping but not settling, not at first. Maybe they even came straight across the mountains to the west; in midsummer, pursuing the trail of deer, they climbed to the tree-covered peaks and saw the long plain that lay beyond, and in the distance the parallel ridge of mountains on the opposite side. They descended from the heights to hunt and fish and stayed on until the nuts were ripe and then they went away before the cold set in again.

Later there were others, who burned the lowland scrub and planted crops along the creek beds, in places where the ground wasn't so stony and the scars of the glacier were covered deep in good soil. As their prey thinned out the hunters went further into the mountains, away for weeks sometimes. In the valley the villages became towns. Creeks were guided and divided, and along them fields stretched for miles, clinging to the land's gentle swell and fall.

For centuries there were travelers from beyond the mountains, carrying flint and shell in exchange for pelts and dried flesh. But when the new traders came, in their strange clothes, this time the sickness arrived with them. The towns were soon abandoned. The survivors retreated into the hills, hunting or taking what they needed to live, until their numbers thinned out and they were forgotten.

The settlers brought new tools, new seeds, beasts from another world, and slaves. They ploughed the lowlands and cleared the foothills for their stock to graze, built mills on the creeks to grind their grain. In the cold winters smoke rose from their houses above the white fields. Some starved, more died of fever, but in time their numbers increased. New towns appeared, clusters of strong stone buildings encircled by others of wood, ringed with fields and fences and orchards and connected by muddy roads.

Once or twice armies crossed the valley and skirmished, then marched away. The towns spread out. On the slopes that rose behind the mansions of the manufacturers, of the merchants and the bankers, the slums filled with immigrants drawn to labor in clattering factories. A few were drawn off to distant wars or answered the call of distant enterprise. Then the great mills died, leaving their stone carcasses behind.

The little city of silversmiths and academies grew slowly, in the new century's first decades; then the tourists brought money in. Still, outside of town the farms remained, utilitarian and trim. Later, the reckoning came beyond the mountains, and the bad years began. The valley declined in its turn, but only so far; its people were poorer but survived.

When the scholars began to build the first new town, according to plan in an empty field, they were ridiculed. Later, the idea was imitated, around the valley and beyond. Ingenuity replaced some of what had once been brought in from afar; the rest they did without. Every year, when the corn was brought in, they organized a feast; then they huddled together and steeled themselves against the long winter to come.

In our time

A bonfire on a bare hill, whipped high by the wind. High clouds and a moon with no mercy. In the shadows apart from the blaze, scattered voices, a tongue now known to no one, rapid steps, then nothing but chill. The scuttle of dry leaves blown over hard earth.

In the cities the rain is falling harder now, as the cars wait for the lights to change to green, the rubber blades working furiously against the flood. Beyond the iron railing the sycamores stand like giant bones. A woman shuts the taxi's door, a white umbrella in her hand, and hurries off.

The traveller sees the belfry in the distance below and heads in that direction. Around his neck is a double horn, one bell facing either way. The shepherds far across the slope stand and watch as he descends, but do not wave. His heavy boots leave a trail of crushed acorns, pale and sour-smelling among their broken shells.

The woman looks out the window from the room over the bar. Her worn white robe wrapped around her, she listens to the buzz of the neon sign across the street. Its garish green has summoned an insect from the reeds along the shore. It swoops and rises in rapid figure eights, bumping its wings against the glass.

A Planxty Page

One

The Humours of Planxty, Leagues O'Toole's collective biography of the Irish trad quartet has finally been released, a year after it was originally promised. Not that you can buy a copy of the book in the US, mind you. For reasons that escape me the US seems to be behind a wall for the group these days; the excellent live CD and DVD of their reunion two years ago have never officially distributed here at all, which really is mystifying given the reverence in which Planxty is held throughout Europe and elsewhere. All this while every kind of insipid pseudo-Celtic treacle is in every gift shop and New Age store — but don't get me started ...

In any case, I ordered my copy from Eason's in Ireland and it arrived with exemplary swiftness. I did so with a bit of trepidation, given that the last book to be published in which Planxty played a major part, Colin Harper's Irish Folk, Trad & Blues: A Secret History, was pretty much of a shapeless mess. I needn't have worried; The Humours of Planxty is a solid job. O'Toole lets the band members and their associates do most of the talking, but he weaves their recollections nicely together into a coherent narrative and makes judicious and largely on-the-mark observations throughout.

The book is admirably thorough, particularly for the early years; it takes more than 125 pages to reach the release of the the “black album,” the group's 1972 debut LP. It's an “official” biography, to be sure. Leagues O'Toole is not just the narrator but a minor character as well, since he was in part responsible for getting the band back together in 2004. He's not afraid, though, to let on when he thinks the lads were having a bit of an off day — usually as a result of too much bending the elbow. My only major quibble (other than the lack of color illustrations) is that the book has relatively little to say about the personal lives and later careers of the four founding members.

There are rumors that the book was delayed because of a legal squabble. Founding member Christy Moore seems to be alluding to this on his website when he says:

Leagues went to great lengths to get it right. Sadly, one key component is missing. One vital cog in the Planxty wheel denied Leagues the use of some brilliant insights and stories. For whatever reason the wonderful interview was quashed. (We still love you).

Not sure what that's all about, but I hope it's nothing that will keep the band from working together again in the future, if the spirit moves them.

Two

Reading O'Toole's book seemed to provide an opportune moment to catch up with one of the later Planxty records I'd never heard in full, so I've lately been enjoying making the acquaintance of After the Break, the record the group released in 1979 during their first reunion. The first cut, “The Good Ship Kangaroo,” I already knew from Planxty Live 2004. Though the studio recording isn't as confident and rousing as the later live version — Christy Moore's signing isn't quite as inspired — it's still a treasure.

According to the liner notes, the song was collected “from the singing of the late Mrs. Elizabeth Cronin of Macroom, Co. Cork.” Whether that implies that she had anything to do with its composition I don't know. One thing's for sure, though, the song is way too clever to be casually filed away as yet another chance relic of “oral tradition.” Somebody wrote these lyrics, from beginning to end, and had a good larf doing it:

(...)

Our ship was homeward bound from many a foreign shore,
Manys the foreign present unto my love I bore.
I brought tortoises from Tenerife and ties from Timbuctoo,
A China rat, a Bengal cat, and a Bombay cockatoo.

Paid off I sought her dwelling in a street above the town,
Where an ancient dame upon a line was hanging out her gown.
“Where is my love?” “She's married, sir, about six months ago,
To a smart young man that drives the van for Chapplin, Son and Co.”

Oh, I never thought she would prove false,
Or either prove untrue,
As we sailed away from Milford Bay,
On board the Kangaroo.

Here's a health to dreams of married life, to soap, to suds, and blue,
Hearts, true lovers, patent starch and washing soda too.
I will go unto some for shore, no longer can I stay,
With some China Hottentot I'll throw myself away.

(...)

Oh, I never thought she would prove false,
Or either prove untrue,
As we sailed away from Milford Bay,
On board the Kangaroo.

There's some disagreement about exactly what “China Hottentot” means. The liner notes say that Hottentot (a name once applied to the Khoikhoi people of South Africa) was a slang term for opium. Leagues O'Toole doesn't buy this explanation and rather pointlessly adds that “the word 'hottentot' is nowadays considered offensive by the Oxford Dictionary of South African English.”

The song's verses and chorus are melodically identical, but Lunny's arrangement disguises that fact so cleverly that, according to Leagues, Christy Moore himself was never aware of it until recently.

Off the top of my head I'd guess the song dates from 1900-1940. Here's a health to its forgotten creator.

Three

Another highlight of After the Break is a song called “The Rambling Siúler.” Sung by Andy Irvine, the song has a good deal in common with “The Jolly Beggar” from the black album. Both are about a man of high station who dresses up as a beggar and gains a night's shelter in a farmhouse, where like every good traveller he naturally takes advantage of the hospitality to win the charms of the farmer's daughter. In this case the beggar is really a colonel, who has donned rags as part of a bet with his commanding officer. The beggar first makes a show of flirting with a servant girl, but everyone just laughs that off. Then the daughter comes downstairs and ends up alone in the room with the beggar. She repulses his first advance, but later that night shows that she's not a bit shy:

When supper it was over
They made his bed in the barn
Between two sacks and a winnow cloth
for fear that he take harm
At twelve o'clock that very night
She came to the barn,
She was dressed in white
The beggar rose in great delight,
"She's mine," says the rambling siúler.

In the Anglo-Irish tradition this kind of thing generally ends with the girl ruined and the “beggar” riding away in triumph, but in this happier instance, after the colonel reveals all (in more ways than one), he and the girl both head for the general's house to collect on the wager and ride off together.

But what is a siúler? Though the word (which is pronounced shooler) wasn't in any of my dictionaries, an appeal to the forums at wordreference.com quickly brought some answers. It apparently derives from the Irish verbs siúil or siubhail with the meaning to go or to travel, the agentive form siúlóir meaning a rambler.

The interplay of Andy Irvine's mandolin and Dónal Lunny's bouzouki is particularly fine on this recording. Lunny's bouzouki (if that's in fact what it is) has a beautifully rich tone; after you've heard the song a few times try ignoring the words and listen for it.

Four

Not a Planxty song, strictly speaking, but one of Andy Irvine's best, “Forgotten Hero” relates the story of Michael Davitt, the 19th-century Irish nationalist and founder of the Irish Land League. It's a highly polemical song, and one that provides an enormous amount of information about Davitt's life and political activities — more than you would think could be accomodated into a six-minute song. Here are the last few verses and the chorus:

(...)

With Parnell as its leader the land war held his course
Hold the rent and hold the harvest they can't evict us all
And Davitt crossed the ocean saying give what you can spare
And the Irish in Amerikay they paid up their full share

But not for the first time and neither for the last
The Dublin Castle bishops nailed their colours to the mast
And the altars rang with warnings, respect the law we say
For these Fenians and these Socialists are leading you astray

With the laws of private property and the army at his back
Buckshot Forster then arrested all the leaders of the pack
In the hallowed House of Commons the Gents did cheer and howl
When they heard that Michael Davitt was safely back in jail

And the treaty of Kilmainham Parnell threw it all away
It was the turning point in his career and he turned the wrong way
And the revolution missed its chance with victory in its sight
And fell down like a house of cards collapsing overnight

Davitt saw the Land War as the first step down the track
And he hoped to see the end of the Queen and the end of Union Jack
And I hope some tremor reached him where he lies in bleak Mayo
When they raised the Harp without the Crown above the GPO

O Forgotten Hero in peace may you rest
Your heart was always with the poor and the oppressed
A prison cell could never quell the courage you possessed
Forgotten hero never vanquished in the struggle

The song piqued my interest in Davitt, so I got a hold of a copy of T. W. Moody's Davitt and Irish Revolution, 1846-82, considered the definitive biography of the man. Andy departs from Moody in his assessment of Parnell, and never mentions the pivotal fact that Davitt as a youth lost an arm in an industrial accident. But he otherwise follows Moody's narrative in its general outline, and here and there even in language. (“His heart was always with [the cause of] the poor and the oppressed” was apparently picked up from Moody (p. 556), and “the turning point of his career” is a phrase Moody uses (p. xvii), though he applies it to Davitt rather than Parnell.)

“Forgotten Hero” can be found both on Andy's excellent solo CD Rain on the Roof and on Irish Times, the 1990 record by one of his other musical projects, Patrick Street. I recommend the former as the better version.

How to Change a Flat Tire

See update (December 2020).

This was the unlikely name of a Celtic music ensemble that came together in 1975 at the California Institute of Arts, relocated to the East Coast, and was active at least through the summer of 1980. They released two very listenable LPs, both on Front Hall Records. On the first, Point of Departure, which was released in 1977, the band members were Jim Cowdery (recorders, mandolin, banjo, and guitar), Bo Hinrichs (flutes, fife, and whistles), Ginny Phelps (vocals, guitar, mandolin, etc.), Jim Martin (mandolin, guitar, banjo), and Dean Kuth (bodhran, spoons, bones, concertina, mandolin). If you're keeping score, that's four mandolin players, though I suspect some of those instruments were actually bouzoukis or something along that line.

By the time of their second record, Traditional Music of Ireland and Shetland, which was issued in 1978, Hinrichs and Phelps had moved on and fiddler Maggie Holtzberg had joined the band. Except for some tin whistle (credited to Cowdery) there are no winds on this second album, nor did anyone take over on vocals in the absence of Ginny Phelps. The credits for Martin and Cowdery now include “tenor mandolin.” The photo above shows the revised lineup.

I've been told that the group later issued a third recording that was only available on cassette, but I've never seen a copy. They appear live on at least one compilation, a locally produced LP called Fiddling Celebration: Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, Cross River, N.Y. This was issued by Soarin' Hawk Records in 1980 or shortly thereafter as SH-002. I saw the group live once or twice, at the (now long defunct) annual fiddle festival where that LP was recorded, though I didn't happen to be there that particular year.

As far as I can tell none of the group's music was ever issued on CD, and I suppose it's not very likely that it ever will. I think the group must have disbanded in the early eighties. Jim Cowdery, who seems to have been the arranger and band leader, became a musicologist and has compiled an instruction book on playing the Irish bouzouki. Maggie Holtzberg became a folklorist and the author of several books but has also remained active as a performer, with a group called the Flexible Flyers String Band. I haven't been able to find any record of the subsequent activities of the other band members.

Aubade

It's not always bird song. Sometimes it's traffic on the street below, the first gray light reflecting off stone façades. The fevers of the night extinguished, the sleeper wakes but doesn't stir, eyes watching thin curtains flick in the breeze. The air is close and heavy and sparse dust passes through the haze. The other drifts on for a while, limbs uncovered, a silent, dreamless sleep.

There is always one who leaves and one who is left alone. One who rises at last, bestowing a kiss on lips still drowsy and numb, dressing without hurry, crossing the floorboards to the window and looking down at the rows of trees, the passers by in their coats and dark hats. One whose head lies deep and centered on the pillow, awake now but too exhausted still to unfurl the fingers of a lifeless hand.

No one speaks. A door is shut behind, footfalls descend the stairs, and they are parted. A cool wind chills the lingerer's uncovered shoulders, or perhaps the heat of the day begins to fill the room, the curtains slacken and fall to rest. Their destinies resume their separate courses; the pale eyes of the one who lies in bed close again, the cafés open, the women walk their dogs.

Departing

When we doused our lamps and went to sleep the great ship was still moored at the dock. From the windows of our houses along the harborside, curtains pushed aside, we could make out its vastness against the backdrop of stars. The sailors came ashore to do what sailors do.

There was rain in the night and a bit of wind. But we slept soundly, accustomed to worse. Down a back street somewhere a loose shutter banged, untended, for a while, but its rhythms never entered our dreams, which were long, silent, and grey until at once dawn broke and we stretched our limbs and stepped outside.

A crowd had gathered at the water's edge. The ship had slipped away — nobody ever found out how. There was no sign of broken chains at the moorings. It had simply gone. With no pilot or captain to steer it back to land, we imagined the passengers far at sea, hushed along the rail, watching the water as the ship drifted on to parts unknown.

And now nobody sleeps well anymore.

Drive time

My morning commute, of late, is a fifteen-minute drive, mostly on back roads through suburban woods. About halfway out a stream comes out of the woods and runs parallel to the road for a while. I take a left, cross a stone bridge above the stream, and continue into a stand of pines. Then the reservoir emerges, circled by trees with not a building in sight, a few swans in the shallows. A mile or so along its shore there's an intersection, a traffic light and a busier road, then five minutes more and I'm at work.

It's not news that bodies of water have a restorative effect on the spirits. I'm not much affected by the sea; I enjoy it and honor it but can't shake the feeling that the sea is not particularly interested in our activities, that no matter how much we try to muck it up its scale remains of another order entirely than ours. But I grew up near fresh water and so lakes and streams always seem right, especially when they're surrounded by an illusion of wildness. And it is an illusion, for the most part, because my ride isn't through wild country at all, it just happens to skirt watershed property that's been kept free of encroaching development, all in order to better slake the thirst of a far-off city that is one of the least wild places in the world.

An island, then, or better an archipelago of the wild, a reminder that all our involvements, compelling as they are, are not the only way to be in the world, that there was once and may be again and in a sense if we are fortunate always is a terrain beyond from which we came and to which we can always return, at least in the mind.

Under sentence

There is a story by Jorge Luis Borges called “El milagro secreto” (“The Secret Miracle”). It concerns a Czech writer, Jaromir Hladík, who is arrested by the Gestapo in the early days of the German occupation of Prague. Accused of a variety of “crimes” — that he has Jewish blood, that he has translated the Sepher Yezirah — he is condemned to be executed by a firing squad, the sentence to be carried out at 9 o'clock in the morning on the 29th of March, 1939.

Hladík's first reaction, when he is returned to his cell to spend the few days left to him, is simple terror, as he repeatedly imagines the horrific details of his execution. Then he begins to bargain:

He reflected that reality never coincides with what one expects to occur; with perverse logic he thus inferred that to foresee a circumstantial detail is to prevent it from taking place. Faithful to this feeble magic, he invented, so that they would not take place, atrocious eventualities; naturally, he ended by fearing that those eventualities were prophetic. Miserably, in the night, he managed in some way to convince himself of the fugitive nature of time. He knew that time was rushing onwards towards the dawn of the 29th; he reasoned aloud: This is the night of the 22nd; as long as this night lasts (and six nights more) I am invulnerable, immortal.

As the days pass, Hladík reconsiders his unfinished masterpiece, a verse drama called The Enemies, the completed portions of which he has committed to memory. Deciding that he would need a year's time to revise and finish the work, he prays to God to be allowed the time required. Later that night he has a dream in which he is told that God resides in one letter of one book in the library of the Clementium in Prague; he finds the book, touches the letter, and hears a voice declare that his prayer has been granted.

On the morning set for his execution Hladík is led outside where his executioners await. There is a delay of a few moments; then, as Hladík feels a drop of rain rolls down his temple, the sergeant gives the order to fire.

The next paragraph has only one sentence: “The physical universe comes to a halt.”

Everything, including Hladík, even the shadow of a bee that had been flying nearby, is instantly frozen, paralyzed. In quick succession various thoughts race through Hladík's mind: he is dead and in hell; he is crazy; time has ground to a stop. But then he notices that his thoughts are continuing, and he realizes that what he asked for has been granted.

For a year he stands motionless, mentally completing The Enemies. The moment he finishes the work he feels the raindrop resume its path towards his cheek. The rifles aimed at him discharge, and the story is over. The miracle is accomplished, though the only person who will ever know it is dead.

Hladík, in one sense, is a stand-in for his creator. Like Borges, he has published early poems that he later came to regret; like Borges, he has written an attempted refutation of time (or a vindication of eternity — which comes to the same thing). Hladík's anxiety under the weight of his uncompleted masterpiece could be any writer's mingled anticipation and apprehension in the face of the tasks yet to be undertaken, some of which may never be accomplished.

But to me, the story is something else as well; it is a parable about the essential liberty of the mind. Hladík is seized against his will and can not control his own fate; the Gestapo can at whim revoke his freedom and deprive him of life. Yet Hladík retains the one thing that can never be commanded.

You can interpret that narrowly, if you like. The tyrant who exacts outward obedience may believe that he also commands the allegiance of his subjects, but he will never know. The true despot of genius is the one who is not satisfied with mere acquiescence but seeks to shape the mind as well, for he knows that independence of thought is the seed of potential resistance. But in the end it all crumbles the moment he relaxes his grip.

Though Borges was not generally inclined to comment on political events, I don't think he chose his setting at random. When he wrote the story, in 1943, he would have been well aware that, for millions of people, Hladík's fate — or something comparable — was in quite concrete ways their own. And he would have also known that for them there were few miracles, secret or otherwise.

But just as K., the hero of Franz Kafka's novel The Trial is at once a victim of a bureacracy gone mad and a representative man condemned by the universal sentence under which we are all are forced, unjustly, to live, so “El milagro secreto” is a story written in the shadow of an evil time but it is something else besides. It is a defense of meaning, of mind, of art, in the face of mortality and oblivion.

I am not religious and thus can not say with any assurance that the word “soul” is anything more than a metaphor used to name a flickering state of consciousness that can be snuffed out at any moment. I am aware that free will may well be nothing but an illusion, that the mind is bound to the body and constrained by infinite chains of cause and circumstance, that it can be swayed and degraded in any number of ways. And yet the mind is at liberty enough to recognize that its own nature is contingent and ephemeral and nevertheless imagine it otherwise. Perhaps that imagining is its own and only vindication.

(Translations, which are a bit free, are my own.)