Memorial Day

The children were darting in all directions, in blue Cub Scout uniforms with yellow neckerchiefs if they had them or play clothes if they didn't, giggling and hollering and playing tag in the clearing beneath the high pines, ducking behind the enormous trunks, tracing circles around the hulking clapboard frame of the community house. They had marched in the parade, following the band, and had kept as still and silent as they were capable of doing while a bugler played "Taps" and the white-gloved firemen stood crisply at attention. The brocaded flags, borne on poles by the color guard in white helmets, hung laxly, barely stirring in the diffident afternoon breeze. When the riflemen shouldered their arms and aimed into the distance, the children had plugged their ears, then gasped as each salvo of blanks echoed around their heads. The cloud of smoke soon thinned but the smell of gunpowder, acrid but alluring, continued to filter through the crowd.

Later, when the coolers were hoisted out and set down on a patch of lawn, they lined up two by two for sodas, grape or root beer or orange, fishing them out of the melting ice and waiting while the grown-ups plunged can openers through the tinplate tops. Through the triangular holes they sipped the sweet cold liquid that tasted of wounded metal and gingerly waved off the yellow jackets that hovered around their hands. Finally they lined up again for paper cups of vanilla ice cream, which they scooped out, quickly before it could melt, with little wooden spoons. Then they ran off again to play until it was time to go home.

Why have they killed Jaurès?

Today is the 99th anniversary of the assassination of Jean Jaurès, the French socialist leader and parliamentarian who had struggled, valiantly but vainly, to keep his country from plunging into the infernal stupidity of what would become known as "the Great War." Dining in a Paris restaurant, Jaurès was shot by a French nationalist who was later acquitted of the murder. A fictionalized version of the event is included in Roger Martin du Gard's Les Thibault.

This version of Jacques Brel's "Pourquoi ont-ils tué Jaurès?" was recorded by Erik Marchand.

Ils étaient usés à quinze ans
Ils finissaient en débutant
Les douze mois s'appelaient décembre
Quelle vie ont eu nos grand-parents
Entre l'absinthe et les grand-messes
Ils étaient vieux avant que d´être
Quinze heures par jour le corps en laisse
Laissent au visage un teint de cendres
Oui notre Monsieur, oui notre bon Maître

Pourquoi ont-ils tué Jaurès?
Pourquoi ont-ils tué Jaurès?

On ne peut pas dire qu'ils furent esclaves
De là à dire qu'ils ont vécu
Lorsque l'on part aussi vaincu
C´est dur de sortir de l'enclave
Et pourtant l'espoir fleurissait
Dans les rêves qui montaient aux cieux
Des quelques ceux qui refusaient
De ramper jusqu'à la vieillesse
Oui notre bon Maître, oui notre Monsieur

Pourquoi ont-ils tué Jaurès?
Pourquoi ont-ils tué Jaurès?

Si par malheur ils survivaient
C'était pour partir à la guerre
C'était pour finir à la guerre
Aux ordres de quelque sabreur
Qui exigeait du bout des lèvres
Qu'ils aillent ouvrir au champ d'horreur
Leurs vingt ans qui n'avaient pu naître
Et ils mouraient à pleine peur
Tout miséreux oui notre bon Maître
Couverts de prèles oui notre Monsieur
Demandez-vous belle jeunesse
Le temps de l'ombre d'un souvenir
Le temps de souffle d'un soupir

Pourquoi ont-ils tué Jaurès?
Pourquoi ont-ils tué Jaurès?

Streets of the Spectacle

It's February 1848, and Frédéric Moreau, the idle young hero of Flaubert's Sentimental Education, paces up and down the sidewalk, nervously awaiting a rendez-vous with another man's wife. The two have been engaged in a passionate but unconsummated love affair, and Frederick has at last persuaded her to stroll arm-in-arm with him, in public view, along the streets of Paris. (What Madame Arnoux doesn't know is that he is secretly scheming to whisk her up into a room he has previously rented just for that purpose.) But, inexplicably, his date hasn't shown, and Frederick is left cooling his heels. Here's how Flaubert describes him:

He considered the cracks in the paving-stones, the mouths of the gutters, the candelabras, the numbers above the doors. The most trivial objects became his companions, or rather ironic spectators, and the regular façades of the houses seemed pitiless to him. He felt himself dissolve from despondency. The reverberation of his footsteps shook his brain.

When his watch read four o'clock, he felt a wave of something like vertigo, like horror. He tried to repeat some lines of poetry, to perform some mental calculation, to concoct a story. Impossible! The image of Madame Arnoux obsessed him. He wanted to run to her. But which route would he take to avoid passing her?

What gives this rather silly scene an extra pungency is what is happening all around it, because an uprising is in the process of breaking out, the early stages of which Frédéric has personally witnessed, and the reign of Louis-Philippe is about to come to a sudden, violent end. Only after some time has passed does it dawn on him that it might be the fighting in the streets that has prevented her from appearing — in fact this is not the case, as she has been detained because her son is ill — and eventually he gives up and consoles himself, even as the battle rages, by chasing after another woman, whom he succeeds in leading up to the same rented room he had prepared for Madame Arnoux. The next morning he leaves her, goes out, and is on hand during some of the fighting, which fascinates him even as he remains emotionally detached from it:

The wounded who fell, the corpses stretched out, didn't seem like real wounded, like real corpses. It seemed to him like being present at a spectacle.

At one point Frederick will tread on something soft and realize that it's the hand of a dead man, but even this has no real effect on him.

The whole episode, and the entire novel, are heavily tinged with irony, a self-mocking irony given that the character of Frédéric is regarded as being modeled on the author, who, like Frédéric, supported the 1848 revolution but was largely indifferent to politics. Inevitably, it recalls the writings of the Situationist Guy Debord, who declared (as translated by Ken Knabb):

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving. (The Society of the Spectacle)

It's likely no coincidence that the events that Flaubert chose to describe coincided with the earliest years of photography. Far more so than a painting, a photograph is an image that acquires a life independent of its creator. Photography is an art form, to be sure, and is eminently susceptible to being manipulated, but a photographic image eludes the control of the photographer in a way that a painted one, whose every brushstroke has been consciously placed, can not. The image at the top of this post, captured by Daguerre himself in 1838, bears details and resonances that the photographer himself may or may not have noticed; most importantly, it doesn't matter if he noticed them. Frédéric, the epitome of the Paris flâneur, is strolling through a spectacular world, that is, a world made up of just such images, not necessarily photographs themselves (though they are a part of it) but a whole universe of things that appear not to have been consciously created, by God or by man, but rather to simply exist on their own.

The Daguerrotype shown, which is said to be the earliest datable photographic representation of the human form (a bootblack and his customer at lower left), depicts the Boulevard du Temple. Flaubert later lived on the same street.

Three portraits

Three more Real Photo postcards, possibly from western Pennsylvania. The one above has the following inscription on the reverse of the card:

Mother Moser [or possibly "Moses"]
Mother's Sister
Mariah Knotts
& Son & his child

This conceivably could be the Mariah Knotts who was born in 1836 and died in Franklin, Pennsylvania in 1915. The Cyko cardstock on which the image is printed was manufactured from 1904 into the 1920s. The other two cards, which bear no inscriptions, are on Azo stock that is roughly contemporary.

Scenes of Rural Life

The images on this page reproduce part of a group of Real Photo postcards that may have originated in western Pennsylvania. The one above is probably the oldest; it's printed on postcard stock, in this case sold by an unknown manufacturer, that became obsolete around 1907, when postal regulations were updated to permit including a message, in addition to the mailing address, on the reverse of the card. The wall behind the adolescent boy has been decorated with a variety of posters and advertisements, though it's difficult to read the lettering because of the angle and the exposure. Even so, the central image of the boy and his horse is nicely composed.

The remainder are later, printed on Azo postcard stock manufactured from 1918-1930, and may be the work of a single photographer, one who developed his own images but hadn't quite mastered the printing process. In the first, an oval frame was employed, but only on the right side. Note the rungs on the tree to enable climbing. The name "Harold Bixler" is written on the back.

The image below, of a woman holding a cat, is even more askew (these scans are aligned with the axes of the cardstock, not of the print).

In the composite below, I have juxtaposed the two cards to show how the ragged edge and the dark background on the left side apparently align. If I'm correct, the two prints must have been made at the same time.

The awkwardly exposed image below may also belong with the previous two; if rotated 90° to the left, it also is a possible candidate for aligning with the top of the print of the woman with the cat.

The dark backgrounds framing these three prints appear to be previously exposed film. I don't really understand the developing technique involved here, but it's clear the photographer was improvising, probably with minimal training and rudimentary equipment. That would make sense given the general poverty and isolation of the scenes, but it says something that he or she was driven, even under less than optimal conditions, to preserve a little bit of the surrounding world.

None of these postcards were ever addressed or mailed.

Hopscotch at Fifty

This summer marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (Hopscotch) by Editorial Sudamericana, and next year will be the centenary of the author's birth. Blog Morellianas has a useful round-up of some related articles and announcements in Spanish, English, and Portuguese. Among the more interesting are an exhibit at the Instituto Cervantes in Paris devoted to Rayuela: El París de Cortázar and a nice appreciation by Ted Gioia (link dead).

Much of this activity is inevitably highly "meta," as they say these days, since the author himself has been dead for nearly thirty years. Supreme cronopio that he was, he would probably have found all of it more than a bit tiresome and wandered off to play with the nearest cat or spin some Louis Armstrong records. But hopefully it will draw the attention of new readers and bring old readers back to the books themselves, which are aging nicely, thank you.


I'll leave the last word to Cortázar, from a letter to Jean Barnabé dated June 3rd, 1963, just as Hopscotch was going to press:

Personally, I think I've written nothing better than "The Pursuer" [his novella loosely based on Charlie Parker]; nevertheless, in Hopscotch I have broken any number of dikes, of doors, I have smashed myself to pieces in so many and such various ways, that as far as I'm concerned it wouldn't matter to me if I died right now. I know that in a few months I'll think that I still have other books to write, but today, when I'm still within the atmosphere of Hopscotch, I feel that I've gone to my own limits, and that I would be incapable of going further.

Dark beginnings

It's a bit disconcerting, perhaps, to reflect that the oldest story in this collection is now more than sixty-five years old. Gabriel García Márquez is still with us, of course, though he seems to have outlived his muse, but these early stories, almost of which were written before more than a handful of readers had even heard of him, now seem to belong to a distant era. Even so, many of them still hold up quite well for all that.

The volume gathers "all the stories" Gabo had published as of 1975 (the latest story is in fact dated three years earlier), organized into the three earlier collections — Ojos de perro azul; Los funerales de la Mamá Grande; and La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Erendira y de su abuela desalmada — in which they first appeared. They can be roughly divided into three distinct but not necessarily mutually exclusive modes. Two are fairly easy to categorize: the neorealism of "La mujer que llegaba a las seis" and "En este pueblo no hay ladrones"; and well-wrought fantastic tales like "Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes," "El ahogado más hermoso del mundo," and "El último viaje de la buque fantasma." The third (but chronologically earliest) group is made up of what we might call existential horror tales, and here we find most of the contents of Ojos de perro azul.

There are deservedly popular gems among both the neorealist and fantastic tales, but it is the author's first — and by most measures least accomplished — pieces that interest me for the moment. And what a difficult and strange bunch of stories they are! Most are concerned with ghosts, or corpses, or disembodied spirits of some kind; in the least challenging (perhaps "Nabo, el negro que hizo esperar a los ángeles") the reader is eventually able to piece together something resembling a narrative thread, but at their most extreme (the frankly baffling "Amargura para tres sonámbulos") we're pretty much left scratching our heads. Note that this is not a criticism. Note also that the stories, though written over the course of a least a half-dozen years, weirdly illuminate each other; thus certain cryptic references in "Diálogo del espejo," which describes a man shaving before work and discovering that the face he sees in the mirror has begun to diverge from his own, acquires new possibilities when read alongside "La otra costilla de la muerte," in which one of a pair of twins has died and the survivor waits while a barber shaves the face of his brother's corpse in the next room. Motifs of consciousness beyond the grave, of transmigration, not always fully developed, weave in and out of these tales, though it isn't clear whether their affinities are the result of strategy, improvisation, or simply the reworking of material that wasn't fully mined the first time through.

One of the strangest, and most abstract, of the tales is the brief "La noche de los alcaravanes," in which three men who have been blinded by curlews* stumble about within a space that is neither explained nor truly described; the setting could be from one of Beckett's theatre pieces, except that Beckett would never have conceived of anything so garish. According to Gerald Martin's biography of García Márquez, the tale alludes to a folk belief about curlews blinding children, but no such origin can account for the oddness of the tale. Longer, but no less perplexing, is "Eva está dentro de su gato" ("Eve Is Inside Her Cat"), in which a woman who is tormented by her own beauty (which she compares, in a lush extended metaphor that runs to a full page, to a population of insects coursing through her veins) suddenly leaves her body, floats in a dimensionless world, finds herself drawn back by a craving for the taste of oranges, and then attempts (apparently unsuccessfully) to enter the body of a cat. There is no backstory, no explanation; instead there are mysterious allusions to a buried "niño" — a boy or child, but the word is placed in quotation marks in the original — and to "three unmovable enemies" (the sonámbulos of the other story?) and the reader has little to hold onto, though the story's final sentence provides a devastating, if not clarifying, conclusion.

To some extent, these perplexing stories can, perhaps, be characterized as apprentice work, though by a singularly gifted hand. García Márquez would go on to write more classically polished tales, as well as audience-pleasing novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude. But these earliest pieces, as clunky and difficult to interpret as they often are, also display the possibilities of a more radical approach to narrative.

*"Curlews" is the word used in Gregory Rabassa's translation of the story, though the Spanish alcaraván may correctly refer to a "stone-curlew" or bittern.

The Black Lake

The waitress spread a cocktail napkin on the glass tabletop with a practiced flourish, then swiftly clanked a gin and tonic down on it before the wind could lift it by a corner and carry it away. He thanked her with a nod and watched her move off among the other tables, taking orders for refills, pulling a check tucked into a dark faux-leather case out of her apron pocket and setting it down. Blondish hair done up in a tidy knot, sturdy, she looked to be in her thirties. She was pleasant and professional but a hair shy of friendly and he guessed that she had a husband and a small kid or two and knew how to deal with situations. It was only when she moved off to go inside the restaurant and gave instructions to a busboy who stood expressionless just outside the door that he saw the smile disappear from her lips. The busboy, younger, darker, and slightly built, an immigrant he guessed, snapped into action, seized a plastic bin, and efficiently cleared the table that had just been vacated, then mopped off the crumbs and condensation with a white cloth.

The cast-iron legs of the table rested unevenly on the flagstones and rocked as he reached for his drink. The outside of the glass was already slick with condensation. He peeled away the cocktail napkin and took his first sip, gazing out through his sunglasses at the choppy water beyond the terrace, at the uniform green of the surrounding high hills. Lofty clouds lay here and there above him, darker in the distance, and he suspected there might be rain by evening, but for now the sun still bore down, interrupted only now and then by a fugitive shadow. The conversations at the tables around him blurred into white noise, the meaningless chatter of birdsong. An older couple sat directly behind him but they rarely spoke; further off there was a group of six women, middle-aged, dressed-up, lively, talking two and three at a time, and it was some time before he noticed that they were speaking — what was it? German? Swedish? He couldn’t be sure, and wasn’t curious.

Far out on the lake, a small boat, steered by two barely distinguishable figures in orange life-jackets, was struggling with the fickle crosswinds, tacking left and then right, its multi-colored sail billowing, bending over the water but always righting itself again. A crow passed high above, closely pursued by a smaller bird, whose nest the crow had no doubt attempted to raid. He watched them cross as far as the opposite shore, the crow in smooth glides, the smaller bird in quick aggressive darts, until they disappeared behind the trees.

On the near shore, just below him, stretched a little crescent of beach, clearly artificial, no more than fifty feet across. A small child was digging in the sand with a pink plastic shovel, trying to build a tiny castle, but the sand was all wrong, too coarse and impure, and it wouldn’t cohere. The child’s father was reading the newspaper in a beach chair a few yards away, and now and then peeked over the pages to glance at the child and at the little waves that exhausted themselves on the sand.

“May I join you?” said a woman’s voice. She didn’t wait for a reply, and none came. He turned away from the lake to face her, set down his glass, and, with an expression that conveyed neither surprise nor pleasure, regarded her as if she were a giant bird who had just completed folding her wings behind her as she settled into her chair.

Echoes of war

Coincidence or fate put an advance copy of Jean Echenoz's fine, slender novel about French soldiers in the Great War into my hands just as I was reading the last few pages of Les Thibault, Roger Martin du Gard's anything but slender roman fleuve, the latter sections of which span the war years. (Spoilers ahead, so be advised.)

As it turns out, the books have some curious similarities. Some of these, like the scenes narrating the mobilization of the French army at the outset of the war and the loss of one limb by a major character in the course of it, might be plausibly dismissed as inevitable given the nature of the subject. On the other hand, the fact that both novels are primarily concerned with two men, and that in the course of each narrative one of those two men will die in the crash of the two-seater aircraft in which he is a passenger (and leave behind a pregnant girlfriend) may be a coincidence or may be a sly hommage on Echenoz's part, a hommage that would not be out of character given that the opening pages of 1914 feature a pointed allusion to Victor Hugo's novel of the 1793 Vendée uprising, entitled Ninety-Three. (The French title of Echenoz's novel, by the way, is not 1914 but a simple 14, and it also begins in the Vendée.)

Be that as it may, the novels have little in common in tone, with Martin du Gard's being (for the most part) earnest and analytical, and the newer book more graphic in its depiction of warfare but also leavened with a bit of playful postmodernism. As a case in point, we only find out about halfway through 1914 that its two chief characters, two men named Anthime and Charles who have been strangely circling around each other for several chapters, seemingly both attracted and repelled by some connection whose nature is unclear, are in fact brothers, as are, of course, Jacques and Antoine Thibault in Martin du Gard's novel.

Jean Echenoz's 1914 will be published by the New Press early next year, and will doubtless be one of many new books released in conjunction with the centenary of the beginning of the war.

Rereading Martin du Gard (IX): Night raid

It is springtime in Paris, 1918. The youngest of the Thibaults, Jacques, has been dead since the beginning of the war; his older brother, Antoine, a medical officer in the French army, has inhaled mustard gas while conducting an inspection tour aimed, ironically, at determining why so many members of the medical corps have been gassed. He survives, but with aftereffects that sap his energy, leave him short of breath, and make it difficult for him to speak. He has been recuperating — if that is the accurate word — in a hospital in southern France, but has obtained leave for a few days to return to Paris in order to attend the funeral of an old family retainer. While in the city, he consults with a senior colleague, Dr. Philip. As the two doctors go over the details of Antoine's case, he reads in his old mentor's eyes what at bottom he has already known but refused to admit to himself: that the course of his "recovery" is in fact a downward spiral of remission and relapse that must, inexorably, lead to his death within a matter of months.

For Antoine, who has taken great pride — that stubborn Thibault pride, the family crest — in his own skill and drive, in his scientific knowledge, in the bright future that lay ahead of him, this death sentence produces a paroxysm of horror. Naturally he has known all along — and he is not a religious man — that his life would one day end, but he has always been confident that his death would come only after a long life filled with accomplishments and laurels; there would be a sense of satisfaction, a legacy to leave behind. Abruptly, confronted with his own annihilation, he realizes that it will all come to nought.

The chapter that narrates Antoine's return home that evening is one of the briefest and most extraordinary in the book. Reeling, he first takes the boulevard Malesherbes to the rue Boissy-d'Anglas, "passing so close to the façades that his elbows at times struck the walls."

He found himself under the trees of the Champs-Élysées. Before him, through the trunks, barely illuminated but visible under the nocturnal light of that beautiful spring night, stretched the Place de la Concorde, crisscrossed by silent automobiles which appeared like beasts with phosphorescent eyes and then vanished into the darkness. He saw a bench and approached it. Before sitting down, out of habit, he told himself "Don't catch cold." (And at once he thought, "What does it matter, now?") The blinding verdict that he had read in Philip's face had taken posssession of his spirit, and not only his spirit but his body, like an enormous parasite, a devouring tumor that would crowd out everything else in order to bloom monstrously and occupy his entire being.

The lyricism at just this point in the narrative, this nocturnal urban sublime in the face of the abyss, is remarkable, but it is about to become more so. He hears a distant howling noise in the night. At first he is barely aware of it; then:

Two shadows, two female forms, emerged at a run from beneath the trees, and, almost at the same time, all the warning sirens began to scream at once. The sparse points of lights that blinked feebly around the Place de la Concorde were instantly extinguished.

It is a night raid by German bombers, and the city is quickly blacked out. He hears distant detonations, the sounds of anti-aircraft guns, and rises from his bench.

Above Paris, an astonishing sky came to life. Emanating from every part of the horizon, luminous beams swept the vault of the night, their milky trails moving off and intersecting, scrutinizing the jumble of stars like a face, brutal, swift, or at times hesitating, stopping suddenly to examine a suspect spot, then recommencing their gliding investigation.

He looks for a taxi,

But the square was now deserted, dark, immense and could only be discerned at moments. Its outline would suddenly appear, rising out of the gloom in the intermittent reflection of the searchlights, with its balustrades, its pale statues, its Obelisk, its fountains, and the funereal columns of its tall lampposts, like a vision in a dream, a city petrified by some enchantment, the vestige of a vanished civilization, a dead city, long buried in the sands.

As the detonations and the sounds of machine gun fire rage on, he skirts the Tuileries and approaches the Pont Royal, watching halos of red flame rise all over the city.

He had forgotten his misery. Beneath that invisible, imprecise menace that hovered like the blind wrath of a god, an artificial excitation spurred his blood; a kind of furious inebriation gave him strength. He quickened his steps, reached the bridge, crossed the river, and plunged into the rue du Bac.

A few moments later he is standing outside the building where he lives, resigned to his fate but dreading the solitude of rooms where he knows that no one awaits him.

These few pages are the last chapter of third-person narration in The Thibaults; the more than one hundred pages that follow are composed of letters and of entries in Antoine's journal, which he continues to the day of his death. It's almost as if Martin du Gard, who generally took a more scientific, matter-of-fact approach to narration, decided to pull out all the stops for a set-piece that would combine existential horror, the nightmare of modern warfare, and the beauty — and unexpected, evocative solitude — of the monuments of Paris into one final dazzling flourish.

[Image above: Yvon, Pont Royal and Quai des Tuileries. The translations are mine rather than Stuart Gilbert's, but in any case they pale beside the original.]

On Folly

And here we have the tailor and inventor Franz Reichelt, on February 4, 1912, the day he leapt off the Eiffel Tower. Just looking at him, in his ridiculous homemade parachute, we already know how this will turn out; we don't have to see the newsreel footage, shot on that cold morning, which documents his fatal descent. (For the curious, the whole sorry incident is outlined at Wikipedia, and more photos are available at La piedra de Sísifo, with a brief text in Spanish.)

It's impossible not to wonder about Reichelt's state of mind that day. Did he not at least half-intuit, as he prepared to step off the tower, that he was signing his own death-warrant? Had he simply gone too far to pull back without losing face? How long did it take him, as he began to fall, to realize his miscalculation? Did his limbs desperately try to regain the safety of the tower, when it was already too late?

But we shouldn't judge him too harshly. Two years later, the great statesmen of Europe, counseled by the finest and best-informed diplomatic, political, and military minds of the day and bolstered by countless reports, cables, secret agents, alliances, and maneuverings, would collectively plunge their countries and their peoples into the abyss of the Great War. In the unimaginable carnage that ensued, millions would die, empires would fall, and a cascade of destruction, hatred, and oppression would be set in motion that would take decades to exhaust itself. How long did it take those statesmen (and they were all men, of course) to understand the consequences of their actions? Reichelt, icon of inanity that he has come to be, harmed only himself.

Next to Me

The Yellow Hope is the stage name of the singer, songwriter, guitarist, and applied mathematician Arnold D. Kim, who when not recording and performing is deputy director of the UC Merced Center for Computational Biology (not your typical day job, but hey, you do what you gotta do). He has put out two CDs, Even the Beautiful Get Lonely (Sometimes), from which this track is taken, and the recently released Fifty Shades of Yellow, which features a duet with Syd Straw, no less.

A fine guitarist with an unassuming but appealing singing voice, Kim is content not to try to push his songs too hard. His subject matter pretty much hews to the usual range of romantic infatuation and disappointment, and at his best, as in this quietly affecting little song, he's quite good. The place names mentioned in the lyrics trace a stroll through the streets of Madrid, described in more detail (and with pictures and a map) on the Yellow Hope Project blog.

The two Yellow Hope Project CDs are available from CD Baby.

Update: Kim has now posted a video of the song.

Dear Mother (Primo Levi)

I haven't been able to determine whether "Cara Mamma," the Primo Levi story from which the following excerpts are taken, has been translated into English. In any case, I came across it in a French translation, on a website with a Japanese-English name, and it's written in the form of a letter home from an ancient Roman soldier stationed in Britain, so we're well into international waters here.

Dear Mother,

I beg your pardon if I haven't written you after receiving the letter that you sent me last March, and which arrived just as the spring was reaching its end. In this country, spring isn't like it is back home; here, the seasons have no frontiers, it rains winter and summer, and the sun, when it shows itself from behind the clouds, is as feeble in summer as it is in winter — but it rarely shows itself.

If I've been slow to respond, it's because the public scribe to whom I've addressed myself in the past has died. After so many years and so many letters that he wrote for me, we had become friends and I didn't have to explain to him each time who I was and who you were, to tell him where you live, where our village was and what it was like, and everything that one needs to know so that a letter could speak as a messenger might speak.

The public scribe who transcribes my words today arrived a little while ago. He's a wise and educated man, but he's not Latin, nor even a Briton, and he still doesn't know much about the way they live here, so it's I who am helping him more than he helps me. He's not Latin, as I said, he comes from the country of Kent, which is to say from the south, but he has always worked in public service, and he speaks and writes Latin better than I do, now that I'm beginning to forget it. He's also a good magician, who knows how to make it rain, although that's a task that I am equally able to perform, since it rains almost every day. [...]

Imagine that everything here is different from the way it is in Italy: the vegetation, the sheep, the sea, the houses, the clothing, the fish, the shoes; so much so that one is naturally drawn to call these things not by their Latin names but but the names they use here. Don't laugh if I talk of shoes; in a country of rain and mud, shoes are more important than bread, to the extent that here in Vindolanda one finds more tanners and cobblers than soldiers. For three quarters of the year we wear hobnail boots that weigh two pounds each — everyone, even women and children. [...]

Dear Mother, write me and tell me the news from home; the postal service is quite good, your letters reach me in less than sixty days, and even your package arrived in just over sixty days. Here, one is in wool country, but the wool here isn't as soft and proper as the kind you spin. I thank you with all my filial affection; every time I put on my shoes my thoughts will be of you.

The above translation, which is now two removes from what Levi wrote, is mine. The "original" text (with the same ellipses) can be found at A Nice Slice of Tororu Shiru, where it is accompanied by a brief note and bibliographic details.

Update (2015): An authorized translation of this story will presumably be included in the three-volume set of The Complete Works of Primo Levi to be published by Liveright later this year.

The Waking Hour

I had never heard of David Francey until a few weeks ago, but already I'm a fan.

I wake to the radio morning news
Just as the day is dawning
And I watch from the window while a passing cloud
Dulls the hopeful morning
And I wonder will the girl I love
Come back with the morning
But the omen crow at the waking hour
Has given me fair warning

And the heart that's breaking
Never makes a sound

Born in Scotland in 1954, Francey has lived in Canada since he was twelve. He worked in the construction business for years and didn't cut his first record until he was well into his forties (so score one for the old guys). Since then he has released a CD every year or two and has emerged as one of Canada's most respected songwriters. The Skating Rink is the one I'm currently listening to, but this title song from The Waking Hour (which is available in the US from from Red House Records) is hard to get away from too.

Reading Martin du Gard (VIII): Flight

As the seventh and longest of the eight parts of The Thibaults draws to a close, armies have been mobilized, fighting has broken out across Europe, and Jacques Thibault and Jenny de Fontanin have become lovers. Jean Jaurès, the one Socialist leader who seemed most likely to resist the march to war, has been assassinated before their very eyes; to Jacques's disgust, Jaurès's former comrades quickly fall in step with the patriotic march to war. Because Jacques holds forged Swiss papers, he plans to take Jenny to Switzerland and escape service in the army. In no case is he willing to fight or to kill his fellow man; the divergence between his views and those of his older brother Antoine, in regard to the civic obligation to obey the country's call to arms, is absolute. (Though Martin du Gard was a pacifist, he characteristically gives Antoine the most persuasive lines.) At the last moment, Jenny has a terrible row with her mother and decides to remain behind in Paris, temporarily, to patch things up. Jacques leaves for Switzerland; the couple will never see each other again. Despite his genuine love for Jenny, the truth is that he is relieved. He has set himself a mission, to which Jenny would only be an obstacle.

The mission, such as it is, is utterly insane: with a comrade, a pilot named Meynestrel, he concocts a plan to drop hundreds of thousands of leaflets along the battlefront, leaflets calling on soldiers on both sides to lay down their arms and rise up against the politicians and capitalists who have sent them to war. Does he really believe that the soldiers will heed the call, or does he simply welcome the chance to sacrifice his own life in a doomed effort that he knows is likely to prove fatal? The chapters describing the preparations for the flight have an adventurous, even lyrical tone, but it all ends too soon, and the final pages of L'éte 1914 are grueling to read. The plane malfunctions and crashes, Meynestrel is killed, the leaflets are consumed in flames, and Jacques, horribly injured, is pulled from the wrecked plane by French soldiers. Unable to speak, fitfully conscious, he is mistaken for a spy and bound to a stretcher. (In what may be an echo of the Passion, he is taunted and pelted with gravel.) As the French army retreats in the face of a German offensive he is carried along with them; when the retreat degenerates into a disordered rout one of the stretcher-bearers, terrified of his own act, administers a hurried coup de grâce with his pistol.

The novel will resume with a book-length Epilogue set four years later. But after some 1,750 pages, Martin du Gard has dispensed with one of the two Thibault brothers by giving him a death that accomplishes nothing, that has no meaning. Jacques was never a good fit for his world; he seemed to know this, and for that reason willed his own death. But the redemption he sought to achieve in dying is completely denied him. Like the war itself, it is ghastly and without purpose.

(The cover shown above reproduces an image from the 2003 French television adaptation of the novel, featuring Malik Zidi as Jacques.)

Borges and Xul Solar

Americas Society in Manhattan is currently hosting an exhibition devoted to the friendship between Jorge Luis Borges and his older compatriot, the painter, astrologer, and mystical philosopher Alejandro Xul Solar.

Like Borges, Xul Solar (born Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari) spent much of the second decade of the 20th century in Europe absorbing the latest currents in avant-garde literature, painting, and philosophy. They didn't cross paths during those years but they did meet in the 1920s, when both were playing a role in the shaping of Argentine modernism. During the Perón era their friendship seems to have cooled somewhat (Borges was a firm anti-Peronist), but some mutual loyalty remained, and Borges often spoke warmly about Xul Solar after the latter's death in 1963.

They were somewhat of an odd couple, Borges philosophically inquisitive but ultimately skeptical, Xul Solar an avid devotee of everything from astrology and Tarot to the I Ching. When the occult metaphysical systems the painter encountered weren't outlandish enough, he simply elaborated new ones, just as he concocted new languages called "Neocriollo" and "Panlengua." He invented a kind of intricate modified chess game based on his mystical principles (the set is displayed in the exhibit), though he seems to have been the only one who understood how to play it.

Xul Solar is mentioned by name in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," where he may also have been the model for the figure of Herbert Ashe, who, like Xul Solar, dabbled in the possibilities of duodecimal number systems. Eccentric as the painter was, it seems fairly certain that several of Borges's best stories would not have been written without his influence.

Some of Xul Solar's paintings, at the weakest, can seem a bit crudely executed, but at their best (and he seems to have been quite prolific) they display a knack for working together disparate elements of color, form, and symbolism into a visually satisfying whole that nevertheless invites closer inspection.

In addition to Xul Solar's paintings (and a rather nice gouache and pencil map by Norah Borges, the writer's sister), the exhibition features rare issues of some of the seminal literary magazines of the era, including Martín Fierro, Azul, Proa, and Revista de América. Another highlight is the manuscript of Borges's famous story "La lotería en Babilonia" ("The Lottery in Babylon"). Written in a tiny but easily legible hand and placed next to the printed version, it lets one see how Borges tinkered with the final wording as he revised the text for publication.

If you visit, ask to purchase the nicely illustrated but reasonably priced hardcover catalog. (It seems difficult to locate online, but the ISBN is 1-879128-82-9 if you want to try.) The show will be moving on to the Phoenix Art Museum in September 2013.

Nocturne

From the shore all that can be seen in the darkness is the flicker of lanterns on the long, low boat. The river's waters are moon-warm, but things unseen move in the murk, rippling the surface and bumping against the ankles of waders. We retreat to the safety of land.

No one here knows how to swim. If a fisherman falls into the water away from the shore and can't be pulled out by his friends, he will drown. They fish anyway because it's far better to drown than it is to starve, but the river remains alien to them. They pole from bank to bank gingerly, afraid of disturbing what may lie in the depths, and will cut their nets loose, no matter how great the sacrifice, if they sense something weighing them down that they can't explain. In some years, after the floods have receded, carcasses are found in the low-lying fields, unrecognizable, neither man nor fish nor anything else that could be given a name. We leave the bodies to be picked by birds and steer our ploughs around the remains; small trees may rise over the bones but if so no one, not even children, will take advantage of the shade.

The boat pierces the water in silence. The boatman lifts his pole and the slender bow glides to rest on the sand.

H. N. Werkman

Alston W. Purvis's volume in Yale's Monographics series brought this interesting Dutch printmaker to my attention. Hendrik Werkman was born in Leens in the Netherlands in 1882 and lived most of his life in the city of Groningen. A professional printer, he apparently didn't have much of a head for business, but he did have a rich talent for design and typographical experimentation. Though he became associated with a Dutch art circle called De Ploeg (The Plough), he retained a prickly independence, and his work was not widely distributed or recognized during his lifetime. One of his best-known projects was a kind of chapbook periodical entitled The Next Call, much of which (there were nine installments, some printed on a single folded sheet) is reproduced in Purvis's book. He was particularly adept at using found materials and printing furniture as elements in his work; in the image immediatly below, for example, the black element was printed using the key plate from a door.

Prolific and resourceful even in the face of difficult circumstances, he created a series of some 600 monoprints that he called "druksels," a name derived from the Dutch drukken (to print), for calendars, bookplates, and other ephemera, and for a suite of prints illustrating stories from Martin Buber's Chassidische legenden (published as Tales of the Hasidim in English). Though Werkman was not Jewish, these last, published under German occupation in 1942, may have contributed to his arrest and execution in March 1945, just days before the Allied liberation of Grondingen. A substantial portion of his work, which had been seized by the Nazis at the time of his arrest, was destroyed during the fighting for the city. Fortunately, much of it remains.

Purvis's H. N. Werkman seems to be the best current source on the artist's life and work. There is a substantial online collection at the Groningen Museum and a nice selection at www.druksel.com.

The Child Ghosts of Prague

Above is one of a series of brief animated shorts entitled Legendy Staré Prahy. This one is called "O neviňátkách z židovského hřbitova"; I don't speak Czech, but the story can be identified with a miracle-working tale associated with the Judah Loew ben Bezalel, a renowned 16th-century rabbi whose name came to be linked, long after his death, with the legend of the Golem.

In the original tale, the Jewish population of Prague has been visited with a terrible plague, leading to the deaths of many of its children. Convinced that this affliction must be a divine punishment of some sort, Rabbi Loew dispatches a young pupil to the Jewish Cemetery to steal a shroud from one of the young ghosts who emerge at midnight to play among the headstones. When the ghost comes to the synagogue to retrieve the shroud, Rabbi Loew demands that the child first reveal what has brought God's wrath upon the community. The child identifies two adulterous couples whose sins have been concealed from view, and once they are confronted and punished the curse is broken. (The film version seems to single out one woman, but perhaps the narration makes this clearer.)

A version of the above legend can be found in The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: A Historical Reader, edited by Wilma Iggers; a very similar one is included in V. V. Tomek's Jewish Stories of Prague. More shorts in the series can be found at the Legendy Staré Prahy website; there is also a companion English-language page with one of the shorts in translation.

Update: There is now an English-language version of the above video.

Thank a musician week

Update (2021): Many of the links below are now broken.

There's a lot of hand-wringing these days about how the old model of compensating musicians is breaking down under the pressure of file sharing, piracy, and 99-cent downloads, and about how nobody has figured out yet just what new model might arise to replace it. As interesting and important as all that is, it's worth remembering that there are plenty of talented working musicians out there right now trying to make a living, driving themselves from gig to gig and hoping that their next royalty check — assuming there still is one — will help cover their medical bills. If those of us who make up their audience — because we get some kind of joy or consolation or amusement out of what they do — want them to continue doing it, we're going to have to keep supporting them, and that means, one way or another, supporting them financially.

Fortunately, there's still a way of doing that that benefits everybody. You purchase a CD (or a download, if you're so inclined), maybe go to a gig if you have the opportunity, the artist gets some cash and a reason to keep going, and you get some music and the feeling of having done your part.

One thing the musicians in the list that follows have in common (other than demonstrating my shameless musical prejudices) is that most are now either producing and marketing their own music or recording for small boutique labels, which means that if you buy music direct from them there's a chance that a fair portion of your dollar might actually go into their pockets. And although I derive no financial benefit from promoting them, I can't say that I do so entirely for selfless reasons; I promote them because I enjoy what they do and want to make sure that they're able to keep on doing it.

— Mary Chapin Carpenter, Ashes and Roses, available from Bandgarden.
— Lowry Hamner, American Dreaming, available from CD Baby.

— Robyn Hitchcock, Spooked, available from Yep Roc Records.
— Andy Irvine, Abocurragh, available from the artist.

— Leo Johnson, It's About Time, available from CD Baby.
— Freedy Johnston, Rain on the City, available from the artist.

— Los Lobos, Tin Can Trust, available from the artists.
— Kelly Joe Phelps, Brother Sinner and the Whale, available from Black Hen Records.

— Amy Rigby & Wreckless Eric, A Working Museum, available from Amy Rigby.
— Zachary Richard, Le fou, available from the artist.

— Chris Smither, Hundred Dollar Valentine, available from the artist.
— Syd Straw, Pink Velour, available from CD Baby.

— Gillian Welch, The Harrow and the Harvest, available from Acony Records.
— Scott Wendholt, Beyond Thursday, available from Double Time Records.

Finally, here are two excellent music documentaries by independent filmmakers:

— Tom Weber, Troubadour Blues, available from Tom Weber.
— Fred Uhter, Wide Awake, available from New Filmmakers Online.