Americans (IV)

Guss Crader

Finally, a name we can trace; the reverse of this snapshot photograph bears an inscription from one Elder Guss Crader of Jennings, Louisiana.

I don't know whether Crader was the man in the dark hat and possible clerical collar at left, or the other man, or neither; the identities of both men were presumably known to the recipient. There were both black and white Craders in the Jennings area, and several alternative spellings, but the sender was probably the Gustave Crader, "negro," whom census records indicate was born in Jennings in 1879. By 1910 he had married a woman named Rosa and was living in Grayburg, Texas, but in 1920 and 1930 he and Rosa were back in Jennings again. His occupation is listed as "pastor" in the 1930 census, and he was employed by the Holiness Church. The photo is undated but I'm guessing it is from the 1920s or '30s. The inscription, with two spelling errors corrected and the Bible verses interpolated, reads:

here is 2 men you can have them if you know them now mind you they are yet Friends Looking for the hope of him that Said St. John 15:14 [Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you] and we are on the way to the Church as Said in Heb 10 C: 25 [Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching] and we are glad as Said in Psalm 1.22:1 [I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the LORD] this Picture was taken at John your Brothers house with you and husband in mind wrote By Elder Guss Crader of Jennings La

There's an interesting border around the picture, showing what I take to be artist's palettes and easels. The number 31 has been stamped on the back.

Vivian Garrett

Though this portrait is smaller than the previous one, everything else about it suggests a common origin. The photographic paper stock is very similar, there is a border (though a different one), and a number (12) stamped on the back. I haven't been able to identify Vivian Garrett, but I suspect she was also from Jennings and would have been known to the same two men.

Laurence

The dealer I obtained these photos from thought that this photo might also have come from Louisiana; I suspect it's later than the other two images. On the back, in a reminder of the fleeting nature of life and the inevitability of loss, is the following note: "this is Laurence it was taken about a week before he died"; the "u" in his name could also be a "w." There is something — it may well be a camera — slung over his shoulder. In the background, just to his left but almost invisible in this scan, is a Coca-Cola sign and another sign, almost legible, that may be for a bar or restaurant (see closeup at bottom of page). There's still a trace of a smile on Laurence's face.

Census records indicate that Guss and Rosa Crader had a son named Lawrence, born in 1901 or 1902, but I suspect that's just a coincidence.

More to come.

Americans (III)

Sallisaw

This photograph may be the pivot of the collection. The image itself has some unusual features (which I'll note shortly), but its greatest interest may lie in the fact that it exists at all, and in how it relates to the other photos.

The photo shows two unidentified men and an unidentified woman, possibly siblings or a married couple and a brother-in-law. Someone — probably a child — has scrawled a line between the two men and a sort of spiral on the woman's mouth. The mount bears the inscription — apparently in pencil — "Wallace Sallisaw, OK." This would be the photographer L. N. Wallace, who was active in Sallisaw, Oklahoma at least by 1910 and as late as 1917, and who sometimes signed his work in that manner. (During that period he reportedly photographed an adolescent Charles Arthur Floyd, later to become notorious as Pretty Boy Floyd.) The photo above is probably no earlier than 1907, because Sallisaw was not in "Oklahoma" before then.

Wallace was a professional photographer, but I'm not clear whether this photograph was taken in a studio. What makes me wonder is the curious pose: the woman seems to be supported by the two men, and the object in the center foreground may be a bedpost; was she perhaps lying in bed, too ill to sit up? There is a seriousness and tenderness to the image that suggests this might have been the case, but maybe there's another explanation. Be that as it may, we can now start to assemble a series of pieces of evidence:

1) The family album or family collection from which all of the photographs in this series of posts were drawn came from a dealer who himself purchased it in Oklahoma.

2) The oldest of the photos that can be assigned a location came from Franklin County or elsewhere in Tennessee and date to c.1880.

3) The latest photos that can be assigned a location (these will be examined in future posts) come from Oklahoma and Louisiana.

4) The photograph at the top of the page, which is from Sallisaw, Oklahoma, is probably later than the Tennessee images, but it is earlier than the latest Oklahoma photo or photos in the group.

What the collection appears to document, then, is a movement after c. 1880 of some members or associates of the family network out of Tennessee and into what is now Oklahoma, and possibly into Louisiana. The evidence of this migration seems stronger in the case of Oklahoma because of the fact that there would have been relatively few African-Americans (there were some) in what was then known as Indian Territory c.1880; Louisiana, on the other hand, had long had a large African-American population. It's not impossible that the subjects of the Sallisaw photograph were descendants of African-Americans enslaved by the Cherokee, or descendants of other African-Americans who arrived in the area at an early date, but it is probably statistically more likely that they were part of the larger migration of African-Americans that took place in the 1880s and 1890s with the opening of Indian lands to settlement by non-Indians.

So the pivotal questions are 1) can the photographs be said to document a migration of one or more family members from Tennessee or another former slave state to Oklahoma?; and 2) how would this fit in with the historical context? The answer to the first question, given the fragmentary nature of the evidence, can only be tentative. Even if the photos could be definitively assigned to a single family network, there are too many other possible narratives that could serve to fit them together. We can't prove that any of the subjects of the Tennessee photos, or any of their descendants or relations, ever migrated west; we can't make any conclusions about the connection of the subjects of the Louisiana and Missouri photos to the other subjects; and we can't prove that the Oklahoma subjects came from Tennessee. The most we can do is say that a migration from Tennessee to Oklahoma is a possible narrative connecting the evidence. But in answer to the second question, we can say that such a migration, if true, would be an emblematic narrative in line with documented migrations that took place within the time frame represented by the photos.

So the remaining questions I'll pose in this post are these: why would African-Americans have migrated in significant numbers to what was then the frontier of US settlement in the West, and did they in fact undertake such migrations? Fortunately, the answers to both of these questions are firmly historically established. Following the Compromise of 1877 and the collapse of Reconstruction, political, economic, and social conditions for African-Americans in the former slave-holding states became extremely precarious, and by the time of the Kansas Fever Exodus of 1879 a classic push-pull migration dynamic had developed to which thousands of African-Americans responded. The "push" was the reinforcement of white supremacy throughout the South, accompanied by violence and intimidation against African-Americans who sought to hold on to their rights; and the "pull" was the prospect (in some cases illusory) of independence and prosperity in newly opened lands that had no tradition of slavery. The movement of African-Americans into Kansas was soon followed by migration into Oklahoma. Over the next decades the thousands of settlers from the east would form a number of black-majority towns in Oklahoma Territory (the state of Oklahoma from 1907), and would establish the prosperous Greenwood business district of Tulsa which was later destroyed by the white riot of 1921.

Sallisaw, the seat of Sequoyah County, was not a "black town," although it may have been one of the few towns in the region to offer a photographic studio. The three subjects in the L. N. Wallace photo may have been residents, or just people passing through. Were they part of the post-Reconstruction exodus from the Southeast? We don't know; all we know is that they could have been, and that such a migration would have been common at the time.

More to come.

Further reading:

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988)
Nell Irwin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1977)

Americans (II)

Ancestors?

The portion of the apparent family collection that I was able to obtain consists of thirteen photographs in a variety of formats, dating from c.1880 to at least 1933. Those that bear indication of their source come from four states: Tennessee, Missouri, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. Some were taken by studio photographers (all were apparently white) whose activities have been documented elsewhere; others are casual snapshots, probably taken by amateurs. A handful of the subjects are named: Vivian Garrett, Guss Crader from Jennings, Louisiana, Laurence (no last name). I've examined the auction listings of the other items that I wasn't able to obtain, but there isn't much more information to be gleaned there.

The images in this post include some of the earliest photographs from the group. All are studio photographs, and three come from Franklin County in the south-central portion of the state of Tennessee. The badly faded but haunting portrait at the top of this page, which is in the carte de visite format, was taken by Rufus B. Williams of Winchester, Tennessee. The reverse of the mount is shown below.

Williams, who was born in 1851, was in business by 1883 and remained active as a photographer for some years thereafter; he would go on to serve several terms in the Tennessee state legislature. The sitter's eyes have been marked with tiny pinpricks, perhaps to make them stand out.

The next photograph was taken by C. S. (Charles Stewart) Judd (1844-1892), a member of a family that included several other professional photographers.

The image, which is only 1.5 x 2.25 inches excluding the mount, is from the studio in Sewanee that Judd established in 1879; at various times he also operated in Columbia, Pulaski, and Monteagle. The same photographer was also responsible for two other images from this collection that are not in my possession; one, very similar to this one, depicts a young man whose last name may have been Miller; the other was taken in Judd's Columbia studio.

The next two photographs are by unidentified photographers and depict unidentified subjects. The first, of a standing woman with her hand on the shoulder of an older woman, is quite beautiful; having the two women stare in entirely different directions may have been a conventional studio pose, but it is deeply moving nonetheless. The water-damaged one that follows it, of a woman and child, is more awkward and uncomfortable.

At first glance the studio where the cabinet card below was taken is unidentified, but one corner of the image has begun to peel back from the mount, exposing the name "Schleier," and in another corner the word "Nashville" is legible through the thin photographic paper.

This would almost certainly be Theodore M. Schleier, a well-documented photographer who operated studios in New Orleans, Nashville, and Knoxville at various times between the 1850s and 1890, before serving as consul to the Netherlands under the administration of Benjamin Harrison. Schleier, who had Republican ties, was known for his portraits of Union soldiers. I'm not sure why the photo was mounted so as to hide the name of the studio; perhaps it was simply a mistake. The subject's mustache has been darkened by hand.

The last picture on this page, shown below, was taken at the Byarlay Studio in St. Joseph, Missouri. Byarlay, who was also an agriculturalist, was active as a photographer over a long period stretching roughly from 1880 to 1920, after which his establishment was renamed Bloomer Byarlay Studio. The photograph is almost certainly twentieth-century; the mount is similar to that accompanying the graduation portrait of a young man that will appear in a later post. The woman holds a relaxed, conventional pose; both she and the photographer have done this before.

One thing that should be noted about all of these photos is that they exist at all because the sitters voluntarily chose to be photographed. They aren't "documentary" or "colorful" images taken for the amusement or edification of white viewers. As far as I can determine, the identifiable photographers — Williams, Judd, Schleier, and Byarlay — were white, but subjects and photographers alike apparently felt comfortable in engaging in a commercial transaction centered around one of the ubiquitous rituals of late-19th-century bourgeois life: having one's photograph taken. Doing so would not have involved any great expense (some of the cruder and smaller images would have been very inexpensive), but it required a level of participation in urban or town life. They are, that is, portraits of citizens, in a social if not political sense. The photograph in the next post, however, may give a hint at the extent to which that citizenship was constrained.

Americans (I)

These photographs represent what are apparently fragments of a single African-American family album or family collection that was recently broken up and sold at auction. The photographs, which date from c. 1880 to at least 1933, offer only a few clues to the sitters' identities and histories, but if they do represent the members of a single, much-extended family (which is not quite certain), then through them we can trace a rough network of family connections and spanning at least four states and roughly fifty years of American history.


In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Darryl Pinckney wrote "In the US, white people are able to conceive of black people who are better than they are or worse than they are, superior or inferior, but they seem to have a hard time imagining black people who are just like them." The most striking thing about most of the photographs presented here, and in the posts that will come, the thing that shouldn't be striking at all, is how ordinary they are. What they reflect is the bedrock of experience: ties of kinship and friendship, rites of passage, memory across generations — the very things, that is, whose existence among black people has often been denied or downplayed. In their fragmentary way, these images remind us that, whatever our histories or notions of identity may be, most of us want basically the same things and will vigorously pursue them — if the doors aren't shut in our faces.

Future posts will examine these and additional photographs from the collection in greater detail.

De Thibaults

I won't be reading this new translation of Roger Martin du Gard's multi-volume novel Les Thibaults for the very good reason that I speak no Dutch, but they look like handsome editions and I'm glad there's still a market somewhere for this kind of writing. The translator is Anneke Alderlieste. They're not cheap: € 49.99 per volume. The publisher is Meulenhoff.

American Nightmares

A friend of mine recommended this volume of short stories, by an author whose name was unknown to me, and although I'm perhaps not the easiest person to suggest books to she hit the money on this one. Maybe she just knew that "lake" and "monster" are a combination I can't resist.

Actually, there's only one lake monster in the collection, and it's a doozy, but there's horror of some kind in all nine tales. I won't get into the question (a fairly tired one at this point) of whether Nathan Ballingrud is a "horror writer" who happens to set his stories among down-and-out, emotionally drained working-class Americans, mostly in the South, or whether he's essentially a "realist" who likes to draw on the horror playbook for material; let's just say that his approach, which is leavened by a good bit of subtle black humor, is his own, and a refreshing one at that. So here on the one hand you have convincing characters who are waitresses, building contractors, oil rig workers and the like, and on the other you have vampires, werewolves, and the undead. There's one story ("S.S."), dealing with a young New Orleans man dawn to a Neonazi group, that appears to have no fantastic element in it, although it may be as uncanny as any of the others. One tale ("The Crevasse"), the only one not set in the US, is a kind of homage to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.

Ballingrud is quite deft at juxtaposing these elements, and also in the way that he works into the stories an underlying substrate of guilt, much of it connected with family members who have let each other down in one way or another. There's a father whose neglect may have led to his son's kidnapping, another father who is struggling to revive his relationship with his family after a stint in prison, and a number of characters who are simply overwhelmed by their family responsibilities. In "The Good Husband," for example, a man wakes in the middle of the night and finds his wife's body in the bathtub, the result of the last of multiple suicide attempts, and decides to go back to bed without calling for help. (What happens next I won't reveal, but it's one of a number of stunning plot twists in this collection.)

North American Lake Monsters is available from Small Beer Press. Ballingrud has published one other book, a novella entitled The Visible Filth, which is published by This Is Horror in the UK.

The Dance

THE GRAND PRIEST

People of Argos, I say to you that this woman is committing sacrilege. Unhappiness be upon her and on any among you who listen to her.

ELECTRA

Oh my dear dead ones, Iphegenia, my older sister, Agamemnon, my father and only king, hear my prayer. If I commit sacrilege, if I offend your doleful shades, make a sign, make me at once a sign, that I may know it. But if you approve of my actions, my dear ones, then be silent, I beg you, let not a leaf stir, nor a blade of grass, let no sound disturb my sacred dance: because I dance for joy, I dance for peace among men, I dance for happiness and for life. O my dead ones, I demand your silence, that those around me may know that your heart is with me.

Sartre, Les mouches

Clementa C. Pinckney (July 30, 1973 – June 17, 2015)

His life has been taken, but his voice is not stilled. Give the pocket history lesson above a listen. Below is his official biography, compiled before his death:

The Reverend Honorable Clementa C. Pinckney was born July 30, 1973 the son of Mr. John Pinckney and the late Theopia Stevenson Pinckney of Ridgeland, South Carolina. He was educated in the public schools of Jasper County. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Allen University with a degree in Business Administration. While there, Reverend Pinckney served as freshman class president, student body president, and senior class president. Ebony Magazine recognized Rev. Pinckney as one the "Top College Students in America." During his junior year, he received a Princeton University Woodrow Wilson Summer Research Fellowship in the fields of public policy and international affairs. He received a graduate fellowship to the University of South Carolina where he earned a Master's degree in public administration. He completed a Master's of Divinity from the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary. Rev. Pinckney answered the call to preach at the age of thirteen and received his first appointment to pastor at the age of eighteen. He has served the following charges: Young's Chapel-Irmo, The Port Royal Circuit, Mount Horr-Yonges Island, Presiding Elder of the Wateree District and Campbell Chapel, Bluffton. He serves as the pastor of historic Mother Emanuel A.M.E. in Charleston, South Carolina.

Rev. Pinckney was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1996 at the age of twenty-three. In 2000, he was elected to the State Senate at the age of twenty-seven. He is one of the youngest persons and the youngest African-American in South Carolina to be elected to the State Legislature. He represents Jasper, Beaufort, Charleston, Colleton, and Hampton Counties. His committee assignments include Senate Finance, Banking and Insurance, Transportation, Medical Affairs and Corrections and Penology. Washington Post columnist, David Broder, called Rev. Pinckney a "political spirit lifter for suprisingly not becoming cynical about politics."

Rev. Pinckney has served in other capacities in the state to include a college trustee and corporate board member. In May 2010, he delivered the Commencement Address for the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary.

He and his wife Jennifer have two children - Eliana and Malana.

Source: Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, South Carolina.

The Rev. Pinckney was one of nine victims:

In addition to Mr. Pinckney, the victims were Cynthia Hurd, 54, who served as the regional manager of the St. Andrews branch of the county library; the Rev. DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49, the mother of four daughters — the youngest is in junior high school and the oldest is in college; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45, a coach of the girls' track and field team and a speech therapist at Goose Creek High School; Tywanza Sanders, 26, who had graduated from Allen University as a business administration major last year and was looking for a job; Ethel Lee Lance, 70, who had worked at the church for more than three decades; the Rev. Daniel L. Simmons Sr., a retired pastor from another church in Charleston; Myra Thompson, 59; and Susie Jackson, 87.

Source: The New York Times.

Water

I rounded the corner, walking from one sleepy back street to another, and just for an instant a view opened out, between the trees in their fullest summer green, of the little valley where the heart of town lay, and of the long lake stretched out in its center. But it was only an illusion, the dark unbroken streak nothing but the roof of a building a few yards away. There was no lake in the valley, only, invisible from where I stood in any case, an easily forded stream.

If I could arrange the world to my liking, everyone would have a view of deep water. Water, as the Taoists knew, is what is beyond us, what we cannot know or define. It can be channeled, contained, but in its nature it remains recalcitrant to our purposes. Its inexorable erosive downward course into the inaccessible can be delayed, but in the end, as any child who has ever made the experiment knows, it slips through our fingers. Even in our bodies it is only imprisoned for a time. It flows through us and sustains us, but when it is done with us it will strand us in the sterile deserts of our dreams.

Notes for a commonplace book (15)

Glenway Wescott:

"There were two albums of embossed leather studded with buttons which resembled shoe buttons, and one with celluloid roses glued upon a velvet binding. There were daguerreotypes in cases closed by a metal clasp or a loop of worn cord, which Alwyn opened and tried to read as if they were a library of miniature books. At the left a leaf of red satin, at the right in a mat of beaded gilt the portraits: heads and busts and family groups, pygmy men and women as if seen through a telescope — the men in a daydream, the women anxious about their children, their lovers, their clothes. Mouths like bits of carved wax, nostrils of an insatiable arrogance; eyes long closed in death — or the young, suspicious eyes of men and women who were now old and patted Alwyn's head and peered at him dimly and benificently — staring out of the picture frames as if he were an enemy in disguise ... The lifeless light (in which innumerable photographers had covered their heads with large, black handkerchiefs and imitated a bird with their hands) half hid and half revealed all the possible combinations of all the motives there were — greed and sensuality and courage and compassion and cruelty and nostalgia; all the destinies there were — manias, consolations, regrets.

"The same motives and similar destinies existed still; but these people whose playgrounds they had been were gone. Nothing came back from the oblivion into which they had vanished (for old age and death were equally oblivion) not a sound came back but a little slightly exultant, unhappy laughter — Alwyn's grandmother laughing for them.

"He listened to her comments — old-fashioned maxims, scraps of tragi-comic narrative, implicitly mocking, explicitly compassionate — and what she told revealed little more than the photograph albums themselves: another set of pictures, photographs of actions and opinions, also noncommittal and badly focused. But he knew what she knew and tried to forget: that each picture was a tomb where a dead heart (or merely the youth and freshness of a heart which was now old) lay buried — buried with its affections, its apathy, its fury. He knew that on each insignificant grave there stood (though he could only guess what it was) a secret like hers, wild and perfect as a wild flower, nodding in its everlasting leaves, or dangling from a broken stem ..."

The Grandmothers (1927)

Notes for a commonplace book (14)

Glenway Wescott:

"There was a shell on the sideboard, a conch shell in the shape of a horn, which, when held to the ear, repeated the surge and collapse of breakers, infinitely faint, as if heard across the great width of America which separates Wisconsin from the sea. It seemed to the boy that in the same way every object in those rooms echoed the forces which had once been at play around it, very faintly, from a distance of years instead of miles. The pleated fabrics and sheets of old paper enfolded little, agitated ghosts; and the odor of unfamiliar clothes, beds, and pillows, the residue of spiritless perfumes and bouquets long since thrown away, suggested energies now exhausted and passions now forgotten: the energy which had chosen this farm in the wilderness, cut down the trees, uprooted the stumps, built and demolished the log cabins, and founded this home; the long series of passions which had in the end produced himself."

The Grandmothers (1927)

Armed with a Broken Heart

Singer-songwriter Freedy Johnston doesn't exactly flood the market with releases of new material, and Neon Repairman, just out, is only his second CD of new songs since 2001. Like many of his peers among major-label refugees (or even minor-label refugees), he's more or less on his own these days; this CD was issued by Singing Magnet Records, which I suspect means that he put it out himself.

There are pluses and minuses to going it alone, but at this point in the evolution of the pop music industry a lot of talented people don't have much choice. Happily, this is a fine CD, one that can comfortably be set beside records like Can You Fly and This Perfect World that Freedy made in the 1990s when it was still possible for someone like him to get promotion and airplay. Freedy continues to tour and I hope at least a few people get a chance to hear this one.

As melodic and jaunty as Freedy's songwriting is, I doubt he's ever been accused of sugarcoating things, and this record is no exception. In addition to drug dealers, waitresses, and damaged war veterans, his characters run the gamut from the ordinary lovelorn to the borderline creepy. The gentlest song on Neon Repairman is sung in the character of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, and even that one looks back to "that hole in the ground we lived in during the war." Not that Freedy has cornered the market on dark material, but there are few songwriters who can combine romanticism, down-and-out grit, and human sympathy quite this successfully. Plus he just flat-out knows how to compose a pop song.

Neon Repairman is available from CD Baby (which has audio samples), and presumably at Freedy's gigs. You could do worse.

Odd, off, oft, old.

The artist and printmaker Annie Bissett has discovered this wonderful bit of found poetry, which she has posted on her Tumblr blog. Adapted from Thomas Dilworth's A New Guide to the English Tongue, an oft-reprinted 18th-century schoolbook, it reproduces part of a table of "Words of Three Letters, viz. One Vowel and two Consonants."

Although it may not be immediately apparent, there is a logical order to the table. It is alphabetized first by last letter, then by central vowel, and finally by first letter. The first word in the table (which actually begins at the bottom of the unshown preceding page) is Dab, and it is followed by Web. Bib fib nib rib. and so on until it reaches Box sox. It then begins again with words that don't fit the consonant-vowel-consonant spelling pattern: The. Who. Cry dry fly etc. (although Two., in the second paragraph, would seem to belong further down). The words in parentheses appear to be ones whose vowel is pronounced differently from those of the rest of their respective groups. The book uses the old-style ſ for initial s.

But knowing how the table is constructed is much less fun than simply reading it (especially aloud), enjoying the music of English speech sounds, and reflecting on the strangeness of human language. It may remind us that these everyday words, the essential building blocks of English, are, in the end, just arbitrary signs, ones that would mean nothing, or perhaps different things, to someone who knew nothing of the language.

Spring list

I've been too busy of late to write anything substantial but not, happily, too busy to read. These three books have very little in common other than the fact that they were published either this year or last, and that I liked them enough to buy a copy. I've reached a point where adding to my library isn't always advisable, if only in terms of shelf space, and so I've been trying to rely on the public library system for run-of-the-mill reading matter (electronic books not being to my taste). These books are exceptions.

Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk is a beautifully written book about training a goshawk named Mabel, about coping with grief, and also about the writer T. H. White, who is best known for his Arthurian fiction but who also composed an account of his own ill-fated attempt to raise a similar hawk. Macdonald's book has been a surprise bestseller both in her native UK, where it was released last year by Jonathan Cape, and now in the US, where it is published by Grove Press, and it has won several awards. For once, all the attention is amply justified; Macdonald is a fine writer, able to deftly capture both her hawk's flights around the English countryside and her own emotional turmoil. Inevitably, there is a movie deal, but although H is for Hawk might make a fine film, nothing, I suspect, can substitute for the pleasures and integrity of Macdonald's prose.

Terhi Ekebom's Logbook, on the other hand, has almost no prose at all. It's a tiny illustrated chapbook published in Latvia (though what text there is is in English). Grief is also the subject here, although the details are as mysterious as the atmosphere. Two women — it's hard to say if they are adolescents or adults — inhabit a house in the middle of the sea where they tend to a bedridden male figure who is menaced by an expanding darkness. Their only temporary defense against its spread are the light-releasing spheres of a marine plant that float up to the surface. Logbook is available from kuš! komiksi for $6 including postage worldwide.

Finally, for some time I've been following Tom Miller's excellent blog Daytonian in Manhattan, which is dedicated to the architecture and histories of Manhattan buildings and monuments, but I've had to admit to some frustration because there was simply too much of interest there to comfortably digest online. Fortunately, a selection of entries has been published in a reader-friendly and nicely illustrated compact format by Universe (Rizzoli) in the US and Pimpernel Press in the UK. Though the book includes a few internationally renowned buildings (the Flatiron Building, St. Patrick's Cathedral), most of the structures it covers, like the Village's Pepperpot Inn and the melancholy General Slocum Memorial Fountain, are easily overlooked, and Miller's enthusiastic dedication to their stories is admirable. Let's hope there will be sequels to come.

More Japanese Gothic

Satori Ediciones in Spain has published its second collection of translations into Spanish of the Japanese writer Izumi Kyōka (1873-1939), following in the wake of El santo del monte Koya, which I discussed here last year.

As with the previous volume, all of the stories (there are four) are fantastic in manner and draw on the long tradition of Japanese supernatural literature and lore. The title story is available in English (as "Of A Dragon in the Deep") but the edition is difficult to obtain and I haven't seen it; the longest of the tales, "El fantasma que esconde las cejas" (The Ghost Who Hid Her Eyebrows) has been translated by Charles Shirō Inouye and can be found in a volume entitled In Light of Shadows: More Gothic Tales by Izumi Kyōka, published by the University of Hawai'i Press. As far as I know the other two tales are not available in English.

Kyoka was a fascinating but sometimes difficult writer, who made of use of what Charles Inouye calls "an eccentric, highly convoluted narrative method that precluded his participation in the more mainstream attempt to accomplish an objective description of an exterior world and a psychologically depicted realm of an interior one." "His narratives," Inouye continues, "neither maintain a consistently stable and omniscient point of view nor do they present time as a steady flow of logically connected events that are contained in the past." Writing at a time when many of his contemporaries were embracing the conventions of the Western realistic and psychological novel, Kyoka held to his own way.

Two of the stories in Sobre el dragón del abismo describe the encounters of children with a unpredictable but not necessarily hostile supernatural world; the third, "La historia de los tres ciegos" (The Story of the three Blind People) is classic horror tale of the perils that lie in wait for those who trangress. The last narrative, "El fantasma que esconde las cejas," is a ghost story so many-layered (and impossible to summarize here) that Inouye includes a diagram in his edition to help visualize its intricately nested levels.

I've now read this final story twice in English and twice in Spanish, gaining insight into it with each reading, but I wouldn't pretend to have mastered it. Because of the richness of cultural allusions in Kyoka's tales, as well as the inherent difficulties of translating from Japanese into a European language, it's interesting to compare the two translations, Spanish and English. Since I know no Japanese, I naturally can't comment on their relative accuracy, but while they're generally complementary (and mutually clarifying) there are numerous passages that show fairly radical differences in interpretation. Below is just one sample passage; what follows is 1) Alejandro Morales Rama's Spanish-language text; 2) my rough English translation of the Spanish into English; and finally 3) Inouye's version:

1) Las montañas y el cielo estaban tan nítidos que parecía que los estuviese viendo a través de una capa de hielo. Los brillantes rayos del sol hacían que las agujas de los pinos y los árboles secos resplandecieran. Al mismo tiempo se veía volando una figura de un blanco cegador y en las profundides de la montána, donde el oso vive alejado de los hombres, la nieve se había tornado en una ventisca punzante como agujas.

2) The mountains and the sky were so clear that it seemed as if one were seeing them through a covering of ice. The brilliant rays of the sun made the needles of the pines and the dry trees shine. At the same time, a figure of blinding white was seen flying, and in the depths of the mountain, where the bear lives apart from men, the snow had turned into a blizzard as sharp as needles.

3) The mountains and sky became clear as ice. While the sun sparkled brilliantly in the pines and other wintering trees, something white began to fall from the sky. In the deep mountains, where bears stood on their rear legs like human beings, the snow came down like needles.

Inouye's "wintering trees" is a nice touch, but I don't much like "rear legs" (rather than "hind"). What's interesting, though, is the very different ways in which the reference to the bear or bears is understood. Whatever the truth of its accuracy, Rama's donde el oso vive alejado de los hombres (where the bear lives apart from men) is a beautiful lyrical touch, suggesting a fundamental if estranged kinship between the two species. Reading the two translations side-by-side provides an unstable but rewarding reading of an intricate masterwork of modern Japanese literature.

Notes for a commonplace book (13)

Charles Shirō Inouye:

"The fixed point of view of the realistic painter finds its analogue in the omniscient perspective of the authoritative author. More than merely a scribbler, the modern novelist tells true stories from a privileged point of view, and from a similarly fixed point in time (usually the present as explained by the past). An author’s claims to truthfulness rest largely on such a consistent, objective point of view, as if that view were an integral, ordering part of the reproducible world that flows from it. Its very stability generates robustness as a true and principled source of truth; and its generality produces realism’s utility as a nondistorting understanding of reality that allows us to describe the world as similarly recognizable and understandable to everyone…

"Such a perspectival system includes both the objectively true exterior (realism) and the subjectively true interior (psychology) because everything, including the invisible realm, must be accounted for… In the modern period, history becomes the acceptable and plausible truth, while fiction, with its ability to delve impossibly into the emotions and thoughts of people, becomes the acceptable and plausible lie (or the imagined that is nevertheless true).

"In other words, realistic truth makes fiction necessary… Fiction derives compellingly from a central contradiction of modernity … that only by surrendering oneself to a rational and atomizing system does one gain individual identity and the ability to think and act for (and by) oneself. Paradoxically, in order to be an individuated member of such a society, we must assume a point of view that everyone shares; thus, the fundamental irony implied in the notion of subjectivity, where the subject is supposedly both a follower (a loyal subject) and an acting agent (someone with subjectivity or the will to act independently) and where the status of subjectivity is, on the one hand, praised as being emotionally true and, on the other, degraded as a lack of (objective) truth. The modern novel attempts to make sense of this paradox — this surrendering as empowerment — by raising the possibility of a true subjectivity, that is, fiction, within a larger context of objective truth."

From an essay on Izumi Kyōka's "A Quiet Obsession," from In Light of Shadows: More Gothic Tales by Izumi Kyōka, University of Hawai'i Press.

The cure

This may be my favorite photograph ever: via Bibliodyssey (Tumblr), an image from a Sotheby's auction lot of glass negatives by Samuel Bourne, Nicholas & Co., P. Klier, and others, grouped as "Photographs of Darjeeling, Madras, and Burma." Click through the image for the full effect.

I have no doubt that were this image to be enlarged and mandatorily posted on the walls of every kindergarten classroom, the salutary effects on future generations would be immeasurable.

Re-envisioning Japan

This merits a look: Re-envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th-Century Visual and Material Culture, a new "interactive archive and research project" created by Joanne Bernardi, associate professor at the University of Rochester, is now online. From a quick glance it looks like there's plenty of good stuff there, including a section devoted to the Japan Tourist Library, about which I've blogged previously. Lots of postcards too.

Ruins

"One day we walked out, a little party of three, to Albano, fourteen miles distant; possessed by a great desire to go there by the ancient Appian way, long since ruined and overgrown. We started at half-past seven in the morning, and within an hour or so were out upon the open Campagna. For twelve miles we went climbing on, over an unbroken succession of mounds, and heaps, and hills, of ruin. Tombs and temples, overthrown and prostrate; small fragments of columns, friezes, pediments; great blocks of granite and marble; mouldering arches, grass-grown and decayed; ruin enough to build a spacious city from; lay strewn about us. Sometimes, loose walls, built up from these fragments by the shepherds, came across our path; sometimes, a ditch between two mounds of broken stones, obstructed our progress; sometimes, the fragments themselves, rolling from beneath our feet, made it a toilsome matter to advance; but it was always ruin. Now, we tracked a piece of the old road, above the ground; now traced it, underneath a grassy covering, as if that were its grave; but all the way was ruin. In the distance, ruined aqueducts went stalking on their giant course along the plain; and every breath of wind that swept towards us, stirred early flowers and grasses, springing up, spontaneously, on miles of ruin. The unseen larks above us, who alone disturbed the awful silence, had their nests in ruin; and the fierce herdsmen, clad in sheepskins, who now and then scowled out upon us from their sleeping nooks, were housed in ruin. The aspect of the desolate Campagna in one direction, where it was most level, reminded me of an American prairie; but what is the solitude of a region where men have never dwelt, to that of a Desert, where a mighty race have left their footprints in the earth from which they have vanished; where the resting-places of their Dead, have fallen like their Dead; and the broken hour-glass of Time is but a heap of idle dust! Returning, by the road, at sunset! and looking, from the distance, on the course we had taken in the morning, I almost feel (as I had felt when I first saw it, at that hour) as if the sun would never rise again, but looked its last, that night, upon a ruined world."

Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy

Image above: Rodolfo Lanciani, Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries

The Land of the Free

Ran away, a negro woman and two children. A few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M.

When Charles Dickens made his first visit to the United States in 1842, he found much to admire as well as much to deplore. Foremost among the latter (in addition to the widespread practice of tobacco chewing and spitting, which disgusted him) was the institution of slavery, which he condemned vehemently and categorically, devoting an entire chapter of American Notes for General Circulation to the topic. Much of that chapter consists of a list of runaway slave advertisements like the one quoted above, notices that were made all the more harrowing by the fact that the ardent defenders of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness who placed them made careful note of the brandings, ear-clippings, and other mutilations that could serve to identify their escaped "property." Dickens invented nothing here; the advertisements were copied, almost verbatim (and without attribution), from a volume entitled American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, compiled by Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké, and Sarah Grimké, which scrupulously recorded the sources of the advertisements. Thanks to Weld and the Grimkés, and to The North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements project, we know that the epitome of Southern chivalry responsible for this particular notice was one Micajah Ricks of Nash County, North Carolina, and that the advertisement appeared in the North Carolina Standard on July 18, 1838.

In recent weeks the legislatures of at least two states (Oklahoma and Georgia) have passed measures opposing the curriculum of the Advanced Placement course in U. S. History, on the grounds that it offers, in the words of one critic of the course, "a consistently negative view of American history that highlights oppressors and exploiters." Perhaps those lawmakers need to dust off their Dickens?

The Language of Dreams

"It is very remarkable, that as we dream in words, and carry on imaginary conversations, in which we speak both for ourselves and for the shadows who appear to us in those visions of the night, so she, having no words, uses her finger alphabet in her sleep. And it has been ascertained that when her slumber is broken, and is much disturbed by dreams, she expresses her thoughts in an irregular and confused manner on her fingers: just as we should murmur and matter them indistinctly, in the like circumstances."

Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, writing of Laura Bridgman. Bridgman, left blind, deaf, and unable to speak after an early illness, learned to communicate by means of a manual alphabet while in residence at the Perkins Institution near Boston, Massachusetts.

The mind habituates itself to whatever tools it has at hand. If I converse in Spanish for a while and then return to English, it sometimes takes me a moment to realize that I no longer need to mentally translate before speaking. After reading Dickens's lengthy description of Bridgman, (much of which reproduces the written account of her teacher Samuel Gridley Howe), I found myself only slowly returning to a world in which the senses of sight and hearing could be taken for granted.

Laura Bridgman eventually learned to write with ink and paper. Among her writings are descriptions of her dreams.

Martin Hayes & Dennis Cahill

This is really splendid: fiddler Martin Hayes and guitarist Dennis Cahill, from NPR's Tiny Desk Concert series. I love the relaxed intimacy of the performance; it's like having them in your living room.

Hayes and Cahill have played together for years, most recently as part of a superb five-man band called The Gloaming.

On the town

Two men with lit cigars and a third man, seated, whose own smoke is still tucked in his pocket. Though the postcard was never addressed or mailed and the location is unknown, we may be looking at the interior of a nickelodeon or amusement parlor; an advertising sign behind the men, difficult to make out, may read "Isis Moving Pictures" or "Isis Motion Pictures," and the stirrups of what could possibly be a coin-operated horse appear at left. There were establishments bearing the Isis name in various cities. Or maybe we're looking at something else entirely.

"Jack Begley" is probably too common a name to assign to any identifiable individual; "Bedsoe" is a bit more unusual. But like the man in the dark suit, they've had their time.

Velox Real Photo postcard, c.1907-1914.

Nannie Wilson

The young woman whose likeness was captured in this Real Photo postcard image was a schoolteacher in Red Wing (or Redwing), Kansas in 1907-08. The names of her pupils are neatly written on the back of the card:

Harry Hall Willie Ruble Amelia Proksch August Proksch James Ruble Matilda Heoffner Blanch Cliff Carl Winkle Joseph Heoffner Ethel Bailey

Alloys Heoffner Dell Wylie Richard Bailey Stella Ruble Regina Smith Anna Proksch Rosine Winkle Isabell Bailey Joe Proksch James Bailey

Below the names is the following inscription: "In loving remembrance of days spent to-gether in district 31./ Nannie Wilson / Teacher".

There are twenty students listed but some of the surnames are repeated (there are four children named Bailey, four named Proksch), so Wilson undoubtedly taught a range of ages at the same time, presumably in one room. Amy Bickel, who writes the Dead Towns in Kansas blog and has photos of the area as it looks now, includes Redwing today among the state's more than 6,000 ghost towns.

There are identifiable traces of a number of Nannie Wilson's pupils in census records and other online sources, but I'm not inclined to pursue them. Perhaps in this case I just feel that the stories of these people don't belong to me, that I have no right to them.

Some rocks

for Michael Leddy

Top: Ogdred Weary (Edward Gorey), The Dancing Rock (bound with Dogear Wryde, The Floating Elephant), The Fantod Press, 1993. Shown: cover and sample page. Purchased at the Gotham Book Mart. Bottom: Peter Blegvad, Stones in My Passway, The London Institute of 'Pataphysics, 2002. Shown: cover, title page, and sample page.

Kansas

"Just a few of our crowd and guess you will know the majority of them. If not will tell you of them later." Mailed from Salina, Kansas to nearby Culver in either 1906 or 1908. The recipient was a Miss Blanche Caldwell.

"Made by Frank E. Mohler McPherson Kans." The Mohler family name was common among the members of the Church of the Brethren, a pietist (and historically pacifist) sect with roots in Schwarzenau, Germany. The individuals in this photo may have been associated with McPherson College, a Brethren-founded institution.

The fact that Frank E. Mohler had his name and address pre-printed on the back of the card suggests that he may have been a professional photographer, at least briefly. His identity is complicated somewhat by the fact that various records mention a Frank Ellis Mohler and a Frank Martin Mohler, both of whom had ties to religious institutions and to Kansas. Frank Martin Mohler, who seems to have been the elder of the two by a few years, attended Washburn College in Topeka and later went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, before serving for a number of years as a Y.M.C.A. missionary in China. The less distinguished Frank E. Mohler was a teacher in McPherson during World War I, but then seems to have headed west; a man by that name is recorded as having sold water heaters in San Diego around 1930, having operated a bookstore there in the later 1940s, and having died in 1960.

The image above, taken by the Garver studio in Dodge City, Kansas, shows the Prough family. The Artura stock on which it was printed was manufactured from 1908-1924. There are various records of that family name in Dodge City during those years, but I haven't been able to identify the family more specifically.

All three of these photographs were printed as Real Photo postcards.

A death remembered

This short novel, published in 1981, is based on an incident that had taken place some 30 years earlier, when a young man named Cayetano Gentile Chimento, a friend of the author, was murdered in the town of Sucre, Colombia by two brothers of a woman he had allegedly "deflowered" in advance of her wedding to another man. The narrative apparently follows the outlines of the actual event fairly closely, even to the extent that relatives of the narrator (who is never himself named) bear the same names as Gabriel García Márquez's own family members, at least one of whom witnessed the killing. (Gerald Martin's fine biography of the author has the full background.)

Still, Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a work of fiction, not reportage, and one that remains tense and compelling throughout even though we know the outcome from the very first sentence (not to mention from the title). As the book progresses we learn the reasons behind the killing (although some important things are never explained), and we follow the fatal chain of events that, far from being inexorable, could have been interrupted at any number of points. In fact, the killers, reluctant to carry out an act that "honor" compels them to perform, seem to go out of their way to make the final result preventable. The death is not just "foretold" in the sense of being predicted; it's announced (anunciada) in advance to virtually everyone the killers come across. The victim is one of the few people not to get the message.

For a book that runs to only 193 generously spaced pages in its Spanish text (120 in Gregory Rabassa's translation), there are an astounding number of named characters. That's a key to the nature of the book, which is not simply about a tragic series of events involving a few key participants, but about how an entire community witnessed, participated in, and remembered those events, which the narrator reconstructs years later. Here, from my notes, is a by no means complete dramatis personae:

Santiago Nasar; the victim
Plácida Linero; his mother
Victoria Guzmán; their cook
Divina Flor; her daughter

Angela Vicario; the bride
Pablo Vicario; her brother
Pedro Vicario; Pablo's twin, six minutes his junior
Pura (Purísima) Vicario; their mother
Poncio Vicario; their father
Prudencia Cotes; Pablo's girlfriend

Bayardo San Román; the groom
Gen. Petronio San Román; his father
Alberta Simonds; his mother

María Alejandrina Cervantes; a prostitute
Clotilde Armenta; the proprietress of a grocery store
Rogelio de la Flor; her husband
Flora Miguel; the victim's fiancée
Nahir Miguel; her father
Cristo Bedoya; a friend of the victim
Carmen Amador; a priest
Lázaro Aponte; the mayor of the town
Dionisio Iguarón; a physician
Leandro Pornoy; a policeman
"the widower Xius"; the former owner of a house purchased by the groom

The narrator
Luis Enrique; his brother
Margot; his sister
Another sister; a nun
Jaime; another brother
Wenefrida Márquez; the narrator's aunt (who makes an appearance even though her namesake was already dead at the time of the events)
Mercedes Barcha; the narrator's future wife (and the author's wife's real name)

And on and on through to the very last pages; various townspeople:

Yamil Shaium
Indalecio Pardo
Sara Noriega
Celeste Dangond
Meme Loiza
Polo Carillo
Fausto López
Hortensia Baute
Faustino Santos
Aura Villeros
Próspera Arango
Poncho Lanao
Argénida Lanao

Plus a bishop, an unnamed judge, and present only by allusion, the ghosts of Col. Aureliano Buendía and Gerineldo Martínez.

The delight that García Márquez felt in inventing names is evident. It will be noted that several of them, including that of the victim, are Arabic in origin; these are members of the town's population of second- or third-generation Arab immigrants, sometimes referred to as "the Turks," a reminder of Latin America's complex ethnic heritage.

Visiting professor

Clases de literatura: Berkeley, 1980, published in 2013, presents the transcription of a series of seminars that Julio Cortázar conducted (in Spanish) during one of his infrequent visits to the United States. Cortázar was not a professional academic (he had done some teaching in his native Argentina before emigrating to France), and was quite upfront about being neither a literary critic nor a literary theorist. For that reason, some of the ideas preserved here, such as his thoughts about the differences between the fantastic and the realist short story, may seem a bit half-formed and arbitrary, but not so his comments about his own works and writing methods, which include a discussion of Rayuela that is likely to be seen as indispensable to any future readings of that much-discussed work, even if some of the points he makes are repeated elsewhere. Here, for example, is his explanation of how that novel's interpolated "expendable chapters" were put into sequence:

I ought to say that many critics have devoted many hours to analyzing what technique I might have used to mix in the chapters and present them in their irregular order. My technique wasn't what the critics have imagined: my technique was that I went to the house of a friend [Eduardo Jonquières] who had a kind of large studio the size of this room, I put all of the chapters on the floor (each one was fastened with a paper clip, a fastener) and I started walking around through the chapters leaving little alleyways and letting myself follow lines of force: where a chapter connected well with a fragment that was made up of, for instance, a poem by Octavio Paz (one is quoted), immediately I attached a pair of numbers and went on connecting them, assembling a package that I hardly modified. I thought that in that manner chance — what gets called chance — was assisting me and that I had to let chance come into play a little: my eye might notice something that was one meter away but not see something that was two meters away which I would only see later. I don't think I was mistaken: I had to modify two or three chapters because the action started to go in reverse instead of forwards, but overall this ordering into different levels worked in a sufficiently satisfactory manner for me and the book was published in that form.

(I have changed two verbs in the above translation from the present tense to the past in the interests of consistency.)

Each seminar included a question-and-answer session in which Cortázar was asked about various topics, from the fairly predictable (the Padilla affair) to the unexpected (whether he wrote his works in Spanish or in French), but also prompting interesting evaluations of such figures as Boris Vian and José Lezama Lima. The transcription includes various excerpts from Cortázar's writings which he read to the class, one or two of which I don't recognize. No word thus far on a possible translation into English.

Guru and Disciple (Yuri Arbatsky)

From 1933 to 1942, the composer and ethnomusicologist Yuri Arbatsky traveled in the Balkans, studying and recording the folk music traditions of the region. Much of the material he collected was confiscated and lost during World War II, but after the war his dissertation, "Das Mazedonische Tupanspiel," publication of which had been forbidden by the Gestapo, was translated into English and published by the Newbery Library in Chicago as Beating the Tupan in the Central Balkans. Though most of the book deals with musicological arcana, the following section, in which he recounts his apprenticeship with a sort of Albanian version of Obi-Wan Kenobi, an elderly master of the tupan (a kind of drum), may provide some amusement.

The facts as given in the following chapters are the result of my studies with the folkmusician [sic] and famous tupanist Mehmed of Spinadija near Prizren. These studies were made, with certain interruptions, in the years 1933-1937. […]

During my period of study with Mehmed I kept a detailed diary of my progress as a folkmusician, although I had no intention of making a special record of this relationship. I must confess that, being “spoiled” — Mehmed conferred that designation on everyone who had concerned himself with the study of Occidental art music — I did not at first take his teachings seriously. What could a primitive man teach me about music? With the first lessons, however, I began to perceive the subtleties of his instruction and the scope of the material to be mastered. All of my former studies and my professional practice of years were useless here. I began to work in earnest, and eventually advanced to a proper understanding and respect for the art of folkmusic. As a novice, and one even more handicapped than the native beginner who had been aquainted with the peculiarities of this great folkart since childhood, I worked at a great disadvantage. For even the untrained native, through constant contact with the music of his region, was furnished with some general knowledge of it.

When I began my studies with Mehmed I fancied that I had an excellent knowledge of this kind of music, to which I had often listened before. Thus my irritation was considerable when, on requesting him to play something to which I would “beat time” on the tupan, Mehmed, after smilingly taking up his zurla [a wind instrument] and beginning to blow, put aside his instrument and told me with deepest contempt that I was a dunce. I had always held my own playing in high esteem; I had often listened to how the tupan was beaten; and had of course read many books on Balkan folkmusic. But I was just beginning to discover that there existed other rules of which nothing is written in any book, and that the tupanist, in his playing, is bound by principles unknown in the Occidental science of music. I had yet to be convinced that it was insufficient to beat the tupan in the way I had seen and heard, merely by imitation. It is, indeed, hard for a person brought up in the Occidental tradition of art music not to consider these musical performances as primitive. How could I suspect that in this “indescribable din” lay concealed a wealth of musical wisdom?

In Mehmed's eyes I was just a musical dunce. When I urged him to tell me why, he only repeated again and again, “You are spoiled! You are spoiled!” When I pressed him for an explanation he remained mute. He was either unwilling or unable to explain his judgment of my abilities. I decided to become his pupil — and was flatly refused, in spite of my repeated entreaties. I offered him payment for his instruction, but that was the worst approach I could have made. He became furious and shouted: “You are my friend and I will never accept anything from you! But you are spoiled and will never be able to learn anything.” Nevertheless I finally succeeded in persuading him. He agreed to teach me, for the sake of God, but I had to promise never to resist his methods and “to obey him blindly.”

With the very first lesson I began to see how little I knew. I was told to beat with the drumstick on the tupan at regular intervals. This is usually the simplest of musical performances, if the intervals are short; but it is extremely difficult it the intervals are thirty to forty seconds apart. It was beating of this kind which Mehmed first asked me to do.

Needless to say, the first lesson was a complete failure. Yet I was warned for the second lesson. I looked at my watch — unperceived — and succeeded! Mehmed was puzzled and obviously content with my progress; he said that I might accomplish something after all.

With this measure of success behind me, I exercised myself thoroughly in the beating with long intervals. It took me about eight months until I had mastered this exercise which native musicians generally learn in two or three weeks. Moreover, I still looked at my watch during the lessons, but Mehmed was not aware of it. The lessons took place every day, for myself as well as for the native pupils. When Mehmed had made sure that I was able to beat slowly in regular intervals, he explained to me that there are short and longer beats and told me to perform a short beat and a longer one alternately. To my question about what difference there was between a short and a longer beat he was not able to give an answer; he merely ordered me to play.

Reflecting that a short beat might have the value of one unit, and a longer one that of two units, I began to play accordingly. Mehmed glanced at my compassionately, but did not give the least explanation as to why the intervals of the beats were wrong. He only said, “Now you can see how spoiled you are!”

I became impatient and was about to abandon his teaching when he reminded me of my promise to work obediently and never to offer any resistance. I then asked him to demonstrate to me on the tupan what he meant by short and longer beats. He only replied that this would be undignified — whether on my part or on his I could not tell. Nor did I dare ask another question, for he had become angry.

Finally, however, he took my hand and began to guide it. As it was hard for me to find out the real length of the beats, I again resorted to my watch for help. Thus I learned that the short and the longer beats had the proportion of 1: 1 1/2 to each other. Now I knew the proportion, and with the help of my watch, to Mehmed's great astonishment, I could perform correctly. Later I learned that the use of short beats and longer ones constituted a fixed musical conception among the natives, not requiring any explanation. […]

My studies with Mehmed lasted about three years. What deep and extensive knowledge must be at the disposal of the folkmusicians of great style who study for ten years or more!

Arbatsky comments on his tutor: “Mehmed himself, whose age was difficult to determine — he was then about eighty years old — declared that he had never attended a folkmusic school. When still a youth he had been taught by an old folkmusician who in his time had attended such a school in Koritza. But it was impossible to find out when this had occurred, since the Albanians consider a man of forty still a youth, and sometimes one of sixty a young man.… Mehmed at eighty did not in the least think of himself as an old man! He was only a man in the years of his maturity. Shortly before I made his acquaintance, he had married a girl of thirteen, who even gave birth to children of his. Who knows how long he would have lived had he not been killed in 1938 by a bullet while crossing the frontier west of Djevdelija!”

Arbatsky failed to learn longevity from his master; he died of a heart attack in 1963 at the age of 52.

"This was someone"

Via R.B.

The Palace of the King of Night (Introduction)

In the spring and summer of 2007 I wrote a narrative entitled The Palace of the King of Night, described in its subtitle as "a novella, or folly." Later, when I phased out the website where I had originally posted it, I elected not to transfer it over to my current blog. Not being inclined to revise or or even re-read it at that particular moment, I suspected that the length and likely artistic shortcomings of the piece would render it a distraction from what I was interested in doing at my new address. For whatever it's worth, I have decided to make it available now, in installments, but spun off onto a separate blog [here].

The novella originated, as does much of the (relatively little) fiction that I write, in a dream or half-dream, and the opening scene and perhaps a little more derive directly from that source. Once the story got going, however, I more or less consciously steered it according to a preconceived plan, and it became a kind of ersatz Grail legend, set not in a forest, as is traditional, but in an arid landscape that perhaps was also a kind of underworld or land of the dead. The peculiar artwork of Charles-Frédéric Soehnée (see above) was a partial inspiration, at least for atmosphere, and their were faint traces of what I knew about ancient Egyptian mythology, which was (and remains) very little.

I am far happier composing shorter forms (a few paragraphs) and so the writing of the novella was both exhilarating and grueling. I'm afraid its deficiencies will be all too evident, but perhaps something of what impelled me to keep at it will come across. I dislike reading long texts on a screen, and ideally I would print this up as a chapbook, give the copies away to the twenty or so people who would be polite enough to pretend to read it, and leave it at that. Until I get around to doing so, here it is, warts and all.