Articles of Faith

Things as I see them.

There is no God.

There is no Heaven, no Hell, no Devil. There are no angels or demons or ghosts. There are no miracles.

There is no afterlife, no reincarnation. Whatever the "soul" can be said to be, it dissipates when the body dies.

There was no Original Sin, no Fall, and thus nothing to redeem. There was no Incarnation. Whatever the truth about his sayings and doings, Jesus was an ordinary human being. His mother was not "conceived without sin" any more or less than everyone else, nor was he the product of "virgin birth." He did not "die for our sins," he was not resurrected, nor will he return.

The universe is not concerned with our existence. In fact, even to say that it is "indifferent" is to engage in indefensible metaphysics. The universe is not capable of having an attitude towards our existence or its own. It simply exists. Why and how there is something instead of nothing is a question that neither theologian nor scientist is capable of illuminating.

Morality and ontology have nothing to do with each other. A godless universe is no more or less moral than a universe with a god in it. I once heard an Episcopalian priest, in the aftermath of one human-produced atrocity or another, say that if he thought for one moment that what had happened was God's punishment for our sins, he would put aside his priestly garments and walk out of the church forever. And so, in his place, would I.

The only true "sin" is cruelty, and the most fundamental virtue is compassion. There are more virtues than sins, because all sins ultimately come down to the same thing.

Religious institutions and religious leaders are susceptible of the same virtues and failings as everyone else. Many do good work, but many are corrupt and hypocritical. Much of the cruelty in the world is the outcome of religious belief, but much is not.

If religion gets you through the night, keeps you off the sauce, and maybe makes you a slightly kinder person, then more power to you, but if it serves as a cover for hatred and oppression, you'll get no respect from me.

Effingers (Coming Attractions)

One to watch out for: a promised English-language translation of Gabriele Tergit's family saga Effingers, which was originally published in Germany in 1951 but only recently "rediscovered" and reissued there to general acclaim. Robert Normen has a description on the website of The German Times:

In the best way, this epic 900-page novel resembles another historic family saga: Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Mann’s story of four generations runs from 1835 to 1877. It may be no coincidence that Tergit’s book begins the very next year. Effingers is set against the backdrop of a changing German society steeped in the comforts of Bismarckian Prussia. Modernization and an economic boom bring affluence and changing norms, which are reflected in the contrasts between the city of Berlin and Karl’s and Paul’s small hometown in southern Germany. After World War I, anti-Semitic sentiment slowly but surely takes hold and the Effinger family must reluctantly learn that they are not the German clan they aspired to be.

NYRB Books has previously published a translation by Sophie Duvernoy of Tergit's earlier novel Käsebier Takes Berlin, and they have signed Duvernoy up for Effingers as well, though apparently no date has been announced. In the meantime, a snazzy-looking Spanish-language version has just been issued by Libros del Asteroide in Barcelona.

More information is available at The German Times.

Cardboard Box of Batteries

The death of Kelly Joe Phelps on May 31st got me thinking about my favorite Kelly Joe song, so I've dug out and updated some notes I made back in 2005. First, here are the lyrics, based on the liner notes for Tap the Red Cane Whirlwind, with a few minor changes to punctuation.

make a dent in the shovel
run the mud through a sieve
paste your hopes on a windmill blade
and plant 'em up on the hill.

a pencil sharpened with a putty knife
a pretty girl as a pretty nun
maybe you wake and think this is great
i just want somewhere to run.

oh, the walls blend into ceilings, and the faces they disappear.
never enough time to think it out only time to forget i'm here.
oh, and the bill is on the table but i've got no coins for pay
a beer half circle around her name, and what the hell did she say?

ah, the wise are playing tetherball and the ball's eyes they look like mine
rollin' around all on the end of the cord i can't make up for down
oh, i'm a streamlined engine with a cog chipped out of the wheel
i remember a dirty joke or two but i can't remember the feel.
i remember a dirty joke or two but i can't remember the feel.

too much time alone i spend, a miser with a nickel worn
starving like a mother, well, but i can't let go.
i'll spit the hours across the room and I'll kick 'em out that door
hell, you can have them. another thing i've got no use for.

well and it's funny that this comes out dark, it is not that bad
Oh, there's still a sparkle of silver in my cavity that plays music in the winter
i've a cardboard box of batteries hidden in a tire swing
a miner's hat with a light on top and a handful of wedding rings.
a miner's hat with a light on top and a handful of wedding rings.
a miner's hat with a light on top and a handful of wedding rings.

It doesn't quite "tell a story," but as a mood piece or character sketch it's about as precise as you can get. Memories, regrets, hopes — they're "all in the bag with the coins" (to quote another KJP song). I've highlighted everything that refers to prospecting, money, metal; it's a vein (so to speak) that runs through the whole thing. Some of the imagery is homely and eccentric — has anyone else used the word “tetherball” in a pop song? — other bits (“a pretty girl as a pretty nun”) just raise questions.

It's a melancholy picture, but there's that little "sparkle" at the end. The looseness in the fit between the lyrics and the tune adds something when Kelly Joe sings it, making it seem more spontaneous and conversational. And then there's the acoustic guitar, which after the intro mostly stays in the background but then bursts into extravagant arabesques at the end of some of the lines.

Kelly Joe was clearly a complicated guy, both personally and musically. He had a jazz background that shows in his playing, but his well-received first record, Lead Me On, was a collection of acoustic blues covers featuring slide guitar. He could probably have stuck to that indefinitely and made a career out of it and session work, but instead he repeatedly reinvented himself, abandoning the slide for fingerpicking (and occasionally, banjo) and becoming a gifted if sometimes frustratingly cryptic songwriter. In what turned out to be his final record, Brother Sinner & the Whale, he created a kind of unassuming Old Testament gospel music (if that's not a theological contradiction).

About ten years ago Kelly Joe said he needed a break and stopped touring and recording. At the time there was some mention of ulnar neuropathy, but as the years went on it was clear that something else was going on. His fans waited to see what new iteration of Kelly Joe Phelps might eventually emerge from the ferment, but for whatever reason it never happened. Maybe we'll know more in time, but maybe Kelly Joe just preferred his privacy.

Kelly Joe Phelps 1959-2022

And it's funny that this comes out dark, it's not that bad
There's still a sparkle of silver in my cavity that plays music in the winter
I've got a cardboard box of batteries hidden in a tire swing
A miners hat with a light on top and a handful of wedding rings.

Word is that Kelly Joe Phelps died on Tuesday. The Guardian has an obit. A fine guitarist and singer — and eventually, songwriter as well — whose career encompassed jazz, blues, original songs, and gospel, he took a break from the music business about a decade ago and sadly never came back. Few details are available at this point.

Maybe I'll have more to say when this has sunk in for a bit. For now, here are two examples of Kelly Joe in happier days.

Stepping up to the plate

Two forceful and anguished statements in the wake of yet another mass shooting indicate that the stereotypical image of the American professional baseball player is seriously out of date or simply wrong. First, Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle:

It just feels like we’ve reached a point where if not now, when? We should have done something after Sandy Hook; we should have done something after Vegas; we should have done something after Pittsburgh; I mean, you can go down the list. We should have done something after Virginia Tech. How far back do you want to go? And then the conversation inevitably always changes to mental health or bulletproof backpacks. We’re talking about ballistic blankets. We’re talking about renovating schools so there is only one entrance and one exit. We’re talking about arming teachers.

You’re describing a prison, and you’re bargaining and negotiating with people’s lives instead of just addressing the common denominator in every single one of these issues. It’s really frustrating, and I would like to think that in this country we’re capable of some common-sense reforms that a majority of Americans support that don’t infringe on your Second Amendment rights ... Who am I? I’m on the injured list. I’m a middle reliever on a team that unfortunately is in last place right now ... But we’re still members of societies and our communities, and there are people who look up to us as athletes, who listen to what we have to say as athletes.

And I think if you could start some of these conversations, or you can participate in some of these conversations and maybe get people to listen or put pressure on elected officials to do something, the reality is that you have a little bit more sway than the average person. And when it comes to making changes in your community, you can help move the needle on any number of issues that are important to you.

Source

Perhaps even more remarkably, San Francisco Giants manager (and former player) Gabe Kapler, on why he won't be coming out of the dugout during the playing of the national anthem:

I’m often struck before our games by the lack of delivery of the promise of what our national anthem represents ... We stand in honor of a country where we elect representatives to serve us, to thoughtfully consider and enact legislation that protects the interests of all the people in this country and to move this country forward towards the vision of the "shining city on the hill." But instead, we thoughtlessly link our moment of silence and grief with the equally thoughtless display of celebration for a country that refuses to take up the concept of controlling the sale of weapons used nearly exclusively for the mass slaughter of human beings.

We have our moment (over and over), and then we move on without demanding real change from the people we empower to make these changes. We stand, we bow our heads, and the people in power leave on recess, celebrating their own patriotism at every turn.

Source

Turtle Diary

Two days, two eastern box turtles. This mostly terrestrial chelonian, considered a "species of special concern," is widespread in our area but probably not all that common numerically. I see maybe one a year, often in more or less the same spots. The empty shell above may be the remains of one I saw on two occasions a few years ago. It appears to have succumbed to a predator strong enough to pierce its armor. No such grim fate as yet for the red-eyed male below, which I observed when he was, improbably, in the process of climbing over a stone wall. I kept my distance and he held his ground.

Nobody's business

That the Supreme Court is poised to overturn settled law and reverse the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade should surprise no one, given the steady rightward drift of the court, but it should appall anyone who cares about fundamental human rights.

I'll state my bias: human beings don't procreate spiritually, we procreate as bodies. We are no different in this regard from other animals, and anyone who thinks differently has a lot of special pleading to do. There is, therefore, no more basic level of individual rights than that which pertains to the body and to reproduction. The recognition of those rights, in the face of determined opposition, has been one of the most important advances of modern society. It is, paradoxically, the defense of the fundamental dignity of the physical, of our nature as animals, that defines us as modern human beings.

To deny a woman the right to control her reproduction is as outrageous an affront to human dignity as can be imagined. We pride ourselves — rightly — on the declared principles of freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion, but what is more intrusive, forcing others to keep their thoughts and beliefs to themselves, or telling a woman that even her own body is not hers to control? Defenders of abortion rights often point out — rightly — that it would be unthinkable and cruel to force a rape victim to carry her rapist's child to term, but that argument, legitimate as it is, is ultimately superfluous. It is for women to decide under what circumstances they are willing to bear a child. And it's no one else's business.

Roe v. Wade established a reasoned balance, informed by medical science, between the interests of society and a woman's rights. That balance has been steadily undermined by legislation and previous court decisions, but the essential principle underlying it has been preserved — until now. There is little short-term prospect, given the nature and dire condition of or political system, that the overturning of Roe can itself be undone. The damage will be profound, both to women and to American democracy.

It has to be understood that those who would deny a women's right to decide when or whether to have a child, and who more generally reject the whole idea of a right to privacy, don't really believe that human beings have inherent, independent rights at all. They recognize only power and its privilege to compel those who are subject to it. The fact that the right to abortion has long been acknowledged and supported by a majority of Americans will count for little. I have no doubt that reversal will be robustly cheered in the states that will be lining up to enact restricive legislation and competing to see how extreme that legislation can be made.

This country has been morally problematic from its inception, but it's hard to see how it will survive in any real sense. Even before this decision, we have come as close to fascism as we have ever been, and the danger has in no way receded.

Owl report

A few years ago I had a good run of luck with owl sightings, but last year there were none at all and I hadn't seen any this year until now. Two days ago when I was walking the dog I heard the telltale whistle-hiss of a barred owl in an area where I'd seem them many times in the past. I couldn't get a definite visual on it and didn't have my camera with me, but I made note of the place so I could return. Yesterday it rained but this morning I headed for the same spot, with camera this time but sans dog.

On my way out I thought I heard the same hissing sound but it was too faint for me to be sure; on the way back, though, there was no mistaking it. I walked off the trail a few yards in that direction until I located the owl high up in a very tall tulip poplar. I wasn't close enough to see it well, but since I didn't want to spook it I let my camera zoom in and do the looking. After a few minutes I moved to a slightly different angle, then started to walk away. A single distinct "hoot" from nearby stopped me in my tracks. I looked up: a large adult owl was perched, by itself, in another large tree about fifty yards from the first, keeping a wary eye on me. I took some pictures and headed home.

I thought there might have been a second owl in the first tree, but couldn't tell for sure. It was only when I downloaded the images that I realized that there were no less than four, probably all juveniles. (One is largely concealed behind a limb in the shot below.) Had I known they were there, I would have made a better job of getting them all in the frame.

The Norway maple and tulip poplar leaves are coming out this week; the other trees are a bit behind. I'll give the owls a week's worth of privacy before I check in on them again, but by then I suspect they'll be harder to spot. Still, it's good to know that this family is thriving.

Non-buyer's remorse

When you really should have bought the book: the Taschen edition of the Augsburg Book of Miracles, published in 2014, is now out of print and available in the second-hand market only at prices starting at $250 (and increasing steeply from there). Oh well.

Earlier post: Signs and Wonders. The Marginalian has a selection of the illustrations.

Night haul

The tackle creaks as the net is pulled in. On the lantern-lit deck the crew plant their feet and strain at the rope.

Spilled out on the boards, the finned and tentacled creatures blink and gape, but even as the men gather around them their irridescence fades and their jewel-like colors dim. Outlines blur. The seething multitude becomes still, then melts away into brine and breeze.

They cast the net out again and sail on, dragging the dead dark sea towards morning.

Honest Things

Eleanor Clark, on the Oysterman's Cooperative building in Brittany, where "there is just about everything there you could ever need in oystering, from women's dark blue canvas pants and the beautiful fishermen's blouses up to the heaviest cable":

A lovely store, in which nothing has been advertised, nothing is packaged, no patronage is solicited, no brainwashing is done, no profit is to be made and therefore it is most unlikely that anything bought will break or otherwise go to pieces the first time it is used. Oh, the long-lost delight of this decency! For the general American public there is nothing left that begins to approach it but the small-town hardware store, where a nail is still a nail and had better be a good one, and there is apt to be a good deal of junk and vanity even there. Besides, in this place with its crude heavy counters and air of a warehouse, the aura of the single trade, of the beau métier with all its sea-depths and adventure, hangs around every item, for not a bolt or rope or pair of gloves there is meant for any other purpose, and it is remarkable what beauty it casts over everything. Beauty depends after all on what you come from, what you are being cleansed and relieved of, and in the pass we are in nowadays an American lady of the buying type might be tempted to come away from this place with a batch of pulleys, the way her grandmother acquired a little replica of the Venus de Milo.

But no, that wouldn't do, would it? The beauty of all these honest things, aside from their fine conjunction of textures, is in their being together and being there, not somewhere else, in the above-mentioned association, in the simple appropriateness of it all. It is not to be bought; the poor lady will have to go back to the square, with its tasteless souvenirs.

Clark was writing in the early 1960s, and no doubt many things are different now. Except for The Oysters of Locmariaquer and Rome and a Villa, her books seem to have gone out of print. She moved in Trotskyite circles for a time and apparently knew the man himself, if briefly, in his Mexican years; later she married Robert Penn Warren. The Vassar Encyclopedia has what seems to be the best summary of her life and work.

"This is my city"

Sergio Borschevsky, the translator of Borges, Cortázar, Neruda, García Márquez, and other writers into Ukrainian, is staying put in Kiev with his wife. From an interview with the Argentinian news website Infobae:

Why should we have to leave? This is my city. It doesn't belong to Putin or to his general staff or to the Russian Ministry of Defense... This is my city and my apartment. I live here. When I was a boy I saw all this destroyed by German Nazis. I saw it, because I was born in 1946 and I saw Kiev in ruins, I was born a year after the war. And now when I see these images of cities destroyed by the Russian Army, I remember my childhood. And I can tell you that I'm not thinking of leaving. I will die in this city. Now or later? I don't know, but in this city.

The full interview (in Spanish) is available here.

Update: A version in English, though imperfect, can be read here.

Carlos Barbosa-Lima 1944-2022

A good friend let me borrow this LP of Scarlatti transcriptions for the guitar when we were in high school and I've always remembered it, in particular the last track, the Sonata in G major*, K.380, which still strikes me as one of the most perfectly poised pieces of music I know. The record has never been issued on CD, but at least we have this uploaded version.

The Times has an obituary of the guitarist, Carlos Barbosa-Lima, who died in São Paulo on February 23rd.

* Scarlatti's original key seems to have been E major.

Briefly Noted

Some news items of potential interest to readers of this space.

The translator Edmund Keeley has died. Known for his versions of the work of modern Greek poets like Yannis Ritsos, George Seferis, and C. P. Cavafy, he taught for many years at Princeton University, where he directed the creative writing program. The New York Times has an obituary.

Musician and songwriter Peter Case is the subject of a new documentary by Fred Parnes entitled A Million Miles Away, which is premiering at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival this month. No word yet on wider distribution.

Hayao Miyazaki's 1983 graphic novel Shuna no tabi (Shuna's Journey) will finally have an authorized English translation when it is published this fall by First Second Books. The translator is Alex Dudok de Wit. A news report can be read here.

Stasys Eidrigevičius: "Ukraina"

A pastel artwork by Stasys Eidrigevičius, donated by the artist to an auction to benefit Ukrainian refugees, of whom there will be many. More information (in Polish) is available here. The auction closes March 9th.

Eidrigevičius, who was born in Lithuania but has lived in Poland for many years, works in many media but is particularly known for posters and (in the US) for illustrations for children's books. In his work, objects, animals, and human figures mingle and morph, caught up in mutual webs of dependence. His website is here.

From the Archives: A Letter

The post below was posted in a different venue in 2006; I'm dusting it off in honor of Michael Leddy's post at Orange Crate Art.

I've never read Rose Macaulay's novel The Towers of Trebizond and I suspect that I'm never going to get around to it. But I still have the hardcover copy that I bought at a used book sale a number of years ago, and I'm not quite ready to give up on it. That's only partly because everything I've ever heard about the book is positive; when you come down to it, I suspect, the book is probably not really my thing at all. The real reason I'm hanging onto it is the following letter, which I found neatly folded inside the front cover when I bought it.

TELEPHONE: TEMPLETON 8-7440
CABLES - SECNARFS, NEW YORK

654 MADISON AVE
NEW YORK, 21, NEW YORK

April 6, 1959

Mr. James H. Sachs
Bedford, New York

Dear Jimmy:

            It was so sweet of you to think of us and to introduce us to the Schaffners. As the result of The Tower of Trebizond we are going to get a wonderful trip to Europe.

            We are sailing with them on the Giulio Cesare on the 9th and will see Ravello, Sicily and trans-Appenine Italy. Mr. Schaffner thinks that he can enjoy me more completely on board. I don't know just what it means but it sounds alarming. Thanks so much. If I survive maybe I will send you a postal card.

Sincerely yours,

Rose

Rose Macaulay

At first sight this seems like the kind of witty missive a cosmopolitan, well-educated older British woman like Macaulay might have written to a social acquaintance in the mid-20th century. The hint of naughtiness in the second paragraph, the learned reference to “trans-Appenine Italy,” the British “postal card,” instead of “postcard,” all seem fit to type. But there's a problem: the date. Rose Macaulay died on October 30, 1958, a full five months before the letter was supposedly written. Moreover, as far as I have been able to determine, she was not in New York at any time in the last months of her life, making a simple dating mistake of a year or so (but how likely would that have been anyway?) less than probable.

The closer I examine the letter, the less genuine it seems. The date is in American style, not British. The title of the book is wrong — it's Towers not “Tower,” and in fact what the correspondent originally typed was “Trevizone”; the correct spelling is overwritten in pencil. (It's true that the errors involve contiguous pairs of letters on the keyboard, so it's possible she — whoever she was — was simply a bad typist.) And why would the real Rose Macaulay write gratefully of the prospect of “a wonderful tour of Italy” as if she were not a seasoned, independent traveler herself?

If the letter is not really by Rose Macaulay, and it seems very doubtful that it is, then two possibilities come to mind. The first one, unlikely but consistent with the signature, is that it was written by another woman named Rose Macaulay, who somewhow, as the “result” of the odd coincidence of her name with that of the famous author, was invited to see some of her namesake's old stomping grounds.

The other possibility is that the writer of the letter was not named Rose Macaulay at all. She was simply a woman who, perhaps as the outcome of a conversation about The Towers of Trebizond, was invited to Europe by a wealthy couple she had just been introduced to. The signature, then, would have been just a little joke for the benefit of “Jimmy.”

In either case, I wonder if she survived the trip.

Update: The James H. Sachs to whom the letter was addressed appears to be the individual of that name who was one of the founders of Newsweek and later a publisher of Horizon magazine. He also donated a few acres of land to a preserve where I occasionally hike. If the identification is correct he died in 1971. The New York Times obituary is here.

A Buried Book

Archaeologist Alan Hardy describes a find that emerged during the excavation of a long barrow in the Berkshire Downs:

A book was found within deposit 3001, located immediately south of the southern ditch section, and approximately 0.23 m below the present ground. The book was a buckram bound copy of Demonology and Witchcraft by Walter Scott, published in 1831 (Plate 4.5). The inside front cover was daubed with red ink and crudely inscribed with the words 'Demon de Uffing'. Some decay was evident to the cover and the edges of the pages although it was generally in very good condition. Its state of preservation may well have been due to the surrounding matrix of chalk and soil, which maintained a dry environment. The excavator was confident that the ground around the location of the book's burial had not been recently disturbed, and therefore a pre-excavation joke by persons unknown was ruled out. In theory the book could have been deposited during the 19th-century excavations, but it is more likely that its burial is related to one of the more recent revivals in the mystical aspects of the White Horse and its surroundings.

D. Miles et al., Uffington White Horse and Its Landscape: Investigations at White Horse Hill, Uffington, 1989-95, and Tower Hill, Ashbury, 1993-4

Related posts:
Up in the Downs
The Lay of the Hunted Pig

The Lost Altar

This double-view postcard of scenes from Orkney was issued by J. M. Stevenson, a longtime stationer in Kirkwall and Stromness. It also bears the initials of V. & S. Ltd., that is, Valentine & Sons of Dundee, the actual printer. There's no writing on the back of the card, but I'm guessing that it dates from around 1910. "The Holms" are two small islets just across the water from Stromness.

The central "altar" or "dolmen" shown in the view of the neolithic Standing Stones of Stennis (or Stenness) was a "reconstruction" from 1907, possibly inspired by Sir Walter Scott's interpretation of the site. It was dismantled under murky circumstances in 1972 and only the uprights were put back in place. A century earlier a landowner had vandalized the site extensively, resulting in the loss of much of the surrounding circle of stones.

Despite its barren northern location, Orkney has some of the most extraordinary neolithic monuments in Britain. I haven't been there (my wife and daughter have), but perhaps someday I will make a visit.

A Stock of Curios

W. Jeffrey Bolster:

Able-bodied seamen versed in “the Mariner’s art” were admittedly a minority among black seamen; but men like Daniel Watson, who made five foreign voyages from Providence between 1803 and 1810, cultivated professional identities as seamen. As sailors, they wove together worldliness, skill, and class. Watson, and men such as the African-born David O’Kee, an ex-slave who made at least eight voyages from Providence during the 1830s, were fully socialized to the world of the ship, and probably more at home there than ashore. A blind sixty-year-old black Philadelphian introduced himself to the census marshall in 1850 as a “Seaman,” though his voyaging days were over. The pride black men felt in being identified as seamen is evident in the possessions left by Henry Robinson, a black laborer who died in Boston in 1849. Robinson owned the clothing, chairs, and stove that one would expect, but he also lived among a stock of curios that seem to have been collected at sea. Cases of “sea shells of several kinds,” “two coral baskets,” “one statue,” “one toy ship,” a series of pictures, and “two african swords and arrows” perpetuated images of a life considerably more exotic than the one that ended in a down-at-the heels Boston tenement house.

Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail

Bookseller's Nightmare

A prim middle-aged woman steps up to the counter and asks if we have any books by the novelist Catherine Cookson. I say I don't think so but I agree to check the shelf and the stockroom. No Catherine Cookson. She would like to order some. I reach for Books in Print, but the volumes we have on our reference shelf are decades old and the authors volume is missing anyway. I switch on the microfiche reader. The information that is displayed on the screen has nothing to do with books. Instead, there are a series of street-level views of a city, and I can't even find the intersection I'm looking for. In the meantime, someone has set down a plateful of very appetizing-looking chocolates next to the microfiche reader, but who knows when I'll have a chance to try one.

Curiosity Cabinet

This volume of stories, texts, and illustrations was published by Profile Books in 2003. For a while it seemed to have become scarce, but it's relatively easy to find now.

The Wellcome Collection is (or was) a vast assemblage of objects related to the history and anthropology of medicine. As one might expect, many of the objects are gruesome or bizarre. Henry Wellcome, who amassed the objects, died in 1936, and after his death much of the collection was apparently dispersed, though some of its holdings became accessible to the public in 2007. The editors explain the concept:

This book forms a companion volume to the catalogue of an exhibition on Henry Wellcome's collection held at the British Museum in the summer of 2003. The aim of the exhibition was to reunite a fraction of the collection back in one place. The exhibition catalog endeavours to present the facts of the collection, exploring its objects through documents and physical evidence. Here, in The Phantom Museum, the objects are investigated using a different method, that of the sympathetic imagination.

Each of the six pieces in the volume is inspired by one or more of the Wellcome's objects. A. S. Byatt is the most familiar name among the writers. Peter Blegvad contributes an unclassifiable piece, but my favorite is a deft short story entitled "The Venus Time of Year," which follows two women, one modern and one in Roman Britain, who both have recourse to votive offerings in the form of a fertility figurine. Admirably, it doesn't try to do too much or look too far ahead in the women's lives. Of the author, the back flap notes, "Helen Cleary lived in Singapore, Wales and East Anglia before moving to London. She is working on her second novel and writes non-fiction for the BBC History website."

Oddly, I've found no evidence that either of the two Helen Cleary novels mentioned was ever published, nor any indication that she has published any additional fiction. She didn't disappear; she apparently has contributed to several documentaries and reference books.

In conjunction with the British Museum show, the Quay Brothers released an eccentric short documentary about the collection, which is also entitled The Phantom Museum.

Time Capsule

Above, a page of ads from Barney Rosset's Evergreen Review, Vol. 2. No. 7 (Winter 1959). This was a themed issue devoted to Mexico, but it also included a long essay on Thelonious Monk, so these particular advertisements were presumably chosen with that in mind. Bongos are more usually associated with Cuba, but these "pre-tuned Mexican bongos" would have been the perfect accessories for beatniks, or at least for the Hollywood version of them. Other ads in this issue included one for the Living Theatre and for the Circle in the Square production of Brendan Behan's Quare Fellow, directed by José Quintero.

Sadly, the Gotham Book Mart is no more, but as of this writing at least one of the contributors, the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, is still with us after sixty-odd years.

Jason Epstein (1928-2022)

Publishing pioneer Jason Epstein has died. At 93, he managed to outlive his obituarist, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who died in 2018.

Epstein worked with a long list of authors and founded or co-founded Anchor Books, The New York Review of Books, and the Library of America. I confess to a fetishism for the early Anchor paperbacks, including those published after Epstein left the company in 1958. I have a dozen or so in the house and often re-read some of them. Many have wonderfully dotty covers by Edward Gorey. Today Anchor Books and many of its erstwhile competitors and imitators in the paperback market, including Vintage, Penguin, Signet, Ballantine, Bantam, and Dell, are all subsumed under the same corporate umbrella.

Norma Waterson (1939-2022)

The revered British folksinger Norma Waterson has died. The Guardian has an obituary and a nice appreciation.

Though she recorded contemporary material as a solo artist, she was probably best known as a member of a family ensemble that in its original conformation in the 1960s also included her brother Mike, sister Lal, and a cousin, John Harrison. Norma's husband, the fine guitarist Martin Carthy (who survives her) replaced Harrison beginning in 1975. Later lineups under various names included the couple's daughter, the fiddler Eliza Carthy.

Below are the Watersons (including Martin Carthy) with a rousing a capella hymn demonstrating the group's unique style.



A documentary entitles Travelling for a Living follows the group in their early days.

Reading Matter

Henry Mayhew:

I may mention that in the course of my inquiry into the condition of the fancy cabinet-makers of the metropolis, one elderly and very intelligent man, a first-rate artisan in skill, told me he had been so reduced in the world by the underselling of slop-masters (called "butchers" or "slaughterers," by the workmen in the trade), that though in his youth he could take in the News and Examiner papers (each he believed 9d. at that time, but was not certain), he could afford, and enjoyed, no reading when I saw him last autumn, beyond the book-leaves in which he received his quarter of cheese, his small piece of bacon or fresh meat, or his saveloys; and his wife schemed to go to the shops who "wrapped up their things from books," in order that he might have something to read after his day's work.

London Labour and the London Poor

Urban legend

Henry Mayhew, the great chronicler of 19th-century London's working poor, collected the following tale in the course of an interview with a lively street "patterer" who specialized in hawking printed broadsides containing accounts of notorious murders:

Then there's the Liverpool Tragedy - that's very attractive. It's a mother murdering her own son, through gold. He had come from the East Indies, and married a rich planter's daughter. He came back to England to see his parents after an absence of thirty years. They kept a lodging-house in Liverpool for sailors; the son went there to lodge, and meant to tell his parents who he was in the morning. His mother saw the gold he had got in his boxes, and cut his throat - severed his head from his body; the old man, upwards of seventy years of age holding the candle. They had put a washing-tub under the bed to catch his blood. The morning after the murder the old man's daughter calls and inquires for a young man. The old man denies that they have had any such person in the house. She says he had a mole on his arm in the shape of a strawberry. The old couple go upstairs to examine the corpse, and find they have murdered their own son, and then they both put an end to their existence.

I recognized the outlines of the tale immediately: it's more or less the plot of Albert Camus's 1943 drama Le malentendu, usually translated as The Misunderstanding. Camus shifts the action to Czechoslovakia, replaces the homicidal father with a sister, and changes the machinery of the eventual revelation scene, but it's clearly the same basic story.

Camus had come across the incident in an article published by the Hearst Universal Service, which described it as having taken place in Yugoslavia; he included a brief reference to it in The Stranger before developing it into the play. But it was a shopworn tale even in Mayhew's day. Folklorist Veronique Campion-Vincent, in a 1998 article in the Nordic Yearbook of Folklore (PDF here) traces it back to several versions dating from 1618; within three years versions of the tale had variously located the supposed events in London, Languedoc, Ulm (in what is now Germany), and Poland. Clearly it was too good a yarn not to pass on. (Elements of it — the failure to recognize a long-lost family member — arguably date back to Oedipus Tyrannus and the Odyssey.)

Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, incidentally, is a revelation in itself. A contemporary and acquaintance of Dickens, he combined statistical analysis (mostly omitted in the abridged Oxford University Press edition shown above) with oral history to provide a kind of non-fiction counterpart to the work of the great novelist. He keeps the moralizing to a minimum and allows individuals who would have been long forgotten by now to speak in their own voices. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst aptly calls his four-volume work "the greatest Victorian novel never written."

John the Bear

The above illustration by the late French artist Jean-Claude Pertuzé is from a version of a folktale known in French as "Jean de l'ours," that is, John of the Bear or John the Bear. The story of a hero, born to a human mother and an ursine father, who is kept in a cave until he is old enough to roll away the stone that encloses it, and who later descends into the underworld to rescue three princesses, the tale was found throughout Europe and has been carried into the Americas. The German philologist Friedrich Panzer traced a series of parallels between the folktale and the saga of Beowulf, whose name may mean "Bee-wolf," that is, "bear."

The classicist Rhys Carpenter went further, connecting the story, by arguments too intricate to describe here, with the Odyssey, and suggesting a common legendary tradition ultimately deriving from memories of a Eurasian bear-cult. The bear, an animal that immures itself and passes the winter in death-like torpor, has often been conceived of as a messenger to the Other World (as among the Ainu), perhaps as their lord himself. Carpenter mentions the case of the bear-like Thracian hero-god Salmoxis, who, according to Herodotus, built a great hall and regaled his guests with promises of eternal life, before disappearing, apparently dead, into an underground chamber for three years, only to return. In Strabo the same figure becomes co-regent of the underworld.

Is it too much to find here an echo in the New Testament, where the stone is rolled away from the tomb of the risen Jesus after the harrowing of Hell?

Hermes

Let some traveller, on seeing Hermes of Commagene, aged sixteen years, sheltered in the tomb by fate, call out: I give you my greetings, lad, though mortal the path of life you slowly tread, for swiftly have you winged your way to the land of the Cimmerian folk. Nor will your words be false, for the lad is good, and you will do him a good service.

The Hermes in this third-century Greek inscription isn't the winged messenger of the Greek gods but a teenager who died and was memorialized on what is now known as the Brough Stone, preserved in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. (Original Greek text and details here.) He had done some travelling of his own before he met his end in Roman Britain; Commagene, where he was born, was a small kingdom in what is now eastern Turkey. The Cimmerians, to whose land he flies after death, were a barbarian people known, if hazily, to the Classical world, but in the Odyssey Homer locates their country in the dark regions of the far north, just this side of Hades.

Curiously, Robert Fitzgerald doesn't use the word "Cimmerian" (the Greek is Κιμμερίων) in his translation of Book XI, line 14, but refers instead to "the realm and region of the Men of Winter." It's in Pound's Cantos, though:

Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
With glitter of sun-rays

The Whales of the Dead

Stepan Krasheninnikov:

The Kamchadals regard Mount Kamchatka as the dwelling place of the dead; they say that when it emits flames, it means the dead are heating up their yurts. According to them, the dead live on whale blubber, trap whales in a subterranean sea, and burn whale oil for light. They use whale bones instead of wood to heat their homes. To support their belief, they say that some of their countrymen have gone into the interior of this mountain, where they saw the habitations of their forebears. Steller says that they consider this mountain the home of spirits. When anyone questions them, he adds, about what goes on in this spirit world, they reply that the spirits cook whales. If they are asked where the spirits got the whales, they reply that the whales came from the sea, that the spirits leave the mountains at night and take so many whales that some bring back as many as five or even ten, one on each of their fingers. If they are asked who told them all these things, they reply: Our fathers told us this. As proof they offer the whale bones, which actually are found in large numbers on all the volcanoes.

Explorations of Kamchatka 1735-1741, translation by E. A. P. Crownhart-Vaughan (Oregon Historical Society, 1972). I have modernized the spelling of one word.

Stepan Krasheninnikov was a member of the Second Kamchatka Expedition, led by Vitus Bering and sponsored by the Russian government, which aimed to survey the resources of Russia's possessions in its far northeast, including parts of what is now Alaska, at a time when those regions were all but unknown to science. The Steller mentioned above was the naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller, another notable participant in the expedition (and namesake of the extinct Steller's sea cow).

Krasheninnikov's account probably should be better known; he was a pioneering geographer and a capable and relatively unprejudiced anthropologist. Though he was sometimes wrong, as in firmly declaring that whales were fish, there is much of value in his account, which is out of print but not that hard to find. The Oregon Historical Society edition (the only complete English-language version) could have used more explanatory notes but is otherwise a noble undertaking.

Image Credit: "The Volcano of Awatcha (Avacha) in Kamchatka, Siberia." Etching with engraving, from the Wellcome Collection. A different engraving of the same image is reproduced in Explorations of Kamchatka.

Buffon's Ounce, the lonza leggera, and The Long Walk

Slawomir Rawicz was a Polish military officer in World War II who in the 1950s dictated to a ghost-writer a stirring account of how he and several companions engineered their escape from a Siberian prison camp, crossed the Gobi Desert, and then trekked over the Himalayas to safety in British India. Among the incidents he related was a close encounter with two Abominable Snowmen. Just by itself that latter claim might have raised eyebrows, and in fact the consensus now is that Rawicz's account, which was published in 1956 as The Long Walk, celebrated for decades as both an adventure yarn and an anti-Soviet testimony, and eventually filmed (as The Way Back) by Peter Weir, is essentially fictional. Still, at least it makes a good story.

I'm not the only one who has noted the likely influence of Rawicz's book on Harry Mathews's novel Tlooth, which came out in book form in 1966 after having been serialized in the Paris Review. Tlooth, like The Long Walk, describes a clever escape from Siberia and a southward journey over the Himalayas. (It differs from the earlier book in involving, among other things, dental malpractice, obscure religious denominations, and an exploding baseball.) There are no yetis in Mathews's book, but there is a cryptic if not cryptozoological sighting in a chapter entitled "Buffon's Ounce." The narrator and his companions reach a high pass:

There, in midafternoon, a shout stopped us.

"Look!" Beverley pointed uphill.

I saw a pale spotted creature clamber catfashion over snows into the rocks.

Robin remarked, "Una lonza leggiera e presta molto."

That's the last we hear of the animal. The Italian line is from the first canto of the Inferno, where Dante is brought up short by three beasts, the third of which is "a lithe and very swift leopard" — except that what Dante actually meant by lonza has been long debated. Which brings us to the meaning, otherwise unexplained, of the title of the chapter. "Buffon" is Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, a French naturalist known, among other things, for disparaging the animals of the New World as being inferior to those of the Old (to the fury of Jefferson*), and "ounce" (or in French, "once") is an obsolete word for a large wild feline, based on an etymological misunderstanding of a derivitive of the Latin word "lynx." (A form like "lonza" was misinterpreted as "l'onza.) What Buffon described — he was the first Westerner to do so — was in fact the snow leopard, shown above in an 18th-century engraving based on his work.

But there's one more weird twist to this convoluted story. Tlooth was published, as I said, in the Paris Review. Its author jokingly claimed that he was often mistakenly assumed to have been in the CIA, and even wrote a novel (My Life in CIA) based on that premise. One reason that Mathews might have plausibly been assumed to have been in the CIA was his connection with the Paris Review, one of whose co-founders, the writer Peter Matthiessen, later admitted that he had used the magazine as cover for his CIA work. In 1979 Matthiessen would win the National Book Award for a book about his travels in the Himalayas. Its title was The Snow Leopard.

* And thus a tale for another time: Jefferson's obsession with the remains of the extinct American mastodon, Charles Willson Peale's excavation of a specimen of the same, Peale's painting of his excavation, an album called Kew. Rhone inspired by the painting, a book, celebrating the album, that includes a contribution by Harry Mathews...

Purgatorio

I'm walking in the woods at night in the company of Willie McTell. I see three deer standing a few yards away; somehow, in spite of his blindness, McTell is aware of their presence and able to describe them to me. What he doesn't realize is that a half-grown mountain lion has stepped out from among them and begun to approach us.

We climb a series of concrete steps that ascend to an unseen waterfall somewhere ahead. Far below, on the right, is a broad expanse of seething whitewater. The cat is hard on our heels now, drawn by the smell of the sausages I'm carrying wrapped up in deli paper. McTell knows he's there but doesn't seem overly alarmed, and refers to him, jokingly, as "Kitty." Behind us, silently, the mountain lion's parents have begun to follow.

As we climb, the cats press closer and closer to us, bumping us and sniffing at our hands. One opens its mouth tentatively, but for now doesn't bite down. In desperation I unwrap the sausages and drop one on the steps behind us; it rolls off and into the torrent below. The adult male instantly leaps the railing and lands safely on a rock. We leave it behind and continue to climb. I drop the sausages one by one until we're alone. I know that McTell will be disappointed later about losing the sausages, but he'll understand when I explain.

Monday afternoon

I stepped into a little café that was simply a small room with a counter in the rear and a table on either side of the door. The woman behind the counter gestured for me to sit and brought me a menu, which listed just two or three choices. I ordered tea and a pear torte, which turned out to be a delicious warm mélange of fruit and cream swathed in puff pastry, and which was accompanied, for some reason, by a ficelle in a wax bag. When the bill came I was a bit surprised to see that the total came to $60, but even as I reached for my wallet a man strode out of the kitchen, picked up the bill, looked at it, frowned, then began a heated argument with the woman that I couldn't follow, as it was conducted in a language I couldn't identify. I broke off a piece of the ficelle, which was also quite tasty, and waited for the outcome.

Ambition (II)

Edward Gibbon:

Diocletian, who, from a servile origin, had raised himself to the throne, passed the nine last years of his life in a private condition. Reason had dictated, and content seems to have accompanied, his retreat, in which he enjoyed for a long time the respect of those princes to whom he had resigned the possession of the world. It is seldom that minds long exercised in business have formed any habits of conversing with themselves, and in the loss of power they principally regret the want of occupation. The amusements of letters and of devotion, which afford so many resources in solitude, were incapable of fixing the attention of Diocletian; but he had preserved, or at least he soon recovered, a taste for the most innocent as well as natural pleasures; and his leisure hours were sufficiently employed in building, planting, and gardening. His answer to Maximian is deservedly celebrated. He was solicited by that restless old man to reassume the reins of government and the Imperial purple. He rejected the temptation with a smile of pity, calmly observing that, if he could show Maximian the cabbages which he had planted with his own hands at Salona, he should no longer be urged to relinquish the enjoyment of happiness for the pursuit of power.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

More "Ambition"

A Few "Regrets"

I pulled out this slender letterpress chapbook the other day when I was looking for something else. I had forgotten that I owned it. The cover reads Sonnets Translated from Les Regrets of Joachim du Bellay 1553, the publisher is "the Uphill Press, New York," and the translator (who is also the printer) is identified only as A. H. It bears a date of 1972, and the statement of limitations at the back indicates that one hundred and ten copies were printed. (My copy, number 38, is inscribed to a noted architect and his wife, "in old friendship," but that's a tale for another time.)

It didn't take much to identify the person responsible, an arts administrator and biographer of Woodrow Wilson named August Heckscher. But neither in his 1997 New York Times obituary nor in the Wikipedia article devoted to him is there any hint that he was also an avid amateur printer, translator, and poet (probably in that order of importance). For that information you have to refer to the likes of Joseph Blumenthal, the noted printer and author of Typographic Years: A Printer's Journey through a Half-Century 1925-1975 who has this to say:

Among his public activities, Heckscher was Consultant in the Arts for President Kennedy and a Commissioner of Parks who planted thousands of trees in New York City. In his living room in New York, he set type by hand and printed fine small books and ephemera, often with the help of his son Charles. More recently he has set up "The Printing Office at High Loft" at his summer home in Seal Harbor, Maine, where with young apprentices he prints and publishes modestly but with éclat.

A little more digging turned up this photo of Heckscher and his sons at work from a 1962 profile in Life magazine.

Letterpress printing was probably never a particularly common hobby, but it did have its aficionados in postwar America, many of whom had day jobs in unrelated fields and carried out a collegial kind of artistic underground in their off-hours. (Broadcaster Ben Grauer, proprietor of the Between Hours Press, was a notable example.) It was negligible from an economic standpoint (hobby printers were careful not to take business away from professionals, and generally their productions were simply given away to friends), but here and there, on presses tucked away in Manhattan apartments or the basements of suburban homes, some fine work was done — and no doubt there are still people doing it.

The brief "Note" attached to this chapbook sets the scene:

Joachim du Bellay journeyed to Rome in 1553 in the service of his uncle, Cardinal du Bellay. The young Renaissance poet and scholar might have been expected to find many rewards during his three years at the center of the classical world. On the contrary, he was extremely unhappy — though it must be remarked that like many who are unhappy when they travel, he was hardly less so when he returned home. In Les Regrets, published in 1558, he poured out in sonnet form the varied pains of exile.

Heckscher tells us that he was inspired to translate the selections while he himself was traveling, in his case in Morocco. Below is a sample; I've cropped the page for the sake of readability on the web. Heckscher's margins are more generous, and of course he would have taken pride in his page design.

The chapbook is rounded off with an Envoi "from a different hand," that is, from A. H. himself:

Sleep, du Bellay, sleep sound and do not fret.
Dislikes and troubles vanish with the past.
The stuffy Roman dames, the Latin cast,
Are one with centuries that rise and set.

The endless littleness of your regret,
The heart in servitude, the soul harassed,
Are eased by kindly death, which gives at last
The peace men seek in life, but do not get.

Your verses still are read: along the Quai
When earliest Paris spring was on its way
And pear-trees flower'd in your beloved Anjou

I bought your book. I heard from far away,
Above the crimes and passions of our day,
Your sad, so human accents speaking through.

Notebook: Home Fires

Sir James George Frazer:

Not only among the Celts but throughout Europe, Hallowe’en, the night which marks the transition from autumn to winter, seems to have been of old the time of year when the souls of the departed were supposed to revisit their old homes in order to warm themselves by the fire and to comfort themselves with the good cheer provided for them in the kitchen or the parlour by their affectionate kinsfolk. It was, perhaps, a natural thought that the approach of winter should drive the poor shivering hungry ghosts from the bare fields and the leafless woodlands to the shelter of the cottage with its familiar fireside. Did not the lowing kine then troop back from the summer pastures in the forests and on the hills to be fed and cared for in the stalls, while the bleak winds whistled among the swaying boughs and the snow-drifts deepened in the hollows? and could the good-man and the good-wife deny to the spirits of their dead the welcome which they gave to the cows?

The Golden Bough

The Old Country

It's a frightening thought that I've reached an age where there are now books that I first read almost fifty years ago, and I'm not talking about The Cat in the Hat. A case in point is this Signet Classics edition of Turgenev's The Hunting Sketches, which I first read so long ago that I remembered only that it had about as much to do with hunting as Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America had to do with angling. But I did know that I enjoyed it at the time, and some vague recollection of its mood, coupled with a desire for an antidote after suffering through The Idiot, led me back to it.

I had long ago discarded my old copy. There are newer translations that for all I know may be better than Bernard Guilbert Guerney's, but nostalgia drew me back to this edition and I found a second-hand but still sturdy replacement copy easily enough.

The Hunting Sketches was Turgenev's first book, and its narrator, a member of the Russian landed gentry who seems to have unlimited time on his hands, is thought to have much in common with the author. Not much actual hunting takes place, just the odd game bird or two, but the narrator's travels in search of sport lead him to various encounters with the peasants and gentlefolk of the Russian countryside, a cast of characters that, for a Westernized Russian like Turgenev, must have seemed intriguingly exotic. The individual sketches range widely in tone and subject, encompassing "tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral...," and so on. Here and there the descriptive passages get a bit florid (at least in this translation), but overall the tone is dispassionate, even anthropological; at times I was reminded of that other meticulous explorer of foreign lands, Lafcadio Hearn. The most memorable tale is probably "Bezhin Meadow," in which the narrator, having become lost, stumbles onto a night encampment of five adolescent boys, who exchange eerie tales of local ghosts and horrors once they think that the narrator has fallen asleep. It's a wonderful piece of writing.

The book was published in the 1850s, and the Russia it describes has been transformed and transformed again since then, but Turgenev seems like our contemporary, or the kind of contemporary we would have if we deserved him. Within the limits of his class and his background and the inevitable constraints of literary creation he described life as he found it. Naturally the authorities were displeased.

*

In addition to extensive work as translator, Bernard Guilbert Guerney, who died in 1979, had a second career as the proprietor of the Blue Faun Bookshop in New York City, which was in existence from 1922 into the '70s. (There is a Walker Evans photograph of the shop's exterior.) He was born near Odessa as Bernard Abramovich Bronstein or Bronshtein, and one source indicates that he may have been related to Trotsky. Walter Goldwater, a fellow bookseller, had this to say of him:

He was a great talker and one of the ones who was very resentful about the way things were going: things always used to be better; people are now illiterate; he can't stand people coming in; they don’t know anything, and so on. He was very difficult to do business with, but we got along quite well because we used to talk in Russian or talk about Russia.

Vladimir Nabokov called Guerney's translation of Gogol's Dead Souls "an extraordinarily fine piece of work."

Visitors

A posh tour bus pulls up outside our house and discharges a group of North Koreans and American supporters, who barge in through our front door carrying books and brightly-colored papier-mâché animals as gifts. Some of the North Koreans carry automatic weapons; there are also some children. I round everybody up and make them leave, then call the police. The police already know about it; they say the tour bus is going all around the country like that and not to worry. When I look at some paperwork tucked into the books I realize that they were bought from a former employer.

Calais

Charles Dickens:

The passengers were landing from the packet on the pier at Calais. A low-lying place and a low-spirited place Calais was, with the tide ebbing out towards low water-mark. There had been no more water on the bar than had sufficed to float the packet in; and now the bar itself, with a shallow break of sea over it, looked like a lazy marine monster just risen to the surface, whose form was indistinctly shown as it lay asleep. The meagre lighthouse all in white, haunting the seaboard as if it were the ghost of an edifice that had once had colour and rotundity, dropped melancholy tears after its late buffeting by the waves. The long rows of gaunt black piles, slimy and wet and weather-worn, with funeral garlands of seaweed twisted about them by the late tide, might have represented an unsightly marine cemetery. Every wave-dashed, storm-beaten object, was so low and so little, under the broad grey sky, in the noise of the wind and sea, and before the curling lines of surf, making at it ferociously, that the wonder was there was any Calais left, and that its low gates and low wall and low roofs and low ditches and low sand-hills and low ramparts and flat streets, had not yielded long ago to the undermining and besieging sea, like the fortifications children make on the sea-shore.

Little Dorrit

Report of the Committee on Agriculture (II)

Most of this year's butternut squash crop has now been harvested. I grew two types, both of which are hybrids. The tan ones shown above are a variety called Canesi; the others, which can be either mottled green or a two-tone combination of mottled green and yellow-orange, are Autumn's Choice. The colors on the latter variety tend to fade eventually after they're picked.

I planted three or four hills in an area of our yard that hadn't been used for growing anything but grass and weeds for some time. When I dug into it I discovered old cinders, broken glass, and other indications that it had formerly been a household dump, perhaps a century ago, but the soil was apparently suitable for vegetables. About ten or twelve vines emerged, and although at first they were slow to develop once they got going they were quite rampant. The dreaded squash vine borers that are endemic in our area either let them be or did minimal damage; butternuts, which are Cucurbita moschata, are less affected than other squash species. A deer made it over our fence one evening and did some minor damage, but once the fruits themselves started to develop I swathed them in row cover every night and that proved successful. There are still a few squash on the vines but all in all we'll have a good eighty pounds or so of winter squash, which should keep us well supplied with pumpkin pies and side dishes throughout the winter. (Butternuts store for months.) We've shared a few with neighbors already and may wind up giving away more.

I have a few packaged seeds left of both varieties. Since they're hybrids and won't "breed true" there's no point in saving seed from this year's harvest, and Autumn's Choice is becoming hard to find, so next year may be the last for that one. The average size of the squash I harvested this year was in the range of five to seven pounds, which is a bit on the large side to be practical for a small household, so I'll probably mix in a smaller variety next year, perhaps one that is "open pollinated" and can be saved from each year's harvest.

Autumn's Choice proved delicious in previous years, but I won't know about Canesi until they have a chance to cure for a few weeks. Certainly they look appetizing.

Ostalgia

This novel set in a fictitious Eastern European country was published in 1983, that is, the year after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, but superficially at least it's very much a book of the "Brezhnev era" and also of the Margaret Thatcher years. The Iron Curtain and the Iron Lady are both long gone, of course, so I was curious to revisit the book now, having liked it so much when it first appeared.

The central character of Rates of Exchange is a British academic named Petworth who is dispatched on a two-week lecture tour sponsored by the British Council. He arrives in a country that has been "pummelled, fought over, raped, pillaged, conquered and oppressed by the endless invaders who, from every direction, have swept and jostled through this all too accessible landscape." The official language spoken in Slaka is a farrago of Slavic and Romance elements as well as loan words from English and other tongues, and it's prone to overnight shifts in dialect as different political factions in the country vie for influence. Much deft comedy is had from all this and from the inevitable misunderstandings that go along with travel and with translation, and Malcolm Bradbury is nothing if not fluent and witty about all that. But there's more here than simply mocking foreign ways. Petworth never knows whom he can trust among the officials and cultural figures who wine and dine him and usher him around the country, but he himself is an unsettled figure, a middle-aged man of middling accomplishments, with a muddled marriage, in short, he can scarcely be regarded as "a character in the world-historical sense" as one of his interlocutors puts it. He is no more in control of his life than are the people he meets, all of whom are either working for or looking over their shoulders at (generally both) the ubiquitous state security apparatus. The book is suffused with an uneasy melancholy that doesn't go out of date with geopolitical changes. If it's true that one can't really imagine this novel being written today, it nevertheless hasn't lost one bit of relevance.

The Lowest of the Low

A Josef Škvorecký novella set in wartime Czechoslovakia led me to this droll 1985 BBC documentary about the bass saxophone and its players, who seem a genial lot, comfortable with the humorous effect the instrument tends to have on people but also very much in earnest in their devotion to it. Škvorecký himself appears as one of the interviewees.

One of the masters of the bass saxophone was the multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Adrian Rollini (1903-1956), who can be heard below leading a lively combo that includes a young Buddy Rich.

Rollini largely abandoned the instrument in his later career. He opened a hotel in the Florida Keys and died in a hospital in ghastly circumstances, apparently after having run afoul of the mob. Ate van Delden's Adrian Rollini: The Life and Music of a Jazz Rambler is the definitive biography.

"The nastiest Christian I've ever met"

And some books are just not meant for one ... I picked up The Idiot because I was more or less housebound for a few days and tired of dipping half-heartedly into insubstantial books I had already read. I hadn't looked into Dostoevsky at all since re-reading Crime and Punishment fifteen years or so ago, and The Idiot was one of the few long novels in the house I had never read. I knew even less about it than I do about the author's other major late works, The Possessed (to use its most familiar title) and The Brothers Karamazov, neither of which I own.

I don't exactly regret reading it, now that I've finished, and nothing stopped me from tossing it aside halfway through (I didn't), but it hasn't raised my estimation of the author. (The gratuitous title of this post, by the way, is a mot of Turgenev's.) For 600 pages various infuriating characters, including the feckless hero Prince Myshkin, rant and rave, shift emotions with little prelude or logic, and essentially do nothing (until the final pages). In his rare moments of coherence Myshkin reveals himself as the worst kind of spiritual reactionary, engaging in anti-Western (and vehemently anti-Catholic) tirades that embarrass even his not exactly progressive social circle. Granted some cultural differences (and exasperation on the part of the reader), but I found it difficult to follow and mostly not worth the trouble. To be fair, there are some brilliant set-pieces, but they can't redeem the novel as a whole.

I can, however, see why Kafka regarded Dostoevesky highly, and in saying so I don't mean to sneer at either writer. Strip Dostoevsky of the political and religious baggage, a few dozen patronymics, and a few hundred pages, and you have the core of a potentially interesting existential or psychological novel, even if the result might turn out to be deemed ultimately unsuccessful. But everything in this novel speaks of artistic force, and nothing of artistic control.

I would have been amused, however, if Edward Gorey (who did cover art for a few of Dostoevsky's other works) had been given the opportunity to illustrate this one. His gentle satirical eye would have provided welcome relief.

Red in Tooth and Claw

Our dog came upon this large Chinese praying mantis in our yard this morning in incriminating circumstances. The mantis was on the ground directly beneath our hummingbird feeder, and I found the insect surrounded by small feathers, with some of which it appears to have bedecked itself according to the custom of hunters from time immemorial. It reared up in an intimidating manner and the dog, who is no fool, backed off and quickly lost interest.

Until I can decide its fate I have brought it inside and put it in a transparent plastic container where I can keep an eye on it, and vice versa. I can't simply release it; it's an invasive species and they do eat hummingbirds, as improbable as that seems. On the other hand I can't quite bring myself to kill it.

For the last few hours it has been hanging on upside down to the lid of the container, which permits the passage of air. I gave it three Mexican bean beetles in case it got hungry, but they appear to have died of fright. Now it's staring in my direction, awaiting my next move. If I am murdered in my sleep tonight you will know who to blame.

Nancy Griffith 1953-2021

The gifted songwriter and performer Nanci Griffith has died at the age of 68. Here she is in her prime, with a lovely live version of one of her best songs.

The New York Times has an obit.

Ambition

One day I hope to retire to grow the vegetable marrows, but until then I have only the window box. — Hercule Poirot

Il faut cultiver notre jardin. — Candide

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
— Yeats, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"

When a knight retires his only plan
is to live in peace and quiet like a gentleman.
He makes a modest living selling honey and cheese
and his golden helmet is a hive for bees.
— Peter Blegvad, "Golden Helmet"