Notebook

Last night I drove with my daughter to a club to hear a musician and singer whom I've long admired and whose visits to this country are few and far between. Though it was a bit of a drive — about an hour north — I had never seen perform him live and didn't want to pass up the chance, not knowing whether the opportunity would be repeated since neither of us is getting any younger.

As it turned out, the show itself was a bit of a letdown, thoroughly professional as one would expect but lacking fire. I had the feeling that he felt obliged to play but didn't really want to be there, didn't quite have his heart in it. It was particularly disappointing because he has always had a reputation for being a charismatic live performer. Too many years on the road, too much water under the bridge, I guess.

After we left I got lost and wound up taking a road home I had never been on before. It ran along the shoreline, and even at that hour there were people coming up from the beach, getting in their cars and heading home. The great suspension bridge soared out over the bay as we approached.

As I drove I became increasingly alarmed by the realization that I couldn't remember the latter part of the show. In fact I had no memory of the half-hour before we left the club at all. The time had simply vanished. Eventually I was able to recall getting up and leaving when it was all over; there had been a pancake buffet, on the house, but we had elected not to stay. Of the performer's encores and farewell I could remember nothing.

It's true that I'd been drinking, but only a single bottle of Guinness, surely not enough to cause me either to fall asleep or to black out a portion of an evening I had been anticipating for years. I wondered about the state of my mind, whether this was a harbinger of worse things to come.

It was only later, with great relief, that I realized that the entire sequence of events — the ride, the concert, the gap in time — had never taken place at all. I lay in bed, enjoying the sweetness of concern dispelled, for now.

Cortázar: Hopscotch cover art

The first edition of Julio Cortázar's novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) was published by Editorial Sudamericana in Buenos Aires in June 1963. During the planning of the book the author and his publisher, Francisco Porrúa, had extensive discussions about the cover art, documented in a series of letters that are reproduced in the first volume of the Alfaguara edition of Cortázar's letters.

The idea of using a drawing of a hopscotch grid as part of the design apparently originated with Porrúa. In a letter of October 8, 1962 Cortázar wrote that he planned to visit bookshops in search of, among other things, a book of Brassaï photographs that Porrúa had indicated might contain a picture of such a pattern. He also promised to send his publisher a sketch, photo, or plan that could be used as a model for the cover art. Later (March 13, 1963) he sent a photograph, and also sketched out in his own hand a rough plan in which the hopscotch game would be laid out horizontally across the front, back, and spine of the book, with the title superimposed across the portion that appeared on the front. He also mentioned that a friend and compatriot, the painter Julio Silva, was working on a mock-up, which Cortázar promised to forward to Porrúa when it was ready.

Porrúa suggested that the rayuela be rotated ninety degrees so that it would appear full-length on the front cover. Cortázar responded at length on April 1:

And now we're going to put the cover on the book. So you've been studying the thing with Esteban and, for one brief moment, thought that the hopscotch would be better standing up? Enormous cronopios, I started out that way as well and I had it standing up for along time until the poor thing's Earth got tired. No, my friend, I don't think that will work. It won't work, as you have seen very well, because that front cover has its other side, and I would prefer if possible that it not have a front and a back. You detect an unfortunate implication in the Heaven on the back of the book, and it's true, but there's more to it than that. Very briefly, imagine that, making a praiseworthy sacrifice, you have just purchased a copy of Rayuela, and without wasting a moment you have immersed yourself in reading it. If you are a normal person, you will hold the book with your left hand, while your right hand will occupy itself with turning the pages, while going back and forth with your pipe, alternatively taking sips of the Mariposa brandy that your wife has served you, and from time to time you will make a signal of admiration that stirs the air in your home. Fine, so here we are with your left hand holding the book. Part of your palm and the base of your fingers are resting on the cover, that is to say, on Earth. But the most spiritual part of your hand, the fingertips, the thirst and desire that dwell in your fingertips, will be on the other side searching for Heaven, perhaps grazing it even, briefly entering it. Can you picture it? Your hand is reading the book as well, with that extra-retinary vision of which the sages speak, and which in reality is another attempt to grasp that which, inside the book, your eyes are seeking for. Facile symbolism? Maybe. But I have always been sensitive to book covers, and at times I have found in them things that are curiously linked to the text, unless that is they are published by Santiago Rueda. All joking aside, I think that my “unreasons” will be reasonably understandable … So that, to the extent that it's doable, I take my stand for the idea of the reclining hopscotch, and now let's go to battle. I hope to be able to send you the mock-up as soon as possible; I will immediately issue a ukase to Silva, who has gone totally silent on me in Paris.

A week later Cortázar gave in:

Julio Silva just sent me from Paris the plan that I am enclosing. You will note, among other errors, that the title of the book includes an article that must be suppressed. You will note (and you will enjoy it if you read my last letter) that Silva also stood the hopscotch up like you and Esteban did, but in order to make me a little happier, he repeated it entire on the spine, which strikes me as magnificent. You already know my sensitivity to the matter of the spine, and really a little hopscotch showing out in a bookstore somewhere would be quite nice, don't you think?

I, personally, continue to believe in the reclining hopscotch, but Aurora tells me that it's enough to take one look at Silva's mock-up to understand that it's much more effective if the reader sees the whole hopscotch when he picks up the book, and that the drawing should not squirm like a worm around the book. I think that you and Aurora are pretty much right, and of course I accept the idea. …

One thing that I like is that on the front cover the Earth and Heaven are replaced by the names of the author and publisher, but on the spine, which is the most sacred part of the book, Heaven and Earth shine forth as they ought to. Don't you like that?

In later correspondence Cortázar devoted much attention to the question of the colors of the lettering of the cover. Silva's mock-up was mishandled en route, but eventually turned up, and was evidently used as the basis for the final cover treatment. When he received the finished book Cortázar expressed to Porrúa his great satisfaction with the finished product.

The image at the top of the page here, which was culled from the web, shows a first edition of Rayuela that was sold at auction recently. My own copy, a later reprint from 1973, bears only yellow lettering on the face, the multiple-color arrangement having been abandoned, no doubt for reasons of economy.


George Salter, a well-known graphic artist, designed the Pantheon edition shown above, issued in the United States in April 1966 in a translation by Gregory Rabassa. The title and author's name are hand-lettered. Salter made use of a hopscotch drawing very similar to the one on the Sudamericana cover, but tilted it at an angle, and then underlaid it with a series of colorful diagonal bands. (It was a bit of a cliché at the time for American publishers to use striking colors for books with Latin American themes.) The pattern continues onto the spine, but the back cover is taken up by a photo of a very young looking Cortázar. I'm quite fond of this cover, perhaps because I first read the novel in this edition, but Cortázar firmly disliked it. When he received the advance copies he told Porrúa “the dust jacket is horrendous, but as soon as you toss it in the trash the rest is a wonder of a book.”


This Signet edition of the novel was the first American paperback publication, in December 1967. I don't know if the cover art depicts an actual George Segal sculpture or just an imitation of his style; in any case the book credits neither the designer nor the artist. It's a fairly generic piece of art; perhaps the salient point is that the woman is naked and lying in bed, as the publishers were apparently eager to punch up the erotic angle of the book. The words above the title read LIFE | LOVE | SEX, which I suppose is one way of summing up what Rayuela is about. In case anyone missed the point it's spelled out again on the bottom of the back cover: “Hopscotch / a game of / LIFE, LOVE, SEX.” The blurbs are pretty hilarious: Harvey L. Johnson of the Houston Post promises “Sexual bouts, drunken orgies … escapes into hallucinations and trances, emphasis on sex, unmindful frankness … shocking and sordid … crude or amusing … Hopscotch will not soon be forgotten,” while the Baltimore Sun simply promises that it “leaves you limp.”


The Avon Books edition, first issued in 1975, is another story entirely. The entire Bard series of Latin American literature was elegantly and imaginitively designed, and this one, which was created by Roger Stine, is one of the better ones. As with the rest of the series, the title, author, and front blurb are separated from the illustration, printed in block letters, and hence very easy to read, even from a distance. I'm not sure whether the man looking down — who bears a rough resemblance to Cortázar — is meant to literally have one foot in Paris and the other in Argentina (which would make perfect sense), or whether the whole night scene is supposed to be Paris. (The artist has included the Eiffel Tower in the background, just to make sure we know that part of the book is set in Paris.) On the pavement, which may be cobblestone, is the familiar hopscotch grid, along with a young boy in short pants who is probably meant to represent a younger version of Horacio Oliveira. That last detail may be a little of a mistake; one thing Oliveira does not spend much time doing is reflecting on his childhood. But the boy is appropriately placed on the Earth of the hopscotch, looking ahead at Heaven or at his own future. The interplay of darkness and illumination is very appealing, particularly on the man's sweater, which seems to be lit by a flickering glow.


Above is the cover treatment used in the edition of the De Oro Library of Latin American and Latino Literature imprint of the Book-of-the-Month Club. The design is by Monica Elias; the painting is by the Argentine painter Xul Solar. It's a fairly handsome cover, though why it would be chosen for Hopscotch rather than for any other random modern novel that happened to be in need of a cover I'm not sure. One possible clue: the painting is called Homme des Serpents; a little nod, perhaps, to the novel's Club de la Serpiente?


Finally, above right is the current US edition in the Pantheon Modern Writers Series, which shares the same clean but rather drab design as the other volumes in that series. I suppose the woman in the photograph is meant to represent la Maga or Talita, but if so she seems miscast. Maybe she's Pola or Gekrepten.

(All translations from the Alfaguara edition of Cortázar's letters are my own.)

A village in the distance

1.

Here are the opening paragraphs of the first chapter of Three Dollars a Year (Delphic Studios, New York, 1935) by G. Russell Steininger and Paul Van de Velde:

San Pablo Cuatro Venados, a small and somewhat inaccessible Mexican village, hangs on a slope of the high western Sierras. It is a curious and primitive community the inhabitants of which are Zapotecan Indians. Life offers them little. Their lot is both meagre and hard — a situation that seems not to distress them in the least.

The natural setting of San Pablo is one of majestic but tortuous grandeur. Mountains overlap and tower above mountains. Their sides drop precipitously into deep barrancas only to rise again, sheerly and suddenly, into more formidable and gigantic ranges. The tremendous scale of this scenic background is intensified by the almost dwarf-like stature of the natives — a physical characteristic reflected in the low doorways of their houses.

San Pablo sprawls over the mountain side and in appearance is merely a collection of thatched-roofed huts tucked here and there on an occasional patch of level ground. The whole is dominated by a twin-towered church of little merit. Throughout the five or six hundred years of the pueblo's existence comparatively few foreigners have trod the steep winding trails which serve as village streets.

For centuries however, in either nearby mine or distant market place, the San Pableños have known the white man and his ways. Christian teaching and European methods followed swiftly on the heels of the Spanish Conquest. Despite these alien influences old customs and habits still persist and the current life of the San Pablo Indian is essentially the same as that of his forefathers.

The fate of the San Pableños was sealed centuries ago. They perhaps do not realize that their institutions and activities — that they themselves — are the inevitable result of ancient causes which they are almost powerless to modify. In their present position they are encompassed by futility and should they desire to better themselves, which plainly they do not, they would have no choice but to abandon their village. Fear and physical geography have determined their history, their psychology and their economics. A long-standing and unending feud with the neighboring pueblo of Cuilapam and an impoverished soil make this a certainty. The direct route from San Pablo to the market place in Oaxaca leads through Cuilapam, but this road the San Pableños dare not take. Instead they trudge another five miles for the sole purpose of avoiding enemy territory. The crushing force and mounting burden of adverse circumstances seem to indicate that, in the long run, these Indians are bound to lose out and that, within the course of time, their village may disappear.

The history of San Pablo can be summarized as a series of escapes. From the very beginning of its existence the inhabitants have endured the constant menace of extermination. Blood has flowed and continues to flow: the blood which has forever been a symbol of Mexico from pre-Conquest sacrifices to recent revolutions. San Pablo was established as a Zapotecan Indian military outpost, a buffer settlement representing the advance guard of one warring tribe against another, and accepted the dangers, privations and sufferings which always accompany such a role. The warriors of this encampment incessantly watched the activities of their enemies — Mixtecan Indians who lived in Cuilapam, at that time a small village nestled at the foot of Monte Albán.

November 25, 1521 was a crucial day in the affairs of the little Indian garrison of San Pablo. It was then that the Spaniards, bent on conquest and captained by Francisco de Orozco, entered the Valley of Oaxaca. For the San Pableños the arrival of Orozco and his band practically constituted a miracle and had the Spaniards not appeared exactly when they did it is probable that today San Pablo would not exist. When the Conquistadores reached the valley a bitter civil war was in progress. It was a war of revenge and a fight to the finish. The Mixtecs had determined to conquer the Zapotecs beyond any hope of recovery and were on the point of achieving complete success when a common foe — the white man — arrived. The Indians temporarily dropped their grievances and united against the invaders. San Pablo was saved.

Time however has increased the hatred of original enemy tribes and their descendants are now hereditary foes. Not so long ago the entire population of San Pablo deserted the village and fled to the mountains, fearing complete annihilation at the hands of the Mixtecs. Intervention on the part of Paul Van de Velde and of the Mexican authorities undoubtedly prevented a catastrophe and the San Pablenos are again back in their homes, at peace for the moment but not knowing how long it will last.

Caught in this whirlpool of fear and hate and condemned to an unending struggle with a topography angular and stubborn, the San Pablo Indians should be a morose and sullen lot. Certainly life for them is often little less than a mere existence. Food and clothing frequently fall short of actual necessities. But here is the paradox. Notwithstanding a life of seeming misery and bare sufficiency — often extreme poverty — these Indians are fundamentally happy and contented.

2.

According to the Editor's Note at the beginning of the book, Three Dollars a Year was based on the researches of Paul Van de Velde, a Belgian scholar who was a member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística and various other scholarly organizations, and who was the author of a number of works on Oaxaca and its environs. The book was actually written by G. Russell Steininger, a landscape architect from Reading, Pennsylvania who had assisted Van de Velde in his researches. As far as I can tell it was Steininger's only published work. Though the book is a bit disjointed and marred by its condescending manner and confident assurance that the San Pableños are satisfied with their lot in life, it contains a number of evocative photographs and some interesting material on the customs, history, and material life of a small village in the Sierras.

The authors make it clear that the centuries-old animosity between Zapotecan San Pablo Cuatro Venados and the nearby Mixtec village of Cuilapam (now more of a town, and generally spelled Cuilapan) was one of the central facts of life in San Pablo. The animosity could be traced in competing maps, surveys, and legal actions, as well as in violence. According to an appendix, in just one brief period in the 1920s and early '30s the murders or disappearances of fourteen citizens of San Pablo as well as two Cuilapeños were attributed to the feud. The backwardness and isolation of San Pablo appear to have been exacerbated by its unfortunate location. Trapped between hostile Cuilapan and the rugged terrain of the Sierra Madre, the villagers were forced to work marginal agricultural lands. The “three dollars a year” of the title refers to the average annual income of the San Pableños, a meaningless figure for people who hardly belonged to an economy wider than their village boundaries at all.

It would be easy to assume that the description of San Pablo in the book is now completely out-of-date, and perhaps it is. But one aspect apparently remains unchanged: the occasionally violent feud between San Pablo and its lower-lying neighbor continues unabated. In 1929, in arbitrating a boundary dispute between the two localities, the Mexican Supreme Court had granted 522 hectares to San Pablo and 3,112 hectares to Cuilapan. That ruling was upheld by a presidential decree in 1970, but the San Pableños rejected it and continued to squat on land granted to Cuilapan. In 2001 another court returned 1,565 hectares to San Pablo. And just in the last few days (February 2008) there has come a report of yet another outbreak of hostilities. What follows is a rough translation:

There were tense moments in the municipios of Cuilapan de Guerrero and San Pablo Cuatro Venados, where residents of the two communities were on the point of a confrontation yesterday morning as a result of the dispute over communal lands in El Cucharito and Acapixtla districts, where the sound of gunfire was even heard. Fourteen inhabitants of San Pablo, among them Wenceslao Sánchez, president of Bienes Comunales, were detained by a group from Cuilapan as a means of pressuring (the San Pableños) to abandon the 400 hectares that they had invaded and deforested indiscriminately, in addition to diverting the course of the Río El Valiente, which supplies water to both communities.

It all began at 6:00 AM, when residents of Cuilapan, most of them women armed with sticks and machetes, set up blockades on the highway to San Pablo, first in San Pedro Acapixtla and then in El Cucharito, which is identified as the zone in conflict.

For his part, the Secretary General of the government issued a call to avoid bloodshed and to seek ways to solve the problem, which is more than 200 years old.

So even in an era of globalization — or perhaps especially in an era of globalization — ancient local conflicts over land, water, and tribe continue to flare in the Sierra Madre.

3.

I've never been to San Pablo Cuatro Venados, but I may well have stared at it from a distance. The village is barely a dozen miles from the major pre-Columbian archaeological site of Monte Albán, which were constructed by the distant Zapotec and Mixtec ancestors of the warring villagers. The ruins, which I visited in 1980, occupy a plateau above the city of Oaxaca and provide an excellent prospect in all directions of the surrounding valley and the mountains beyond. Somewhere out there, to the southwest, is San Pablo, though I didn't know it at the time.

The undoing

He caught sight of the girl on his way out, in the late afternoon heat and haze. For an hour or so, after the last bell, he had marked up a week's worth of essays — never an edifying task, these days — and when he was finished he had packed up his briefcase, cleaned the dust off his desk the best he could, sipped the last lukewarm coffee in the office pot, and started out across the nearly deserted parking lot to his car. She was sitting by herself on the stone wall that marked the limits of the school grounds, just a few yards in from the road to town. Dressed in a faded lime-green T-shirt and jeans, with her backpack on the wall beside her, she sat dangling her knees, head bent down, apparently deep in thought but more likely, he suspected, just lost in space.

Her name was Kelly Hinther. She was a ninth-grader, and he knew her because she had been in his English class the year before. Like most of the kids in the valley she had family problems. Her mother had done time, a couple of years back, for meth possession, and was now in a halfway house somewhere; her father was out of the picture and from what he'd heard about him that was just as well. She lived with her grandmother, who was a bit of a train-wreck herself with a drinking problem but who did at least care for the girl and tried to keep her fed and clothed and out of trouble. Kelly had difficulties with reading and even more with attitude but he had a hunch that somewhere deep down she was actually relatively bright. She had surprised once him by reciting, from memory and verbatim, a couplet from an Andrew Marvell poem that he had recited to the class a few weeks earlier on a whim, never expecting the lines to sink in:

But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near

That kind of thing didn't help her on her exams, particularly — she had barely passed the course — but he had the impression that, in another time and place, where she wouldn't have started out in life with concrete blocks sealed around her feet and headed downhill from there, she might actually have blossomed into something approaching a responsible adult citizen, able to take care of herself and maybe even live a productive life. She was a handful, though, no question about that, always being punished for some minor infraction: smoking, cursing, goofing off. No doubt that was why she was sitting there: detention, again, and hadn't caught the late bus home.

He called to her and asked her if she wanted a ride. She stared at him blankly for a moment, then muttered “yeah, okay,” slipped down off the wall, and half-carried, half-dragged her backpack to his dusty Subaru compact.

Officially this was frowned upon. Two years before there had been an incident. A young teacher at the school, someone from away, had made the mistake of assuming that one of his students, another dirt-poor girl from a rough home, wouldn't be likely to complain to the authorities if he attempted to take a few liberties. The girl blackened his eye with an impressively pugilistic right jab and raised holy hell. The teacher was summarily dismissed the next morning, and by evening he had cleaned out his apartment and left town for good. His haste was understandable: nearly everybody in the valley owned a gun, and word had its way of getting around, even if that kind of thing would be kept out of the tame little weekly that was the valley's only official source of local news. At a staff meeting shortly afterwards policies were clarified; even the appearance of improper intimacy with a student was to be carefully avoided. Giving an unaccompanied minor a ride was a bit "gray area," but he'd taken Kelly home before — she lived on a bluff, outside of town, on his way — and the grandmother didn't seem to have a problem with it. In any case, he knew there was a good chance that the old lady might well already be three sheets to the wind and in no condition to drive. Even if she could be reached on the phone it would be a half-hour trip to school, an hour before Kelly got home.

She slung the backpack into the back and took a seat in the front beside him, carefully buckling her belt, an operation which he knew perfectly well was for his benefit only. He started the ignition, gave the windshield a squirt, and flicked on the wipers to clean away the grime. As he pulled onto the highway the car began to quiver gently, shaken by a small tremor coming from the pavement beneath. Involuntarily the girl's eyes widened and she drew in a breath, but it was over in a second. Nothing to get excited about: sometimes there were dozens of quakes a day, and this wasn't even one of the bigger ones, the ones that could go on at times for a full minute or more, in a kind of slow shuddering and churning of the earth that would be followed by a terrible, anxious stillness, something like the beginning of a migraine or that last uneasy moment before you started to throw up.

The geological disturbances had begun a few months earlier. In the valley, the first inkling had come when a couple of boys hiking in the woods had noticed something unusual in the waters of the little creek they were wading across. It was like a kind of miniature vortex, just a yard or so in diameter. The water was behaving as if some invisible force were bending gravity down. You could put your hand on the surface of the creek and feel the pull, even though there was no visible rupture in the creek bed beneath or anything else that might have accounted for the effect. The earthquakes followed, not long after. At first they were few and far between, and didn't hurt anyone or do any real damage, but within a few weeks they had grown in frequency and power until they had settled into a pattern of sporadic major tremors and almost continuous aftershocks. A number of older buildings in the valley had crumbled into ruins, and objects left overnight — even parked cars — were sometimes displaced long distances by the vibration by the time morning came. For months now the sky had been shrouded with an ominous russet tinge; a powdery grime the same color covered everything, leaving a bitter, gritty residue in the mouth and lungs.

The anomalies were worldwide in scope: hundred-year floods on the Gulf Coast, unprecedented landslides in the Andes, choking dust storms across huge swaths of Africa and Australia. There was much talk, in the churches and elsewhere, of the Last Days; news reports spoke darkly of some kind of tear in the fabric of space, a singularity. The teacher wasn't a believer and he didn't get the physics, but in any case the scientists themselves didn't seem to really know what was happening or where it might lead, though it seemed to be getting steadily worse.

They drove along the valley floor for a few miles, between fields of withering alfalfa, then turned off to the right. The county road they were now travelling on didn't connect with anything, it just went up and into the hills, and so the dust on the pavement was like new snow, unmarked by tires. They passed a few gray, abandoned shacks and tobacco sheds, and one shuttered farmhouse, but then nothing until they began to climb out of the valley, up to where the real rednecks used to live until a couple of decades back. Here and there dirt tracks spurred off, now to the left, now to the right, disappearing into the scrub, but he didn't know any children from those roads, or if any of the houses that might have once stood along them were still occupied. As far as he knew only hunters — and maybe the occasional illicit horticulturist — spent any time there now.

The ridge where he and the girl both lived was higher up, at the edge of the deep pines, and as they reached its crest a prospect of the valley below opened out on their left, its contours softened by the haze that hung over it. Usually the air was a few degrees cooler up here, where a stiff wind rippled year round, but as they drove along they felt instead that it was becoming suffocatingly hot. He rolled his side window down a bit further to let in some more air, even though the dust was nearly blinding him.

On the right ahead, on a small bluff, her house appeared, with the dilapidated, listing garage beside it. He signalled — out of habit rather than need, as they had passed no traffic since leaving the main road — and pulled into the unpaved driveway. As the car rolled to a stop the earth began to rumble underneath them again. Ten seconds later, just as the tremor seemed to be about to subside, there was an awful, tearing noise and a major quake began. The car rocked on its shocks for sixty seconds. It wasn't the worst he had felt, he thought, but it came close. Beside him the girl was pale, her lips tight, her hands locked on the dashboard and her gaze fixed out the front windshield as if she thought she could stop the earth's motion by will alone.

When the quake was over she unhitched the seatbelt, got out, gathered her things from the back, and closed the door. She looked up at the house uncertainly for a second, then turned back towards him and leaned her head into the passenger window, her eyes cast down. He watched, waiting for her to speak, but she didn't seem able to form words. He wondered if Kelly might be epileptic and was having a small seizure or if she just needed to get her land legs back.

“Kelly—?,” he started to ask, but at once she spoke, distinctly and firmly:

“Mr. Kursoe, do you think it's the end of the world?”

For a second he hesitated, thinking that the girl just might be strong enough to handle it if he gave her an honest reply, but then he changed his mind — he couldn't do it to her.

“No, Kelly,” he said, in as reassuring a tone as he could muster, then quickly added, “no, I'm sure not.”

He watched her step slowly away, up towards the house, then he turned the wheel and urged the car down the driveway and onto the road. He had driven no more than a few hundred yards when the haze suddenly worsened. He slowed to half speed, struggling to see through the windshield, navigating as much by the sound of the tires on the gritty asphalt as by sight. The dust blowing in through the windows was choking, lacerating his face, stinging his eyes beneath his glasses. Stones and debris covered the road, and as the tires ground over it projectiles kicked up, colliding with the sides and undercarriage of the car.

A few miles short of home he braked, at first tentatively, then urgently, then he lifted his foot up and let the car creep forward. As he accelerated again he was surprised to note that he could no longer feel the friction of the tires. Instead, the whole roadbed appeared to be moving laterally, in the direction of the valley; rocks and mud tumbled across it, and a terrible deep roar seemed to be coming at him from all directions at once. In terror he clenched the steering wheel, fighting to keep the car on the road even as the road itself seemed to be about to dissolve into nothingness. For an instant he blacked out, though without releasing his grip. When he came to he realized that his foot was no longer on the gas pedal, but that the car was still moving, faster now, falling through a cascade of rubble into fathomless space.

Work in progress (II)

The first time he turned to look back towards the harbor, ten minutes later, he could make out nothing of the town except a water tower and a couple of derricks; a few minutes more and these were gone as well. A stiff wind and cold spray were blowing across the deck, and the ferry was rolling in the swells. He stayed out as long as he could; then, when the chill became too much, he went below decks and found the lounge. A scattering of passengers were sitting on the benches by the windows: couples, lone men, a family with two small, excited boys, and the woman in the yellow slicker, who was reading a newspaper. The snack bar smelled of grease and had limited offerings, but he was beginning to feel hungry and bought a sandwich and fries and sat down.

They were soon out of sight of land. The two boys had fallen asleep, one on his mother's lap, the other sprawled on the bench beside. Two men played checkers quietly in a corner, observed by a third who stood over them until he grew bored and went to sit by himself, nursing a cardboard container of coffee. The woman in the slicker had finished her paper and now sat motionless, her hands folded in her lap, sunglasses on.

He stepped outside to the rail and found the air warmer in the afternoon sun. He went around to the stern, where two of the crewmen were killing time. They nodded as he approached, then resumed their conversation. He climbed the stairs to the upper deck and back to the wheel-house again. The captain, standing at the controls and talking into the radio mike in his hand, gave him a friendly wave but kept an eye on him, as if deciding if he looked like a jumper. He sat down on a bench and began to feel drowsy; he had drifted asleep when he heard tapping on the window and looked up. The captain pointed off to starboard. At first he didn't see the pilot whales, then he spotted them, a dozen or more, swimming parallel, black and sleek, their heads breaching the water at every trough. They kept up with the boat for twenty minutes, then veered away.

As the afternoon waned they came by land in the distance on the port side, and the first fishing boats appeared. The ferry skirted the coast for another hour, then turned as night fell. He saw lights alongshore, and the blinking of beacons, as it slowed. There were hotels and homes on both sides of the dock, and people out walking, even in the off season. The captain reversed the engines and the ferry inched up to the landing and came to rest, rocking gently with the waves beneath. The crew secured it fast, then dropped the chains to let the cars go through. He saw the couple with the little boys pull away in a dented blue sedan, the boys jumping up and down in the back seats and peering out at the sights. The woman in the yellow slicker went ahead of him into the waiting room and was greeted, rather coolly he thought, by an older woman in a drab wool overcoat. They stepped out to the street, got into a waiting car whose driver he couldn't see, and drove off.

He found a bed and breakfast a few blocks from the water, a narrow three-storey brownstone with chrysanthemums in windowboxes. One wall of the lobby was occupied by a cage full of tiny finches; they hopped restlessly from perch to perch twittering while he registered with the white-haired man at the desk — the owner he supposed, retired from some other life. Most of the rooms were vacant, and he asked for one on the top floor in front so he could look out at the town. He took the key, climbed the stairs, and went in. The room was small and bare, but adequate. The mattress on the four-poster was a bit high up but not too soft, and the single cast-iron radiator under the front window appeared up to the task. As he stood by the window he suspected he would be hearing traffic noises through the night, but this seemed more likely to ease his sleep than to disturb it. The streetlights would be more of a problem, as the curtains were pale and barely met, but he would manage.

He locked up again and went out to the street in search of a meal. There was a dark bar with a neon sign and a dining room, and a fish and chips, but he kept going, walking the main drag until he came to an Italian place that looked tiny from the street but opened out into an ample room, now largely deserted, once inside. He was shown to a table looking out on the water by a black-vested waiter in his thirties who spoke gently and with barely a trace of a foreign accent. He ordered bread and soup and a plate of clams with spaghetti on the side, and a glass of wine, and ate slowly, in silence, finishing it all as he watched the few boats that were still moving at that hour and season tie up along the docks and unload. When he had paid the bill and exchanged an amicable buona sera with the waiter he stepped into the street again. There was live music coming out of a basement storefront a few doors down but he wasn't in the mood. He found a bench in a little park by the water, under an aspen, and sat for a while until the last of the stragglers from the waterfront had moved on and the chill was starting to invade his bones, then he retraced his steps, bid the man at the registration desk goodnight, and went up to his room. He undressed and lay down, turning his back to the window, and was asleep the moment he shut his eyes.

(Never completed.)

Work in progress (I)

He stood alone. The treeless plain stretched out around him in all directions, cold and dry and monochrome. The brown earth was stoneless, windswept, dotted with dead grass long beyond its season. Whatever blew onto the plain — grains of sand and rust, bits of leaf, splinters of bone — would whistle along for miles until it was caught in a patch of turf and held fast, there to remain until the next rain, months off, caked it in with the soil forever. To the north, a few miles off, the ground rose sharply to a broad plateau, as barren as the plain beneath. He thought it might have been the stranded coast of a sea whose waters had long ago drawn back, but he didn't know.

The mid-morning sun, its glare muted by a high, thin haze, had driven off the chill of night, but the air was still cool and flicked with breezes. A few dark birds wheeled above the horizon, very far off, but never approached.

He began to walk. He walked at a steady pace, without hurry, bearing south. As he travelled the exertion warmed him, and he soon shook out the last of the cold air from his coat. The mist on his breath grew lighter, then disappeared for good. He never looked back. After a few miles his boot struck a stone, just a milky white pebble the size of a knucklebone, and sent it skipping away; it was the only one he encountered. A kestrel crossed above, not hunting but moving quickly to the west. He watched its shadow pass in front of him, a perfect dark reflection of the silent bird, speeding towards an unseen convergence.

It was near evening when he sighted the flock. He heard the bellwether first, before they came in sight, a muffled low chunking that arrived and dimmed with the wind, the direction of its source undeterminable. When he came upon them at last, immense and eerily white in the twilight, they paid no attention to his passing and only shied at the last moment, when he reached out a hand to graze their backs. Silent but for the bell, they drifted around him in clusters of six or eight or a dozen, nosing at the turf. He thought they seemed like ghosts, and looked for the ghostly shepherd sure to be nearby, whistling for his spectre hound, but there was none.

The terrain began to slope down, in fits and starts, over little dips and rises, runnels trickling here and there in the gaps. Lacking a staff, he stepped carefully across the slick, broken ground, planting the lower foot first, bending his knees. In a while he smelled the first peat fire, borne for miles perhaps in the damp night air. He found a stream and a well-trod path and turned to follow it.

At the first settlement they gave him shelter in the barn, a loaf and a steaming bowl of mutton broth. There were three men, soft-spoken and remote, the one he supposed the father of the other pair. The woman, slight and leathery — she might have been the mother but he thought her too young — seemed glad of his company, though she spoke little and retired at the end of the meal. When he rose in the morning she was the only one about; she gave him bread and a blessing for the journey and he departed. He took the wagon-path along the rim of a narrow, fog-shrouded gorge until he reached the paved road. He read the name of the village on the sign at the turnoff and made a note of it.

It was drizzling and still when he caught a ride. The driver of the van smelled of tobacco and wool; he chattered over the radio, pointing out what sights of interest lay along the way without waiting to be prompted. They passed a little clapboard church, a convenience store, and miles and miles of grazed-over fields, dotted with little ponds, dilapidated sheds, and mothballed machinery. At the first intersection there was a traffic light but not a soul in view; the driver breezed through without slowing.

As the neared the coast the drizzle became fog, then drifted away suddenly, revealing the shoreline and the freighters in the offing. As soon as they had skirted a little point the port came into view. Its buildings were sullen and anonymous: silos and storehouses, processing plants and canneries, pipelines and cranes. A scattering of mud-daubed cars, nearly all of them white or black, were parked in the lanes and lots between, and a few gaunt men, in caps and white coats, stood outside smoking on their break.

The driver left him off near the ferry dock and drove on. He found the station, which was nearly deserted, and bought a one-way passage from the woman at the window, and a soda and crackers from a vending machine. He glanced at the newspaper someone had left open on the bench, but didn't know the language. When he had warmed sufficiently he went outside and watched the gulls and the splashing of the waves on the pilings of the pier alongside. The ferry took nearly a half-hour to reach its berth, from the time he first spied it; its wake, even at low speed, drove up under the dock and shook it to its foundations. With the clanging of bells and the shuddering of machinery it bumped to a halt and lowered its gate, discharging a fuel truck, a score of cars, a pair of motorcycles, and a handful of shivering pedestrians. The crew came ashore for a few minutes, entered the station to get back their land legs and chat up the ticket-agent, then went back onboard.

When they dropped the chains and began to board the lined-up cars he stepped up to the deck. The crewman took his ticket affably and said something to him, but he couldn't make it out. A woman in a yellow slicker, her head swaddled tightly in a scarf, was the only other traveller by foot. She stepped away from him, not meeting his eye, and quickly made for the warmth of the cabin. He instead climbed the iron stairs to the upper deck, just outside the wheel-house, and found a seat on a bench where he could overlook the harbor, hands in his pockets, the collar of his coat turned up, as the ferry began to pull away from shore.

Notes & Queries (Gabriel García Márquez)

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

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

The US text reads as follows:

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

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

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

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

Graham Parker in Japan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roughing it

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

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

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

Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan

Sweet As the Showers of Rain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soehnée

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

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

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

Open road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Craxton covers

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

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



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


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


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

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

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

Souvenir of the Ancient World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and of course the final stanza:

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

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