The Honest Badger Thief of Lubeck

Kahn + Selesnick are at it again, with a new project, Truppe Fledermaus. Worth keeping an eye on. Sly Frank Zappa reference below:

The Armies of the End of Days

The late Norman Cohn's study of "Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages" is a book I first read in my early twenties, have dipped into now and then over the years, and have just finished re-reading in full. I no longer remember exactly why I picked it up in the first place, years ago, though I'm fairly sure that I did in fact seek it out deliberately rather than simply stumble across it by accident. At the time I first read it I had negligible grounding in medieval history or the study of millenarian movements (not that I have much more now), but Cohn was a vivid enough writer and an assured enough scholar to overcome the reader's shortcomings in that regard, and for that reason the book has long had an appreciative audience. As far as I can tell, The Pursuit of the Millennium has been more or less continuously in print since the publication of the first edition in 1957. My paperback of the revised edition features glowing quotes by such British intellectual heavyweights as Bertrand Russell, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Isaiah Berlin, but its influence has been surprisingly widespread, having had its effect on Guy Debord and the Situationists as well.

Cohn's subject, in brief, is the tradition of millenarian excitement that flourished in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and into the Reformation. An appendix examines the activities and writings of the Ranters in 17th-century England; other than that Cohn makes little attempt, in what is not after all a particularly lengthy study, to draw comparisons with similar movements in other times and places, though the relevance of such events as the War of Canudos of 19th-century Brazil is clear.

The millenarian tradition drew its intellectual origins from various canonical and non-canonical apocalyptic writings of the Jewish and Christian traditions, from the Book of Daniel to the Sibylline Oracles, but much of its energy arose from the social conditions of the Middle Ages, from the vast disparities in wealth between rich and poor, from the blatant corruption of much of the clergy, and from such disruptive events as the Crusades, the Black Death, and the rise of towns. In the geographical area that Cohn focuses on (mostly the Low Countries, France, Germany, and Bohemia), hardly a generation seems to have gone by without the appearance of some would-be prophet or redeemer, usually but not always self-appointed and often identifying himself with a historical figure, like Baldwin IX of Flanders or the Emperor Frederick II, who had supposedly returned from the dead. The coming of this figure was taken to herald the violent downfall of the rich and the corrupt and the advent of an era of peace, prosperity, and righteousness in which, as in the primal State of Nature, all things would be held in common, the faithful would be sustained without labor, and the world would be unified beneath the strong and just hand of the redeemer. In some but not all cases there was a marked Antinomian strain; as the elect or even the incarnation of God, the army of the faithful literally could not sin, and thus anything — theft, adultery, murder — was permitted to them.

As unhinged and megalomaniac as many of these figures may have been (and many of their followers were hardly less delusional), the movements were often surprisingly potent. Drawing the allegiance not only of the dislocated poor but of disaffected clergy and nobles who chafed against the wealth and privileges of the Church, they successfully occupied and defended major towns and cities, notably in Münster in 1534-35. Horrific violence was an intrinsic part of the pattern, as the participants, justified by divine sanction, simply slaughtered anyone who opposed the new order or violated its injunctions, or anyone against whom they held a grudge; devastating pogroms against Jews were a regular occurrence. For their part, the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, in their zeal to suppress the disorders, meted out merciless punishment to anyone deemed heretical or subversive; time and again we read of dissenters who met their end by being burned, beheaded, drowned, or simply hacked to pieces.

Cohn doesn't stress, but does make note of, the applicability of the movements he describes to more recent history. Millenarialism, of course, has never gone away, though it has largely been absorbed within conservative Protestantism and tamed to the point of banality. The affinity of some of the movements with Marxist expectations of the overthrow of capitalism and the institution of a classless society is evident, and has been indeed noted by some Marxist historians (who naturally have tended to emphasize the social rather than theological roots of such movements). Possibly less familiar is the anticipation of Hitler's explicitly millennial Tausendjähriges Reich in the writings of the anonymous 15th-century "Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine," who proclaimed that "the Germans once held the whole world in their hands and they will do so again, with more power than ever." As Cohn writes:

There is the same belief in a primitive German culture in which the divine will was once realised and which throughout history had been the source of all good — which was later undermined by a conspiracy of capitalists, inferior, non-German people and the Church of Rome — which must now be restored by a new aristocracy, of humble birth but truly German in soul, under a God-sent saviour who is at once a political leader and a new Christ. It is all there — and so were the offensives in West and East — the terror wielded both as an instrument of policy for its own sake — the biggest massacres in history — in fact everything except the final consummation of the world-empire which, in Hitler's words, was to last a thousand years.

In the end, with five centuries or more separating us from most of the events described in this volume, the reader would be ill-advised to draw much inspiration from the millenarian uprisings of the Middle Ages, however legitimate the grievances of their participants. Understanding what produced them, and how the events played out once they were set in motion, however, would still seem to remain valuable.

The bus

There were no seats and several people already standing, so she grabbed hold of a strap and planted her feet as the bus lurched forward. She could have walked it in a half-hour and often did if the weather was okay and she wasn’t too tired, but today she was dead on her feet and eager to just get home and out of her work clothes. The traffic was bad, though, and she quickly regretted her decision. Gingerly easing its way around construction vehicles, crossing pedestrians, and cabs picking up or discharging passengers, the bus slowed to a crawl at every intersection and barely managed to make up time in the long stretches between avenues. All was quiet in the interior. One young woman was silently nodding to music, her headphones trailing down from her ear and disappearing into her clothes, but the other faces around Helen were patient, impassive, inured. If any of the riders were traveling together they had let their conversation lapse and were staring blankly ahead or out the window, rocking with the motion of the bus, when it moved at all. She recognized a couple of people from other times but no one she knew well enough to say hello to.

A voice came over the radio and the driver picked up the handset to respond. Over the noise of the motor she couldn’t make out all the back-and-forth but it sounded like the dispatcher was reporting a tie-up somewhere ahead. The bus had been stuck for several minutes, fifty yards from the end of a block, and streams of pedestrians — heavier than usual, Helen thought — were flowing past it on either side, as if the age of the automobile and the internal combustion engine had suddenly ground to a halt, undone by their own success, returning the streets of the city to older and more agile forms of transportation. No one complained or stood up or even let out a sigh, though the bus’s air conditioning wasn’t great and they were getting hit head-on with the declining sun in the west. The bus crept forward a few yards, halted, crept a few yards more, and finally pulled up to a designated stop where a dozen or so figures were waiting, skeptically, hoping to board. As the doors opened Helen made a snap decision, strode forward, and stepped to the sidewalk. She was only halfway home but anything was better than wasting the rest of the afternoon standing on a bus that wasn’t going anywhere.

The block stood in the middle of a busy wholesale and manufacturing district made up of older buildings, with narrow storefronts, fire escapes, and lofts in the upper storeys — not the trendy kind the bohemians liked, but the kind that still actually produced something, though Helen had no idea what. At night the area was pretty much deserted and she avoided it, but she felt no fear at this hour, other than the terror of getting bowled over on the narrow sidewalks by people darting past to run errands, deliver packages, or just be somewhere else. Keeping as best she could to a steady pace, she soon left the stalled bus far behind, but when she reached the end of the second block she saw that a crowd had backed up from the next avenue, that some people were trying to work their way through but others were just lingering there watching something. The traffic heading downtown was barely inching along, and when she turned to look she quickly saw why: a block away there were hundreds of people standing in the middle of the street, swarming around the unlucky vehicles that had advanced that far and now could neither proceed nor turn off. Some of the people held signs aloft but most just seemed to be staring further down the avenue, at something that Helen wasn’t able to make out. Two squad cars with flashing lights were parked at the edge of the crowd and the cops were trying to get traffic off the avenue, but the crowd was too big and the knot couldn’t be untied.

News from Home

The Heald Machine Company no longer exists, but in its heyday it was a major employer in Worcester, Massachusetts and an important manufacturer of grinders and other machine tools for American industry. During World War II at least 1,000 of the company's employees served in the military, and the monthly newsletter shown here, the Heald Listening Post, was produced by the company and mailed to their servicemen and women wherever they happened to be stationed. Subtitled A Periodic Message to All Heald Employees in Uncle Sam's Armed Forces, the newsletter probably began in early 1942 and was still appearing in the fall of 1945. There was no masthead, but the editor, at least for the parts of its run that are in my possession (Nos. 15-25, 35-39, and 44) seems to have been one Lew Hastings; there were other regular contributors and staff members, including Larry Bacon, Maurice Brigham, and a woman referred to only as Blondie. It appears to have been produced by mimeograph, though some issues have a sheet or two of black-and-white photos on glossy paper.


The newsletter was intended to boost the morale of those in service and provide news and gossip about the company and their fellow employees. It included a regular quota of corny jokes, often mildly risqué and sometimes racist (judging from the photographs of men and women in uniform, there were few if any African-Americans in Heald's employ). Much space was devoted to the company's bowling leagues and other sponsored sports teams, and at least in later issues there is a fair amount of feedback from the recipients, who gave updates on where they were and how they were doing. An upbeat tone was called for (and the newsletter was no doubt subject to the approval of censors) but the Listening Post does note the deaths of at least nineteen employees who were in service, as well as a few who died at home. Sometimes it can be quite blunt about the circumstances:

No doubt some of you know Jack Pillings, who has been kicking around here for some 25 odd years. Of late he has been down to Prescott St. Jack didn't have a chick or a child - not a relative. He hasn't been too hot lately, and decided the next world might suit him better, so a couple of weeks ago he turned on the gas in his room at a boarding house, crawled into bed and went to sleep for the last time. (Issue 15, May 17, 1943)

Some of you fellows probably know Albert Pierson in the Unit Assembly department. Last week Al was feeling fine and was here all the week. Sunday, without warning, he collapsed and was gone before medical aid could reach him. (Issue 19, September 21, 1943)

In addition to female Heald employees who signed up as WAACs and WAVEs, there were also WOWs (Women Ordnance Workers) who stayed home and took factory jobs:

Haven't mentioned the WOWS in the last two or three issues since they have become part of the picture and it would seem strange to go back to a man's shop. Naturally some are more efficient than others but on a whole they rank high and for steady going they put the male to shame.

Some are running lathes like old timers, whetting up the tools, slapping on the dogs and leaning right in to check that tool cut.

Jim Symes has a bevy of them in the Screw Machine department, they snap the levers into position, correct flow of oil and Zip, a piece falls off. As for Inspection, why they handle a pair of mics with the dexterity and finness [sic] of Lady Astor fingering a teaspoon at one of Eleanor's "My Day" parties.

The V-E Day issue (below) was celebratory, naturally, though it noted the deaths of two more servicemen.


The only issue I have after that is No. 44, from October 15, 1945. By then the war was over, but the editor cites one additional name for the company's Honor Roll, a Sgt. Albert P. Belaki who was listed as missing in the Pacific theatre. Many of the Heald employees were now being discharged, though others were still writing in from places as far afield as France, India, Japan, and the Aleutians. One soldier sent in a brief, haunting note:

"I am now in Dachau, Germany, where the Nazis had one of their worst concentration camps," says S/SGT. FREDERIK HIRTLE. "It was sure a horrible mess over here."

I don't know when the Heald Listening Post ceased publication, nor have I turned up anything so far about its editor, Lew Hastings. The Heald Company published at least one other periodical, the Heald Herald, but this was more of a regular trade journal aimed at customers. According to published reports, Heald was acquired in 1974 by Milacron and liquidated by the parent company in 1992.

Feel free to contact me if you have any additional information or if you know someone who worked for Heald during the war and would like me to check to see whether he or she is mentioned in the newsletter.

Walking (from a work in progress)

There was something going on in the park but whatever it was she wasn't in the mood. She walked slowly around the square, barely glancing at shop windows, smoking and blocking out everything but the taste of the smoke. Everyone in her family smoked and nobody had ever quit; she had picked it up from her cousins when she was thirteen and it was now as much a part of her as her skin.

She turned her back on the square and entered a block of quiet townhouses, all well-maintained but not too freshly scrubbed and polished, and so probably mostly occupied by longtime residents. There were sparrows hopping around on the sidewalk, looking for crumbs and seeds among the debris in the cracks, and someone was walking a huge, slow-moving basset hound that turned its head towards her inquisitively as she passed. She wasn't fond of dogs; they smelled and ate disgusting things and spread diseases, and back home they threw stones at them. It was different here but the attitude was engrained. Cats were better, if other people owned them, though she wouldn't want the bother herself.

She thought this was a block she wouldn't mind living on, someday. Money was the issue; whatever inheritance her parents would split up among her and her siblings would never pay for this. In fact she wasn't sure who could afford to live here: plastic surgeons? bankers? She didn't think the university faculty would be able to swing it, unless they had family money. Blue bloods, old money, she guessed, the ones who hadn't dissipated it all or made so much of it that they had moved on to crass palaces on the shore or ranches in Montana. There were house numbers but no signs, no Tot-Finder stickers on the upper storeys, just tidy planters with geraniums and pansies on the lower windows and fanlights over the doors.

She knew what her parents would think: they would disapprove because the houses were too narrow and the rooms too cramped for a family, and at the same time they would be intimidated by what they imagined was the exclusiveness of it all, those rich white people who will never accept you. They didn't understand that here it didn’t matter if they accepted you or made jokes about you behind your back because of what you looked like. If you had the money you were home free. You cut your ties, you kept your door locked, and someone would always sell you whatever it was you needed. The city was just a set of geographical coordinates. It didn't define who you were or determine where you belonged. Family, nation, social class — all of those loyalties were precisely what she wanted to leave behind. You slipped through the city like a ghost and no one saw you unless you wanted them to. The other people — they were all ghosts too. They turned back into flesh and blood when they returned to their houses, to their boyfriends or wives, but when you passed them in the street you could see right through them, and they could see through you as well. That's why nobody ever made eye contact, unless they wanted something from you, usually, in her case, because they wanted sex. You didn't stare at people, you didn't even look them in the eye, because to do so was an affront — or an invitation. You kept your sunglasses on, even in the rain.

Who was Silvio?

Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, when New York City had several excellent Spanish-language bookstores, the numerous volumes of Losada's Biblioteca clásica y contemporánea were a mainstay of their shelves. The paper and typography may not have been the greatest but they were relatively inexpensive and had simply but attractively designed covers (which, unfortunately, were easily soiled). Most of not all of the cover illustrations in the series, and all of the ones shown here, were by the prolific, but surprisingly elusive, Silvio Baldessari. (The top image, also by Baldessari, is from Losada's Novelistas de nuestra época series.) I only own a few of the books at this point so these images are mostly pilfered from the web.


Oddly, there is little information on the web about Silvio Baldessari. The best source I have found so far is from the blog Los parrafistas:

Silvio Baldessari is probably the most prolific book illustrator in the history of Argentina. Working always in a Picasso-Pop-Expresionist style that is so readily recognizable (his real signature, more so than the miniscule one that almost always appears at the bottom of his work), he designed each and every one of the covers of Losada's "Biblioteca Clásica y Contemporánea" y "Novelistas de nuestra época," as well as illustrating countless covers for the publishing house Paidós, above all in the collection "Letras Argentinas," and, it is said, served as the art director and designer for various Latin American publishers. But here's the point: I said "it is said" because, believe it or not, I couldn't find ONE single bibliographical reference on this artist on the ENTIRE internet. How is this possible? Not only that, but all the illustrations that I could find of this artist were put up by internet sellers, that is to say, no one has ever taken the trouble to scan an image of the artist, but only of the book.

I would like to talk more about this illustrator, but, as I said, I couldn't find a single line about his life, except that he was born in 1916, that he managed, at least in my case, to compel me to buy the book, regardless of its quality, and that he designed (this is mostly a conjecture based on my own experience than a non-existent statistical confirmation) hundreds and hundreds of book covers...

Baldessari appears to have published at least one book of his own illustrations, entitled Sinblabla or Sinblablá:


No doubt there's more information out there, somewhere, on this productive and talented artist, whose work would have been so familiar to generations of readers throughout Latin America and beyond.

Thanks to Berliac of Los parrafistas for permission to include two images and a translation of portions of his original post.

Group Portrait on a Hillside

The first few times I looked at this Real Photo postcard, without benefit of magnification, I succumbed to an optical illusion so strong that I still struggle with it even after multiple viewings and close inspection. In the middle distance, running horizontally across some two-thirds of the image, I saw what was apparently a body of water, with a white line of sand at the base of the hills in the background, and two small white sailboats, one at the far left and the other just below the man's left hand... except that none of it is real. The shoreline is in fact the apex of what appears to be a single long roof, the "sails" are architectural features of that roof, and there is no "middle distance," as the building — whatever it is — blocks out what lies behind it. There may be a river on the valley floor, but if so we can't see it.

That illusion, and the fact that we are so high up relative to the long building that nearly all we can see of it is its roofline, is only one of the unusual elements of this photo; note also that the photographer appears to have shot from a very low angle, right down in the weeds, probably in order to get the hills in the distance in the same frame. There's an incredible amount of detail in the background, much of which emerges only when the image is blown up: houses, outbuildings, smoke rising from a chimney, railway trestles.


On the right side of the close-up below, just to the left of the sharply sloping filigreed roof of another building, is a dark vertical object that may be a pipe or some kind of cast-iron structure, and running across its base are two faint parallel lines that may be telegraph wires.


Even further to the right, and completely invisible to the naked eye without magnification (at least, invisible to my naked eye), is one more ghostly, chimneyed building, so faint it almost blends into the distant hills:


In the center of the frame we see three women and one man, probably the husband of the woman whose hand he barely touches. Someone's straw boater has been set down among the tall weeds at their feet. If you look back to the full image you can see that there's a well-worn path directly behind them, visible on the left side.


The card, which was printed on a variety of Velox photographic paper manufactured from 1903-04, bears no postmark, mailing address, or other clues to the identity of the subjects or the location; the topography should be identifiable but is unfamiliar to me. The hills in the background are mostly barren, as if they had been clear-cut recently, and the houses look like new construction. I'm guessing that we're looking at a boom town, perhaps in a mining area. (Manitou Springs, Colorado has been suggested.)

Our Juggernaut seems to roll

Our Juggernaut seems to roll
by itself over people
but there are really men
who tend the wheels and engine

only a few hours a day
and jump off and go and play
at home or on the links
and eat well and drink drinks.

Many of them are certainly
much happier than I
and today one came with a poem
that he had made in his free time

(though I am still willing
to correct the writing of the young)
but I would not talk to him about his poem,
I would not talk about a poem to him.

--Paul Goodman, from North Percy (1968).

This little pamphlet, most of which was written in the aftermath of the death of the poet's son in a mountain-climbing accident, may be the most sorrowful book I know. It is out of print (like every volume of Goodman's poetry, as far as I can tell), and it is a not an easy book to read, not because of its style (which could hardly be more direct), but because of the bareness with which the author delineates his grief. I have chosen one of the few overtly political poems it contains in honor of the day, but the sadness that pervades its pages is mostly beyond all that.

Of cobblers and cameras

Anthony Lee's exemplary microhistory, centered on a shoe factory in North Adams, Massachusetts, begins with a vivid recreation of a pivotal -- and unexpected -- moment in the town's history:

On the morning of June 13, 1870, an enormous crowd began assembling at the local train station. Reports tell us that men and women were elbow-to-elbow, lined the railroad tracks, and overflowed onto the streets outside the station. The people massed northward from the station for a quarter mile, on either side of Marshall Street, one of the main north-south thoroughfares of town. Thousands had turned out. Given that the census for that year counted about twelve thousand residents in and around town, at least a fifth of the locals, possibly a quarter, had gathered. Many were angry and primed for confrontation. All the region's papers put reporters on site; even the Boston papers, normally uninterested in the western half of the state, sent men to cover the events. A local shoe manufacturer, Calvin T. Sampson, was importing seventy-five strikebreakers to fill the workstations left empty by the local shoemakers' union, the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin. Although able-bodied men were available throughout New England, including many who were not formally associated with the Crispins and possessed considerable skills at shoemaking, strikebreakers were being brought on a two-week train journey from San Francisco and scheduled to arrive that day. What's more, they were Chinese.

The Chinese workers, we learn, had been brought in as strikebreakers to take the place of another migrant minority, for the local chapter of the Crispins was mostly composed of French Canadians, large numbers of whom crossed the border in the 19th century seeking refuge from legal discrimination and the grim economic prospects of rural Quebec.

We thus begin with three sets of actors: Yankee entrepreneurs, personified by Sampson, the Crispins, and the Chinese migrants (to call them immigrants seems a step too far, since few were to remain permanently). But as Lee quickly make clear, there was another group of key players at work, one around which he structures his entire absorbing tale, and that was the local photographers, who not only played a crucial role in documenting what happened in North Adams in the next few years but also, inadvertently or not, served as a means through which the other groups advanced their own interests and identities. No sooner had the Chinese arrived then Sampson arranged to have them photographed, en masse, against the backdrop of a wall of his factory. The resulting stereo card view was, in effect, a shot across the bow of the union and a declaration of the owner's dominion over both the building and his employees. Not long afterwards, a group of Crispins thumbed their noses at their former employer by commissioning their own photograph, modeled on the original, depicting a group of workers who had formed a co-operative standing together outside the very same building, still owned by Sampson.

Lee's narrative comprises four chapters, which examine in detail respectively the perspectives of Sampson, the photographers William Hurd and Henry Ward, the Crispins, and the Chinese. The amount of visual documentation he has uncovered, much of it from the personal collections of descendants of longtime North Adams families, is extraordinary, in particular for the Chinese shoemakers, who often sat for studio portraits and used them, variously, as a means of connecting themselves with or declaring their independence from their ancestral culture. Lee is particularly good at showing how, rather than submitting to the artistic conventions of the local "professors" who operated the studios, the Chinese took an active part in shaping how they would be portrayed, adopting poses based on traditional Chinese portraiture and, in one notable instance, mimicking a striking photograph of one of their countrymen taken across the continent in San Francisco.

There is much else in the book: the clashes between management and labor and between rival ethnicities, the hellish construction of of a railway tunnel through nearby Hoosac Mountain that dragged on for twenty-five years and took the lives of nearly two hundred workers, and in the end, as a sad coda, the eventual fate of the Chinese workers, whose presence in the country would eventually be forbidden by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Although a handful managed to settle down and remain in the US, some starting families, most apparently returned home, and the nascent Chinese-American presence in the Berkshires was extinguished.

A Shoemaker's Story: Being Chiefly about French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees, and Chinese Cobblers in a Nineteenth-Century Factory Town is available from Princeton University Press. The author, Anthony W. Lee, is Professor and Chair of Art History at Mount Holyoke College

The theory of dilemmas

One of the many interesting revelations of Jonathan Lee's documentary Paul Goodman Changed My Life is that Goodman saw The Empire City, his most ambitious (and in its weird way, most autobiographical) work, as a kind of Don Quixote in reverse, in which it is society that is delusional, and the Quixotic heroes are people who have determined to live with integrity, in a way that is not an affront to human dignity. He observed that the reversal wouldn't have made sense if only one character had chosen be be sane, for to be alone, to be without society, intrinsically led, in Goodman's way of thinking, to its own kind of derangement. As his articulated it in the somewhat cryptic "Theory of Dilemmas" he set forth in the novel (and how like Goodman it was to present a theory in a novel), "If we conformed to the mad society, we became mad; but if we did not conform to the only society that there is, we became mad."


Goodman will have been dead for forty years this August, and few people under fifty would be likely to know his name. Most of his books are out of print (The Empire City, however, is available), and the long-promised biography by Taylor Stoehr seems unlikely to appear soon, if ever. Jonathan Lee reports that when he approached Random House, which must have sold hundreds of thousands if not millions of copies of Goodman's books in the 1960s and '70s, about re-issuing some of them in conjunction with his film, the response he received from an editor was "Who's Paul Goodman?"

Is Goodman ripe for rediscovery? One would think that the generation that has produced Occupy Wall Street would find some food for thought in an anarchist and pacifist who advocated bottom-up, decentralized, community-based practical solutions and eschewed ideological loyalties and political allegiances, and who spoke out forcefully against the corruption he found to be pervasive in American politics, industry, commerce, urban planning, and education. The Dilemma of Political Action that Goodman articulated, that in the employment of the only political tools available one becomes part of the very system one opposes, remains relevant, and unresolved. But just as Goodman ultimately wore out his welcome with much of the New Left (not because he changed, but because they did), he would probably wind up as an awkward fit with today's protestors as well. In the end, Goodman was not an economic thinker at all, and only accidentally a political one; he was above all a moralist, one whose philosophy was grounded in the social ties which he saw as fundamentally arising from his tutelary deity, which was, of course, Eros.

Goodman opposed the Vietnam War and the nuclear weapons race because he found these things to be immoral, and for that he was adopted, for a while, as a father figure to draft resisters and others on the Left, but he had no patience with armed liberation movements or their sympathizers. Though no apologist for capitalism, he was never a Marxist (he may have had at most a brief fling with Trotskyism in his teens), nor did he ever become a neoconservative convert, as did many of his peers from the Commentary crowd of the 1950s and '60s. He instead became, or rather remained, what he called "a neolithic conservative," a traditionalist whose fundamental allegiance to human values (it wouldn't be amiss, in his case, to say "Western values") led him almost invariably to positions that were deemed "radical" by American society, whether those positions involved opposing the military-industrial complex, abolishing compulsory education as inimical to the free spirits of young people, or advocating the banning of automobile traffic from much of Manhattan.

He could be frustrating enough, as a writer and as a person, and with the possible exceptions of Growing Up Absurd and Communitas (the latter co-written with his brother Percival, a noted architect), his work seems ill-suited to the current directions of academic scholarship, even on the Left. His short fiction could be so stylized as to be virtually unreadable, he showed little interest in women's issues, and he was prone to ex cathedra statements that demonstrated a condescending assumption that he was the bearer of the accumulated wisdom of Western civilization and that everyone else needed to benefit from his insight. (To be sure, he was hardly alone in that regard; the New York intellectuals in general were not a modest crowd.) He was personally and politically disruptive, a scold, a prophet. And yet, as contrarian as his ideas could be, they were often prescient, and where they were not, in retrospect, what makes Goodman now seem dated is often simply an indication of how badly we have strayed away from a world in which his proposals just might have made sound good sense. The whole notion of "social criticism," that the ways in which society is organized, the "means of livelihood and ways of life" which Communitas addressed, should be open to inspection, debate, and reform, now seems sadly anachronistic, as the machine grinds on, inexorably, for its own sake.


As little as his poetry and fiction has in common with what has emerged as the contemporary canon over the last fifty years, much of his verse remains highly rewarding, and The Empire City, the sprawling novel he worked on, in fits and starts, for some twenty years, publishing it in sections, like The Dead of Spring above, is eccentric, messy, infuriating, arguably unfinished, but also often enlightening, invigorating, daring, witty, astonishingly beautiful, and certainly like little else published before or since. Is it his failing or ours that the book has hardly found an audience?

Goodman wrote little fiction in the last decade of his life, which brought him unexpected fame after decades of obscurity, but also a series of disappointments and personal tragedies before his death at 60 in 1972. One must thus return to the later sections of The Empire City, written during the Eisenhower years, to find a note of optimism that may have eluded him at the end of his life. Two brothers, Lefty and Droyt, who are part of the novel's second generation of main characters, leave New York for the West Coast. Some time later, Droyt resurfaces in Manhattan, bearing what seems -- to his jaded audience -- an inherently incredible tale: that Lefty has found a meaningful job and a place to live where he feels comfortable and among friends, that he has settled down with a woman whom he loves and who loves him, and that they have even produced a child who, rather than driving the couple apart, has only added to their joy. His listeners, long inured to the idea that society, and individual human beings themselves, will put up any number of roadblocks rather than permit simple happiness to flourish, are skeptical, raise any number of objections, but in the end they are convinced:

"You have come to us with a marvelous story. We find it hard to believe our ears. You speak of a free artist who has an immediate audience; of lovers who wish each other well; of a man who gets paid for a useful job that fits him; of the confidence that there will be some use for another human being in the world. All this is unlikely, yet you convince us that it is a fact. What does it mean? It means that all along the time a certain number of people are not committing an avoidable error."

Such happiness may have eluded Goodman, but to his credit he seems to have believed that the dilemmas were not, in the end, beyond all possibility of resolution.

Of stories and their migrations

Here's a little fable, which, like all fables, isn't really true, although it isn't really untrue either. Once upon a time there was a vast city, whose inhabitants had come together from all parts of the earth and spoke all sorts of different languages. Some of those languages were thriving and were spoken by hundreds of millions of people around the world, and some of them were dying tongues known only by a dwindling handful, the dispersed survivors of cultures that hardly anyone even knew existed. In that city lived a writer, a curious little man with a mellifluous voice, who spoke the language that most of the people of the city knew the best, and he used it to write and tell stories for his own amusement but also so that other people would be entertained and maybe even enlightened.

From time to time someone would gather up a few of the writer's stories and make them into a book, so that people who had never heard him read them aloud -- an art at which he excelled -- could buy a copy and get to know his work, and also so that people who had heard him read in person or on the radio could open the book from time to time and remind themselves of just how enjoyable the stories were. This went on for a long time until finally the little man became old and one day he died, and many of the people who used to listen to his stories also died and others lived on but thought about the writer less and less, except once in a while when something -- a turn of phrase, a inexplicable flash of whimsy -- would suddenly recall him to their memories. His books disappeared and were forgotten, with only a few copies lingering in dusty attics or the bargain bins of second-hand stores.

But in the meantime something unexpected happened. Someone who lived in a country thousands of miles away (though he knew the writer's language as well as his own), came across a copy of one of the books and was captivated by it. He passed it along to a friend, who gave it to another friend, and eventually someone went to a publisher in that country and told the publisher about the book and suggested that a translation of it might find an audience and make everyone involved a little bit of money. The publisher was persuaded, perhaps reluctantly at first, and the book was issued and it sold a few copies but in the end not very many and after a while it vanished from the market and no one thought that it would ever return. A few people still treasured their copies, however, and they continued to read them and share them with friends, and the book became famous in the way that things that hardly anyone has ever heard of sometimes do in defiance of all logic, and even though many of the people who read the book knew nothing of the author and couldn't speak the language he had originally used to write his stories, the translation was good enough that it didn't matter or maybe the stories even sounded a little better in their new language, and after a while the publisher decided to issue a new edition and new people bought the book and read it and passed it around. And in the end the writer's name was all but forgotten in the city where he had lived but became better and better known in another tongue far away.

Okay, the above is really very silly, and for the record at least one of Spencer Holst's books is still in print in the US, but I can't help thinking that Holst, whom I used to see now and then in the streets and reading venues of New York City many years ago, would have been amused by the irony that The Language of Cats, reborn as El idioma de los gatos, seems to have found a more appreciative audience in Spanish (a language in which his stories seem to work rather well) than in his native tongue and his own country -- at least, that is, judging by the enthusiasm expressed in blogs and reviews in the Spanish-speaking world.

For those who can understand Spanish, there is a very entertaining audio recording of Holst's sweetly demonic story "El asesino de Papá Noel" (translated from "The Santa Claus Murderer") online at a website called esnips (link no longer active). The text of the story (again, in Spanish) can be found on the website of Página 12, along with Rodrigo Fresán's very amusing introduction to the translation of El idioma de los gatos, an introduction he too has wrought in the form of a fable (a better one than mine, I have to say). The translator of the Spanish-language edition is Ernesto Schóo; the publisher is Ediciones de la Flor in Argentina.


Though I don't mean to imply that Holst's stories aren't enjoyable on the page (they are), the best way of experiencing them is in his own mesmerizing performances. Many recordings of his readings were made, including some that were broadcast on WBAI radio in New York City in the 1970s. Unfortunately, I've found no audio or video of his readings online, although some cassette recordings may still be available from the New Wilderness Foundation. A good selection of Holst's stories is available in The Zebra Storyteller from Station Hill Books. For his story "On Demons" see my previous post.

Two group portraits

These two Azo Real Photo postcards date from roughly the same period (c. 1904-1918) and may or may not have any connection with each other. Only the first, which has "Mary Ertwine Bloomsburg Pa" penciled on the back, has any kind of identification. Because of the mix of ages of the women, and the informal attire of the two kneeling men, I suspect that we're looking at a group of fellow employees rather than, for instance, students at Bloomsburg's Normal School, and the four women in the rear are standing on what is probably the end of a loading dock. Some of the women pictured appear quite cheerful, although the one at far left, clutching what may be a folded outer garment, seems lost in thought and, like one or two of the others, isn't looking in the direction of the camera at all. Overall it looks like the work of a professional photographer, though there are no marks on the back to prove that. There are two six-pointed stars on either side of the central platform, and the arm closest to the door of each star has been truncated.


The second photo shows what is probably a school group, mixed in age with the girls on the left and the boys on the right. The foreground is unpaved and stony and the kids don't look particularly well-off, although one of the boys on the far right is wearing a necktie, as if his parents had dressed him up for the day knowing that this picture would be taken. Some can be assumed to be siblings based on their proximity and matching dress. Hardly anyone is showing anything that could be taken for a smile, and the male teacher (if that's what he is) is staring off into the distance. You can see through the window into the interior of the building but it's hard to make out what's inside.

El ingenioso hidalgo

I have to confess to my shame that until now I have never read Don Quixote in its entirety, or even close to its entirety, not in Spanish and not for that matter in English, in spite of the fact that I was more or less a Spanish major long ago (I say "more or less" because I went to a college that didn't use such conventional terminology as "a Spanish major"). I did read one or two of the Novelas ejemplares ("Rinconete y Cortadillo," I think) at some point, and I probably read at least a portion of the translation of Don Quixote included in the old Viking Portable Cervantes, a book I seem to have deaccessioned in one of my periodic cullings of my bookshelves, as I can no longer put my hand on it.

So, making up for lost time, and fulfilling the kind of solemn vow that the good knight might himself have made (without, however, subjecting myself to the privations he likely would have imposed upon himself), I am slowly making my way through the original text, at the rate of about a chapter a day, which so far seems to be a sustainable pace. I'm using the Vintage Español text edited by Florencio Sevilla Arroyo, and keeping at hand Charles Jarvis's serviceable 1742 translation as well as a well-worn paperback dictionary. The latter, however is not as useful as it might be, given that the words I most need to look up are usually obscure terms relating to horsemanship and the like which have fallen out of use in the modern language and thus aren't in this dictionary.

The Vintage Español edition has more than 1,800 glosses -- placed, fortunately, at the bottom of the page, not in the back -- which are very helpful, though they occasionally gloss terms whose meaning seems reasonably clear, even to a non-native. In addition to Jarvis's translation I also looked at Tobias Smollett's, which seems quite good as well, but the edition was bulkier and I decided that having two translations at hand was redundant. There are advantages and disadvantages, I suppose, to using 18th-century translations; by doing so one does get something of a rough equivalent of the effect of the deliberately archaic language Cervantes employed (all those initial "f"s instead of "h"s, and forms like sucedióle instead of the modern le sucedió), but on the other hand there are occasional passages in Jarvis that are now more inscrutable than the original text.

Cervantes was an older contemporary of Shakespeare, and conventionally both figures are regarded as the founders of the modern literary traditions in their respective languages, though that is probably not true in either case in the way that it is for Homer, or for that matter Dante. It's true enough that Cervantes is the oldest writer in the Spanish-language tradition who is widely read in translation, though Spain had a flourishing literature before him, which he both draws on and mocks. His novel famously makes a burlesque out of the whole tradition of chivalric romance, and the whole premise of the novel is that its hero has gone mad due to the evil effects of reading such books, but the storytelling conventions of romance nevertheless strengthen his own narrative. A case in point is the episode in Chapter 19, in which Sancho and Don Quixote, traveling at night, come upon an eerie procession. In Jarvis's version

They discovered about twenty persons in white robes, all on horseback, with lighted torches in their hands; behind whom came a litter, covered with black; which was followed by six persons in deep mourning; and the mules they rode on were covered likewise with black down to their heels; and it was easily seen they were not horses by the slowness of their pace. Those in white came muttering to themselves in a low and plaintive tone.

The episode ends, as Quixote's adventures invariably do, in misunderstanding and disaster and to great comic effect, but before it does the whole otherworldly scene could easily have come out of one of the earliest Grail romances by Chrétien de Troyes or Wolfram von Eschenbach. The reader has the benefit of both worlds, on the one hand the build-up of suspense and uncanniness that relies on old enchantments, and on the other the comic deflation that bespeaks a new, modern, jaded world-view.

And not just modern but postmodern. One of the most astonishing episodes in the early chapters comes just a few pages later, when Sancho suddenly refers to his master by the sobriquet of el Caballero de la Triste Figura, "the Knight of the Woeful Countenance," or as Jarvis has it, "the Knight of the Sorrowful Figure." (There is a double meaning, as Quixote is both sorrowful in appearance and a sorry sort of knight indeed.) Quixote, his curiosity piqued, asks his squire how he came up with this name, and Sancho characteristically gives a very down-to-earth explanation alluding to Quixote's weariness after combat or to his lack of several teeth. Quixote, however, immediately contradicts him:

["It's not that,"] replied Don Quixote, "but the sage, who has the charge of writing this history of my achievements, has thought fit I should assume a surname, as all the knights of old were wont to do... And therefore I say, that the aforesaid sage has now put it into your head and into my mouth, to call me 'the Knight of the Sorrowful Figure,' as I purpose to call myself from this day forward: and that this name may fit me the better, I determine, when there is an opportunity, to have a sorrowful figure painted on my shield."

So here, in the midst of the narrative, we have fictional characters, whose story we are conditioned by readerly custom to follow as if they were real people, explicitly referring to the fact that they are in truth nothing but the inventions of an authorial mind, one who can intervene at any moment to alter their fate -- and yet by referring to Cervantes (or to his putative source, the Arabian historiographer Cid Hamet Ben Engeli) as a participant in the action, they in effect make the author a character in his own fiction.

The Ghost in the Euclid Arcade

It will be dawn soon. The first light of morning will drift down through the lattice of glass and steel above my head, and as it does the shadows along the galleries will thin out and disappear. Before the doors open and the crowds come in I will slip into a crevice and wait, silent, unsleeping, until darkness returns. I can hear birds outside now, bickering, calling to each other. Sometimes one flies in from the street and flutters above for a while, searching for an exit. For me there is no escape.

I'm alone now but once there were others. The jeweler who took poison, the lawyer who died in his chair. At night we climbed and descended the stairs, each obeying the axes of his own geometry. As we wandered from gallery to gallery, our footfalls silent on the marble, our heads bent down, we knew each other but never nodded or spoke. How could we speak? What could we say? In time, one by one, they became reconciled to oblivion and faded away.

I made bespoke suits for wealthy men, their names now forgotten. In fifty years not one look of tenderness. What did they know of my childhood, of the woman I married but couldn't keep, who already rests in the earth beside another man, their twined spirits embracing even as they dissipate? It's all different now, of course. The men come in bare-headed or wearing baseball caps, dressed like stevedores, and care nothing for fine work. Let it go.

In the half-light, like an automaton, my hands stitch still but nothing is mended.

Secrets

This postcard of the Connecticut River at Greenfield, Massachusetts was postmarked in nearby Turners Falls on January 29, 1909 and sent to a Miss Ruth L. Smith at the Northfield Seminary in East Northfield a few miles away. Founded by the noted evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody in 1879, Northfield was an all-girls school, religious in orientation, though it doesn't appear to have been intended to train clergy in the way that the word "seminary" is usually understood. Moody also founded a school for boys not far away and the two eventually merged. The combined institution still exists but the former Northfield Seminary campus is currently unoccupied.

The inscription on the front is an example of a Masonic or "pigpen" cypher, in which the symbols are obtained by the use of two pairs of grids, one dotted and the other undotted. In the example below, for instance, which is taken from Wikipedia, the letter A would be represented by something like a backwards letter L, while the sign for the letter Z would resemble an upside-down V with a dot in the center.


The above assumes that one begins the grid with the letter "A" and continues in an orderly progression, but there's no reason why one need stick to that arrangement; you could assign the letters randomly as long as both sender and recipient know the key. Even then, in principle the cipher should be readily crackable by the same techniques used to solve newspaper cryptograms, at least if one is sure which language is being represented and that there are no additional levels of trickery involved. So far, however, I haven't managed to decipher this one.

At first glance it shouldn't be difficult to solve. There are some one- and two-letter words, a sequence of repeated words, and some double letters, all of which should be helpful, but there are also some puzzling features. Of the first 20 characters in the inscription, only two appear more than once, as if the writer had deliberately chosen words that contained as many different letters as possible. There are several signs that incorporate a tiny "x" instead of a dot, and I don't know whether or not they should be regarded as distinct letters.

Feel free to take a crack at it and let me know if you come up with anything. In he meantime, below is a roughly contemporary view, complete with piano or portable organ, of another Moody-founded institution, Camp Northfield, which also still exists.


The card was addressed to Gillio Cassari of North Haven, Connecticut, and signed by Coriena [Cassari], both of whom, if my identifications are correct, were born in the 1890s. Gillio died in 1975; Coriena in North Haven in 1985 at the age of 94.

Untitled (Woman with dog)

We seem to have an innate need to tell stories, even when the raw material is lacking. I suppose that it's part of our way of making sense of the world, of explaining why it's the way it is and not some other way that might have been equally conceivable if things had been just a little different, or maybe it's simply how we try to reassure ourselves that our existence isn't utterly meaningless, that there's a narrative to it all, improbable as that seems. In other words, whistling in the dark.

This Real Photo postcard bears no inscription and was never mailed; about all that can be said in the way of external evidence is that the style of Azo photographic paper it was printed on was manufactured between 1904 and 1918. The location must have been far enough north to require a heavy (if seemingly threadbare) coat in the winter. I don't know enough about the history of women's fashion, or about the woodworking we see in the background, to know whether there's more here that could be gleaned by someone with a trained eye.

We start inventing, imagining. Because of her skin color and maybe her bonnet we think that she might have been a domestic servant, that she had just pulled on her coat a moment before and stepped out on the porch so that the photographer -- a friend? a family member? her employer? -- could capture her likeness. The woman faces the lens of the camera head on, but the dog's eyes are intent on something just to the side, so maybe there's a child or another dog running in the yard or across the street, leaving only the most indirect of traces as it passes. But the truth is that what we deduce, and what we can try to guess, will always be less than what we can't know, beginning with her name, her background, her character, her fate, and everything else that really matters.

So I think we should resist the temptation and leave her as she is, posed for the flick of a shutter that will preserve what may be -- but how can we know? -- the only memory of her that still survives, one fleeting, indelible moment of tenderness.

Hopscotch animations

Here are four brief animations based on Julio Cortazar's Rayuela (Hopscotch). I can't really follow the Portuguese translation but I like the mood of these. The texts (one is wordless) seem to be taken from Chapters 1, 22, and 34 of the novel.








Thanks to Blog Morellianas for the tip.

Orpheus — The Lowdown (Blegvad & Partridge)

Peter Blegvad and Andy Partridge reportedly worked on this recording project off and on for twelve years, which works out to about two minutes and change a year of finished material, but if that's what it takes to create something this perfect then I'm all for it. Partridge was one of the founders of the rock band XTC and Blegvad has been, among other things, a member of the 1970s trio Slapp Happy, a cartoonist (Leviathan), and a solo singer / songwriter, but Orpheus — The Lowdown, which was released in 2003, isn't made up of "songs," though it does have words and music. What it is made up of is harder to explain; except for one wordless cut it's a suite of short texts recited or occasionally chanted by Blegvad over an aural environment composed of music, sound effects, squawks, and warbles, all organized around the mythological figure of Orpheus, legendary musician (a "lyricist" in the etymological sense of the word), charmer of beasts, and voyager to the underworld in search of his wife Eurydice, whom he won back from Hell by the beauty of his playing only to lose her on the return trip when he disobeyed an injunction not to look behind him as he ascended. Issued by Partridge's Ape House Records, the single CD comes accompanied by an illustrated booklet in which the lyrics (including some that are meant to be part of the project even though they aren't spoken aloud in the recording) are paired with effectively eerie artworks created by Blegvad and Partridge, of which the radiograph-like cover illustration is a representative example.

Blegvad's delicious deadpan narration — he manages to sound droll and legitimately profound at the same time — belongs to a category of declaimed performance that's relatively rarely encountered. Some of the texts he reads could pass for "poetry" (one of them is in fact an adaptation from Rilke), another is a quotation from an essay by the critic George Steiner, but most inhabit a hazy border zone between storytelling and incantation. The closest examples I can think of are John Cage's Indeterminancy pieces (also paired with music), and the work of the late Spencer Holst, though Holst's stories were, and were meant to be, light as a feather, while Orpheus — The Lowdown dives into deep mysteries of creation, death, and language.

Orpheus is a musician, but he is also a poet, a creator of words. In the first piece here he is revealed as a creator of worlds as well, able to build a city on the savannah out of nothing in order to win a bet against the gods. He is a distant cousin to Blegvad's King Strut (from the CD King Strut and Other Stories):

Imagination, like a muscle, will increase with exercise
King Strut developed his by having dreams and telling lies
He'd describe a situation or a piece of merchandise
He could summon it from nothing to appear before your eyes

Orpheus draws so much divine energy that he causes a "Brown-Out on Olympus." Later, in "Noun Verbs," the longest and one of the best of these pieces, Blegvad whispers that "what the dead lack / is substance..."

Time means nothing to them now, but words...
speech,
hot air shaped by thought
into blobs and ribbons
of intelligible discourse,
words have not only substance
but value.

In "Beetle," Orpheus deciphers the marks on paper made by an insect that he has first made to crawl through a pool of ink, and mutters excitedly "as image / after image / astonishes him / with its unexpected force and purity." In "Galveston," (a city "which he's heard is hell"), Orpheus tells a group of prostitutes:

When you come into this world you find pockets in your pants, handlebars on your bike, put there by those who preceded you. You walk in their footsteps. But, as regards the entry into and possession of yourself, you're a solitary pioneer.

There are brilliant illuminations like this throughout.

The aural backdrop to these texts can't be quoted and isn't easily described, but fortunately the CD can be heard, in full, by visiting the Ape House site. To fully appreciate Orpheus — The Lowdown, though (not to mention to support the artists), you'll want to get a hold of the physical package.

Blegvad and Partridge are reportedly in the final stages of assembling another CD, to be entitled Gonwards.

Cortázar: Cartas (new edition)

A post by Gustavo Ribeiro at Blog Morellianas brings news of a forthcoming, vastly expanded edition of Julio Cortázar's letters, replacing the already substantial three-volume edition published twelve years ago.

The new edition, which promises more than 1,000 new letters, will appear in five volumes, three of which (shown above) are being published in February 2012, with the balance to follow in March. The publisher is Alfaguara in Argentina; the ISBNs of the initial volumes are 9789870421238 (Vol. 1), 9789870421405 (Vol. 2), and 9789870422709 (Vol 3.).

The Rotograph Project

I have spun off a separate blog, The Rotograph Project, to serve as a virtual gallery for the display and interpretation of the American view postcards created c.1904-1911 by the Rotograph Co. of New York. This new arrangement should give those images more room of their own without unduly monopolizing the webspace here.