Plan for an impossible novel

There will be paragraphs.

There will be punctuation.

There will be no epigraph in Greek.

There will be no cell phones, computers, or televisions in the novel because such devices belong to the domain of science fiction and this is not a science fiction novel. The presence of radio and ordinary telephones is probationary.

The novel will be, at least in part, a bildungsroman, because only young people are interesting.

Infidelity in a novel is much easier to make interesting than fidelity; as a consequence there will be no infidelity, except perhaps among characters of secondary importance.

There will be sex.

The novel will take place primarily in an urban setting because the modern novel is fundamentally an urban form, the countryside being more suited to poetry. The city will be made up of layers, like overlapping transparencies, and the movements of the characters will take the form of trajectories across and sometimes through the layers. Since cities are more interesting after dark, most of the novel will take place at night.

There will be no violence unless its presence is impossible to ignore. No civilian character will own or handle a firearm, except possibly for humorous effect, as when Alfred Jarry shoots off a pistol in The Counterfeiters.

There will be no autistic savants, evil albinos, children wise beyond their years, or secrets of any kind.

The novel will be a social novel, in the sense that the way in which society is organized will be one of the determining elements in the lives of the characters. It may or may not be a political novel, in the sense that the characters may or may not participate in or be affected by political movements, but it will not be a novel "about politics" or much less about politicians, few of whom are morally interesting enough to be merit preservation in the pages of a novel.

The novel will not be a contingent novel. That is, it will not be "about" anything the subtraction of which would render the enterprise meaningless.

No character will be stupider than the author of the novel.

No character will be wiser than the author of the novel.

The novel will not end with the death of the protagonist. It will not have a happy ending, nor an unhappy ending. This is not to imply that the characters may not, at the end of the novel, be either happy or unhappy, or both simultaneously.

There will be no sequel.

The Beast (Óscar Martínez)

A few years ago when I was doing some volunteer tutoring, one of my students was a young man from Guatemala (I'll call him S., though that wasn't his initial) who already spoke and understood English fairly well, even though he was a bit embarrassed not to be able to speak the language better than he did. I don't know whether he was in the country legally (it was none of my business), but he was fortunate in having found a fairly regular full-time job that was a solid step above unskilled casual labor. I have no doubt that he was good at what he did, and it sounded like he got along well with his employer and co-workers, most of whom knew no Spanish. I worked with him for the better part of a year and in the course of the lessons we talked about a lot of things — whatever served as a way of practicing his conversational English — including his job, his life back home, what he did on the weekends, and so on.

Most of the Central American students I worked with had a good sense of humor and were fun to be around, and S. was certainly bright and likeable, but he was a little more serious than most of the others. He didn't seem depressed, like the occasional student who really seemed to be suffering serious culture shock — in fact I think he was fitting in pretty well — but it was clear that he'd been through a lot and was haunted by his experiences. He volunteered one time, without going into details, that Americans had no idea of what people like him had gone through in getting to this country, and I could tell by the look in his eyes that whatever he had personally gone through had to have been pretty bad.

Óscar Martínez is a young journalist from El Salvador who has investigated what may be the grimmest aspect of the ongoing migration crisis: not the crossing of the border itself but the nightmarish journey of Central American migrants through Mexico, an ordeal that annually subjects thousands to rape, murder, and organized kidnappings for ransom as well as to lethal falls from the northbound freight trains known as "the Beast." Unable to travel openly because of their undocumented status, these migrants are preyed upon by violent criminal syndicates who have either bought off local authorities or intimidated them into submission. At every step of the way they are fleeced or threatened; some resist and are killed, others make it through to the border only to be turned around by US authorities. Increased enforcement at the US-Mexico border has only exacerbated the situation, as newly built sections of border wall have funneled migrants into the most dangerous crossing routes, where many are extorted or forced to serve as mules for drug smugglers. Given the odds against them, the motivation that drives them must be powerful indeed. Some come for economic reasons, but as Martínez makes clear, many come simply to save their skins, having been directly threatened by local gangs or having lost family members to violence in what are currently some of the most dangerous societies on Earth: El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

The Beast (the Spanish title is Los migrantes que no importan — "the migrants who don't matter") originated as a serious of articles for the online publication El Faro. Originally published in book form in Spain in 2010, it appeared in Mexico in 2012 and has now been issued in English by Verso Books. It predates, but clearly foreshadows, the recent upsurge in migration from Central America that is being driven by ongoing violence in the region. As a work of primary first-hand journalism, it makes no attempt to propose comprehensive solutions for the migration crisis, but in providing a powerful sense of the human dimension of that crisis its value is immeasurable.

For an update, see the same author's "Why the Children Fleeing Central America Will Not Stop Coming" in the Nation, August 18/25, 2014.

Birth

"The circumstances of my birth weren't extraordinary at all but they were a bit colorful, because it was a birth that took place in Brussels that might have taken place in Helsinki or Guatemala; it all hung on the assignment they had given my father at the time. The fact that he had just gotten married and that he arrived in Belgium virtually on his honeymoon led to my being born in Brussels at the same moment that the Kaiser and his troops launched upon the conquest of Belgium, which they carried out in the days of my birth. So the story that my mother tells me is absolutely true: my birth was an extremely warlike one, the outcome of which was one of the most pacifistic men on the planet."

— Julio Cortázar, from a television interview with Joaquín Soler Serrano for A fondo, 1977.

The exact nature of Cortázar's father's employment in Brussels in 1914 seems to be uncertain; family accounts that made him out to be some kind of minor diplomat or trade official attached to the Argentine embassy are said to be unconfirmed. The family spent the war years in Europe, and when the young Julio Florencio Cortázar eventually arrived in Argentina, he carried with him, according to some sources (but this point is also in dispute), a detectable French accent that would remain with him through the rest of his life. His father — Julio José Cortázar — eventually deserted the family, and it was young Julio's mother and maternal grandmother who would dominate his childhood, but the accident of his parents' sojourn in Europe made him, along with such contemporaries as Alejo Carpentier (born in Switzerland) and Elena Poniatowska (born in France), part of a generation of Latin American intellectuals who moved easily between continents but remained firmly rooted as citizens of the twentieth century and its disruptions.

Walking Around

Every morning for the past few weeks I've been taking advantage of near-perfect weather and my early-rising habits to go for a long walk before I start the day, and to get better acquainted with the town I've known all my life and have lived in for twenty-five years, something that, no matter how many times one drives through the streets, really has to be done on foot. I get up when the cat wakes me up — generally around six — read the newspapers, eat a couple of eggs, and set out, joining the early-morning joggers and the Central American immigrants already on their way to work at an hour when most of the town is just beginning to stir in their beds. I walk for forty-five minutes or so, sometimes an hour, and whatever route I take I eventually always wind up downtown, where the little stream that runs right through the center of town widens into a slow-moving pool where on some mornings a great blue heron watches for small fish or frogs and turtles climb up on the mud banks, ever alert to retreat into the water at the first sign of commotion.

I walk through the vast silent necropolis on the edge of town, following its circuitous drives and watching crows harass a hawk. In some sections the headstones are mostly those of Italian immigrants of a generation or two go, some with surprisingly evocative names: Manna, Eraclito, Astrologo. In the backstreets live new immigrants, some with carefully tended front gardens lush with sunflowers and vegetables just coming into maturity. Two neighbors greet, in English, discussing one of these little plots. "Y maíz," he says, and regards the developing ear; "soon," he says, in English again. These plantings are too small to be of any economic importance, even to one family's budget; their value is symbolic, a reminder of the milpas back home, a little connection to a distant world and another life.

By eight o'clock or so the town is waking up, the whoosh of traffic beside me is steadier now, and I turn for home. It's time to get to work.

The Dark End of the Street

There are countless covers of this Dan Penn / Chips Moman tune, some of them very good ones, but to me this live performance by Richard and Linda Thompson is on a different plane from all the rest. The directness and intensity of the vocals, the stark one-guitar arrangement, and the quicker tempo set it apart from the smoother, bluesier versions, and when you listen to it in the context of some of the songs that Richard Thompson was writing during roughly the same period when it was recorded, songs like "Wall of Death," "Walking on a Wire," "When I Get to the Border," or "Just the Motion," it suddenly ceases to be a song about an illicit love affair and is transformed into something much more haunting: a song about the way life relentlessly exposes the vanity of our passions and dreams but can't quite extinguish the defiant longing for something transcendent, call it spirit, call it love, call it God, call it what you will (as if anybody could explain what it is or where it comes from). The real fire is in the bridge, which in this rendition is so stirring it is sung twice:

They're going to find us
They're going to find us
They're going to find us someday
We'll steal away
To the dark end of the street

There's something here akin to the Borges story "The Secret Miracle," in which a writer is arrested by the Nazis and sentenced to die, but in the single instant before the order is given to the firing squad — an instant that, in his mind and perhaps (who is to say?) in reality as well, lasts for an entire year — is able to complete his unfinished masterpiece in his mind, though it will be known to no one but himself. It's not external circumstances that matter; it's the secrets, the dark interior that no one can see, that provide a final promise of redemption:

If you take a walk downtown
And you take the time to look around
If you should see me and I walk on by
Oh, darling, please don't cry
Tonight we'll meet
At the dark end of the street

Call it a love song if you will (and a love song it is), but there's something else here few love songs can aspire to: at once an acknowledgment of death and a furious rebellion against it.

We'll steal away
To the dark end of the street
You and me
To the dark end of the street

War

Our species: an interesting idea, but poorly executed.

Given the inescapable fact of our propensity for cruelty, how is anything else not trivia? It's not just our well-established willingness to ignore the suffering of others; our darkest secret is that given the slightest breakdown in the façade of social customs that keep us more or less on peaceful terms with each other we quickly degenerate into torturers and killers. And once the habit of cruelty begins nothing is harder to break, all the more so when we have, as inevitably we do, our own sufferings that cry for vengeance. No flag is unstained. Blood for oil, blood for land, blood for blood, blood, blood, blood.

Our tragedy is that our technological ingenuity has far outstripped our ability to manage the tools at our disposal in a manner that benefits our own species. How could it be otherwise? How could seven billion individuals with conflicting histories, destinies, and needs ever hope to find common purpose? Where is the will? If we can't find a way of destroying ourselves and much of the natural world around us, we will try harder.

Our overfull boat steams ahead
in the darkness with the pilot fled
and the captain mad
and though we huddle cold and numb
day may not come.

The Chase

Having read this short novel by Alejo Carpentier in Alfred Mac Adam's translation many years ago, I cockily told myself that I would be able to whip through it now in Spanish in a couple of nights. As it turned out, I made it about thirty pages in, then bogged down and decided to re-read the translation instead first before giving the original another stab.

Why the difficulty? I've plowed steadily through much longer books in Spanish than this one, which is barely over a hundred pages. Though the author was Cuban there's no Afro-Caribbean dialect issue to speak of; there's nothing comparable to the exuberance of Mexican regionalisms found in Elena Poniatowska's brilliant Hasta no verte Jesús mío, for example, or to the elaborate twists and turns of narrative perspective in Cortázar's novels and some of Vargas Llosa's. Maybe I just had too many distractions; in any case, the novel does present some obstacles to the reader, not insuperable ones to a native speaker, perhaps, but enough to make reading it a bit of a challenge. In Spanish or in translation (and Mac Adam's seems to be good), it repays persistence, though.

Carpentier told the critic Luis Harss that he had composed El acoso in imitation of sonata form, "with an introductory section, an exposition, three themes, seventeen variations, and a conclusion or coda." I tend to be skeptical of such claims (Milan Kundera has made similar statements) but in fact the narrative, the bulk of which consists of one long flashback, is framed within an evening's performance of Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony in a Havana concert hall, and probably should be read with that piece of music in mind.

The first character to whom we are introduced is an impecunious classical music buff who is employed as a ticket seller in the concert hall. As he sits in his booth a patron rushes in, flings down a bill many times more than sufficient for even the most expensive seat, and hurries into the hall, closely pursued by two other men. Pocketing the bill (which may or not be genuine), the ticket seller goes for a stroll, calls on a prostitute of his acquaintance, and returns, at the end of the book, in time for the final notes of the performance — and for the brief, violent aftermath of the opening incident. It is the figure he sees fleeing into the hall who will dominate the long central section of the novel. A native of the provinces, this man has incorporated himself into some kind of vaguely outlined revolutionary cell, but ideological purity has degenerated into betrayal and murder-for-hire and he is now a marked man. As we follow the series of steps that lead him to the concert hall events that were narrated in the book's first pages take on new significance.

Carpentier's vocabulary is rich ("baroque" was a word he himself used to define the character of his writing), but the greater challenge is posed by the fact that the reader often doesn't know — and isn't yet supposed to know — exactly what is happening. One section, for instance, begins, in Mac Adam's version, as follows; the ellipses and parenthesis are in the original:

(... this pounding that elbows its way right through me; this bubbling stomach; this heart above that stops beating, piercing me with a cold needle; muffled punches that seem to well up from my very core and smash on my temples, my arms, my thighs; I breathe in gasps; my mouth can't do it; my nose can't do it; the air only comes in tiny sips, fills me, stays inside me, suffocates me, only to depart in dry mouthfuls, leaving me wrenched, doubled over, empty; and then my bones straighten, grind, shudder; I stand above myself, as if hung from myself, until my heart, in a frozen surge, lets go of my ribs so that it can strike me from the front, below my chest; I have no control over this dry sobbing; then breathe, concentrating on it; first, breathe in the air that remains; then breathe out, now breathe in, more slowly; one, two, one, two, one, two ... The hammering comes back; I am shaking from side to side; now sliding down, through all my veins; I am smashing at the thing holding me in place; the floor is shaking with me; the back of the hair is shaking; the seat is shaking, giving a dull push with each shudder; the entire row must feel the tremor;

And so on and so on. It's only gradually that we realize that this passage is being told from the point-of-view of the man who has fled into the concert hall; we won't understand why he is there, or why his thoughts are frantically racing, for many more pages. Carpentier professed a disdain for "the little psychological novel" and a preference for the "big themes" of historical and social processes; perhaps the fracturing of perspective here is conducive to that more analytical, even didactic approach. El acoso was first published in 1956; since then its technical innovations have been widely borrowed and extended by other writers, but it still retains its nervy intensity.

Alejo Carpentier's description of the musical structure of The Chase, as well as his comments on the psychological novel, are quoted in Harss and Dohmann's landmark Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers, which includes a respectful but sharply critical evaluation of the Cuban novelist's work.

HWY 62

Peter Case is kicking off a Kickstarter campaign for his next CD, HWY 62, which is scheduled to be released in 2015. Details here.

The living

These two faded and stained studio portraits of African-American couples were taken sometime in the early decades of the twentieth century and printed on postcard stock. The one above, which is probably the earlier of the two, is the work of the Flett Studio in Atlantic City, which operated for at least fifteen years or so and must have produced countless similar images. "Mr. & Mrs...," followed by a family name, has been written on the back, but I can't make out the surname. The third figure, standing in the center, may have been the best man at the couple's wedding, or just a relative or friend.

There's even less we can say about the couple below, except that they're dressed to the nines. The studio is unidentified, but the Azo postcard stock used was manufactured from 1904-1918. Like the first postcard, this one was never mailed.

When an artifact is removed from its context without adequate documentation some of its potential for bearing information is lost; we no longer know as much about how it relates to the world that created it. The orphaned photographs above would be much more potent if we knew anything at all about the sitters' identities, life stories, occupations, and families, but people die childless or separated from their families, children have their own lives to lead and can't be bothered, any number of things can sever the thread. Things drift off and go their own ways.

*

The Dead in Frock Coats

In the corner of the living room was an an album of unbearable photos,
many meters high and infinite minutes old,
over which everyone leaned
making fun of the dead in frock coats.

Then a worm began to chew the indifferent coats,
the pages, the inscriptions, and even the dust on the pictures.
The only thing it did not chew was the everlasting sob of life that broke
and broke from those pages.

— Carlos Drummond de Andrade; translation by Mark Strand

Survivors

Chile, the slender nation that lies along the Pacific margins of South America, has faced more than its share of disasters, natural and otherwise. This neat road novel by the Mexican-born writer Andrés Pascoe Rippey imagines an apocalyptic future in which a nuclear war between the great powers has wiped out modern communications and the electric grid worldwide, even in countries — like Chile — that are far from the center of the conflict. As the authorities lose control, rioting and looting break out, and are followed in turn by the rise of brutal paramilitary units, and, more disturbingly, by armies of crazed, cannibalistic merodeadores (marauders) in whom we — although not the characters, at least initially — recognize the characteristic traits of the zombie.

The novel's central character, Alberto, is a left-wing Mexican journalist living in Santiago. As violence breaks out, he at first withdraws to the security of his apartment, but when the situation in the capital becomes increasingly grim he flees south in a commandeered Range Rover, acquiring two companions along the way. One, Max, is a teenager from a wealthy and conservative Catholic family; the other, Valentina, is an Argentinian woman who is both a formidable hand-to-hand fighter and a sexual powerhouse. Hoping to find shelter in an isolated region, they find that little they encounter along the way — a pious farm family, a neohippie commune — is what it seems; moreover, the paramilitaries and merodeadores are also swiftly making their way south. Much of the latter part of the novel takes place among the idyllic scenery of Chile's Alerce Andino National Park, though the events that transpire there — including, of all things, a cavalry charge, are anything but tranquil.

The novel's political and social overtones are obvious and at time explicit, and memories of the violent dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet are never far from the surface, but the novel also draws on the conventions of horror cinema, as well as, I suspect, books like John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids and the disaster novels of J. G. Ballard. It manages to be well-written and astute in its observation of society and character while supplying a ripping, well-paced narrative.

Todo es rojo is, thus far, available only in Spanish. It has been published, in a handsome edition, by a tiny Chilean press, Imbunche Ediciones, and appears to have limited distribution outside that country. (It is, however, available as a PDF download from Lulu.) Hopefully it will eventually gain wider exposure and translation into other languages.

Destroying Angels

Kyūsaku Yumeno was the pen name of a prolific Japanese writer who died in 1936 and whose work is apparently relatively little-known in the English-speaking world. Satori Ediciones in Spain has just published El infierno de las chicas (The Hell of Girls), a Spanish-language translation by Daniel Aguilar of the three dark, intricate stories that were originally collected in Japanese as Shōjo jigoku. As far as I can tell the stories have never appeared in English.

All three tales included here are narrated largely or exclusively in epistolary fashion, though in each case we read only one side of the correspondence. One story makes use of fictional news articles, and now and then letters from third parties are nested within the letters of the primary correspondent. The first story, "No tiene importancia," (It's of no importance) takes the form of a long missive written by one physician to another, describing the case of a young woman who has worked as a nurse, first for the recipient and then for the sender. We are told from the first page that the woman, who goes by the name of Yuriko Himegusa, has killed herself; the remainder of the story, which is approximately one hundred pages long, is in effect an extended flashback explaining this act. Himegusa was, to all appearances, a model employee: pleasant, conscientious, skillful, and beloved by her patients. She was also, it seems, a pathological liar, and the eventual unraveling of the skein of lies she has wound around herself proves her undoing. Or does it? Both Aguilar, the translator of this volume, and Nathen Clerici, the author of a recent doctoral dissertation (PDF here) on Yumeno, point out that the final outcome of the story is in fact highly ambiguous; no body is found, and the "suicide" (revealed, naturally, by means of a letter) may simply be one more deception.

From the point of view of the doctor narrating her history, Himegusa represents simply an unfortunate if rather bizarre case of female psychopathology. But Himegusa sees herself as a victim of misunderstanding and suspicion, and her suicide — real or faked — amounts to a salvo in the drawn-out battle between women and a male-dominated world. This aspect is heightened in the two remaining stories in the volume, in both of which the central female characters are at once victims and avengers of the crimes of men. The briefest, "Asesinatos por relevos," (roughly, Murders by relay) takes the form of a series of letters written by a young woman who works as a conductor or ticket-taker on a bus, in which she seeks to dissuade a friend from leaving her rural home and taking up the same career. Her contention that such a career only serves to subject a woman to the whims and abuse of men is chillingly documented in the course of the correspondence, as a new male driver who appears to be a serial killer of women takes the wheel on the bus route she is assigned to.¹ In the end, the man gets his comeuppance, although what amounts to a happy ending, in both this and the last story in the volume, may seem appalling to contemporary Western readers.

The final story, "La mujer de Martes" (The woman from Mars), which, like the first, is novella-length, is the most intricate of the three. It begins with a newspaper article about the discovery of a charred body after a fire in one of the outbuildings of a girls' school, and proceeds breathlessly through a series of follow-up reports, which document an increasingly bizarre and inexplicable series of events, including disappearances, a hanging, and the desecration of a cross inside a nearby Catholic church. Only after these events have been catalogued is the explanation teased out, in the form of a long letter from one of the students at the school (the gangly misfit whose nickname gives the story its title) to its headmaster, a pious bachelor who has inexplicably gone insane since the fire. As in the previous story, there is a woman wronged and vengeance to be exacted in disturbing — and in this case extraordinarily elaborate — fashion.

Daniel Aguilar notes that those stories are written from a feminine, almost feminist viewpoint, and there is something to that, bearing in mind the limitations of the time and place (1930s Japan). What is certain is that men don't come off well at all; if not all entirely depraved, they are nevertheless very bad at running things. But there's something more here too, a sense that the world is essentially amoral and devoid of meaning. The men, blinded by lust and vanity, may not acknowledge that fact, but the women know it all too well. In the words of Utae Awakawa, the "woman from Mars":

Little by little I began to feel with greater and greater intensity that the emptiness that lay in the depths of my heart and the emptiness that could be found above the blue sky were exactly the same thing. And I began to think, as well, that the act of dying was something simple and of no importance.²

This bleak sense of futility that emerges over and over throughout these stories may perhaps owe something to Buddhist thought, but in its incarnation into 20th-century urban Japan it takes on a character that is very much Yumeno's own brilliant creation.

¹ The bus is staffed by two employees: the man at the wheel (conductor in Spanish), and the female cobradora or revisora who accepts tickets and provides assistance to the driver.↩
² My translation from the Spanish version.↩

Identity

Here are four undated photographs of the same young man, all probably taken within a few minutes of each other. There's a severity to his angular features, projecting an indispensable image of male toughness to a tough world, but as we see him trying out poses — with hat or without, looking now left, now right — do we detect as well a certain lack of resolution, as if he were unsure about exactly how to best project that image?

He selects four different varieties of card mount, to be given away as keepsakes to unknown kin or girlfriends, but they're all passed down together, as if he never did quite make up his mind (or maybe he found that he had no one to give them to). A name scrawled in ink on the back of one of the cards may read "Owen Lewis," but next to it there are also traces of a different set of initials, ornately written in pencil.

The photos themselves are barely more than an inch high, and the embossed cardboard mounts that hold them are about 3.25 x 2.25. Based on the man's hat, collar, and necktie, I'm guessing that the photos date from the early 20th century. They may have been produced in an early automatic photo booth, like the one patented by Anatol Josepho, which debuted in 1925. (The technique of sealing the photos within embossed card mounts originated in the tintype era, decades earlier.)

Cold Trail Blues

Peter Case at the Mug and Brush Barber Shop in Columbus Ohio, May 10, 2014.

"Cold Trail Blues" originally appeared on Flying Saucer Blues, and is also included in the compilation album Who's Gonna Go Your Crooked Mile?, both from Vanguard Records.

Not forgotten

June 5, 1989. (Photo by Jeff Widener.)

Russell Edson (1935-2014)

I just learned from Charles Simic's notice on the website of the New York Review of Books that the poet Russell Edson died earlier this year (on April 29, 2014, according to the Poetry Foundation).

I knew Edson's work almost entirely through the one slim volume shown above, which was published as a "New Directions Paperbook Original," apparently in 1964. I doubt I had ever heard of the author when I picked it up second-hand; I was in my teens, it looked interesting, and it probably cost me all of twenty cents, which is the price marked in pencil inside the front cover.

The Very Thing That happens comprises eighty or so very short pieces — what would you call them? prose poems? anecdotes? fables? koans? — accompanied by Edson's own appropriately daft drawings. Here, in its entirety, is one example:

"Someone"

A man put a fedora on a cabbage, oh please be somebody I know.
Now who it is, as the brim is low, he cannot tell, but someone is certainly someone.
Someone, who are you?
Someone says nothing.
One and cabbage and now the moon. Round things are not unavailable in a square room.
The moon comes wearing a crown of clouds, worn too low to know who it is.

I ate it up: the whimsy, the perverse logic, that last line so deliciously cadenced it demanded to be sung (and sing it I did). And likewise with "The Cruel Rabbit," "Notice for the Meatball Fund," "The Tub and the Woman," "Mouse-music," and the title piece, which begins with a father riding into his kitchen on an imaginary white horse and after going downhill from there ends with this incontrovertible bit of wisdom:

But why why why is it happening? cries mother.
Because of all the things that might have happened this is the very thing that happens.

I've hung on to my copy of the book for a least forty years. I can't say that I've dipped into it more than occasionally for a long time, but its spell, in its own small way, has never really been broken.

The Orphan

Paweł Pawlikowski's Ida is my kind of film: spare, understated, sensitively directed, small in scope but firmly anchored in its time and place, which in this case means Poland in the early 1960s. Sumptuously shot in black-and-white in a narrow-screen format, it's very much a movie to be looked at, the way one looks at still photographs, supplying one's own active eye and interpretation, and not just something to be watched, the way one witnesses a spectacle that's been programmed to hit all the right emotional buttons at the predetermined moments.

The lead character — she's called Anna, a Catholic novice, but she learns that she's really Ida, the daughter of murdered Jews — actually has relatively little to say, usually no more than a few words per scene, and her face betrays little of what's going on inside her head, but she is, in the end, not only the ostensible protagonist of the movie but its audience as well, the one whose fate it is to experience the unfolding of a story that, even as it is about her, is fundamentally not of her own devising. Which is not to suggest that Ida is without a visceral punch. There's something in fact very Greek about it, not so much in the events as in the suddenness and starkness of its emotions, the way the characters — the young novice aside — respond in almost stylized fashion to the revelation of long-hidden secrets, as if purging the collective sins of an entire community.

The trailer below gives an idea of the storyline and the film's beautiful visual style, though inevitably it can't capture its graceful pacing. Stuart Klawans, at the Nation, has a comprehensive and thoughtful review that nicely encapsulates its virtues and ambiguities. I think this is a movie you should see.

Ties

Around the beginning of the 20th century a marriage took place between two nascent media: the postcard, which was becoming the source of an enormous international craze, and amateur photography, a hobby democratized by Eastman Kodak's affordable and portable cameras. The result was the "real photo postcard," continuous-tone photographic prints made directly onto postcard stock, huge numbers of which were created by both amateurs and professionals. While the professional studios made both individual portraits commissioned by customers and mass-produced souvenir postcards in runs of thousands, the amateurs generally made unique prints. Large numbers of the latter survive; although designed to be mailed, many never were, or were enclosed in envelopes and thus never postmarked. Some of the images are fascinating (there are several excellent books devoted to them) but most are fairly dull. They were made for a specific purpose, as keepsakes, to exhibit the likeness of a loved one or the old homestead or the graduating class, imbued with meaning for the photographer and the recipient, but not conveying much to strangers. Separated from their context, they are largely mute.

The obvious amateur image at the top of the page is a little different; while it presents no drama, it does give us a sense of the subject's location and integration within an active, occupied urban space. The card stock was produced by Velox, a company acquired by Kodak in 1902, and this particular variety, which is marked "Made in Canada," was probably manufactured between 1907 and 1914. It bears no address and no identification of the woman in the foreground, although based on provenance I suspect that it was taken in the province of Quebec, perhaps in Quebec City itself. The pyramidal roofs of the skyline at right might potentially make an exact identification of the location possible.

Half of the woman's face is in shadow, as is the street behind her, and a stray fiber appears to have been captured in the printing process at top right, but the image is not without interest in spite of these flaws. If you look carefully (a magnifying glass helps), you can make out on the left side several figures stoop-sitting down the length of the block, the second set of stairs has some kind of ornate stencilled pattern on its vertical surfaces, and there may be an awning projecting from a storefront in the far distance. And then there are the overhead wires, which, like almost everything in this picture, provide a glimmer of connection. The poles, the wires, the street, the sidewalk, the stoop-sitters, the buildings clustered together, all speak of a world in which the texture of an individual's existence is inextricably entwined in sophisticated networks of interaction, communication, transportation, and marketing.

There's no snow on the sidewalk, but there appears to be some piled against the curb on the far side of the street. The child sitting closest to us, who is paying no attention to the woman or the photographer, is wearing a snug wool cap. It's perhaps the end of winter, and the woman has likely removed her own head covering to pose for the camera. A moment later she will move away, but the city that surrounds her will keep on humming even when she's gone.

The Gloaming

The Gloaming — Iarla Ó Lionáird (vocals), Thomas Bartlett (piano), Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh (hardanger fiddle), Martin Hayes (violin/fiddle) & Dennis Cahill (guitar) — are a quintet of experienced musicians, three from Ireland, and two from the US, whose self-titled first record (above) was released in January 2014. They play a kind of stripped-down Irish trad, by turns haunting and breathtaking, that manages at once to innovate and to draw forth the music's deepest and most ancient core. It's really quite special. Below is one live performance, featuring nine and one-half dazzling minutes of Martin Hayes.

The Gloaming can be purchased from Real World Records or Brassland Records.

Helens

I few months ago I signed up for a year's worth of New Directions' Poetry Pamphlets and (prose) Pearls, two series of chapbooks from a publishing company I've long admired but haven't always kept up with. As the books have arrived each month I've found some that I had already seen on the NDP list and knew I would like, like Paul Auster's The Red Notebook which I had read years ago in another format, and a few (definitely a minority) that I set aside after a quick skim. Bernadette Mayer's The Helens of Troy, NY arrived last week (coincidentally as I was re-reading the Odyssey in Robert Fitzgerald's splendid translation) and it's one of the better ones.

This is a modest collection of poetry, perfectly befitting its chapbook format; it's not particularly "literary" in a traditional sense (in the sense in which the poets I usually like tend to be "literary"), by which I mean that although the book includes, among other things, a couple of sestinas, a villanelle, and a sonnet, the language isn't particularly elevated or elaborated in relation to the kind of ordinary conversations that seem to have given rise to the poems. There's no explanatory Foreword or Afterword to the volume (nor is one really called for), but from what one gathers Mayer interviewed a number of women who happened to share a first name and a place of residence, and then worked scraps of their stories and conversations into something like a hybrid of oral history and found poetry, accompanied by black-and-white photographs of the Helens, most of whom are middle-aged or older. (There is one nude — named but mysterious — whom Mayer seems not to have met in person.)

At times fragmentary or cryptic, always unassuming, the poems nevertheless adeptly evoke the particularities of time and place, of what it has been like to grow up and grow old in a city that may have known better days but that hasn't quite given up on itself. (There's an awareness of decline throughout, but no self-pity; one subject proudly holds a bumper-sticker that proclaims "TROY: BACK ON TRACK!") The Helens reminisce about childhood haunts, favorite restaurants, long-dead husbands — or just about what it's like to be named after the most famous woman of antiquity. Names are important here; one of the women, Australian-born, bears the extravagant married name of Helen Hypatia Bailey Bayley [sic], while another, born Helen Mayer (but evidently no relation to the author), quips that she "once met rollo may's son & I thought i was more may [emphasis mine] than he."

Photo at top: Helen Worthington Bonesteel. Bernadette Mayer is now working on a similar project centered on Troy, Missouri.

Cassie Burns

The first snows of December haven't yet fallen on the dirty streets of lower Manhattan, but already there's a chill in the air. The photographer, shifting the legs of his tripod and adjusting the camera for just the right view, shudders under his dark frock. It's an overcast morning without much shadow. The little cluster of urchins have observed his preparations, asking him questions and begging him to take their picture. He has waved them off at first but finally agrees, if they will only stand without moving where he tells them to stand, drawing the eye down from that dead expanse of exposed wall. He has other sites to shoot today and can't waste too much time.

A few men, loitering outside the mission or doing business in the shop that pays cash for "old books, newspapers, pamphlets," have been attracted by the commotion and stand in the background, curious but by old habit loath to draw too much attention to themselves. Along the fence there are posters advertising the plebeian entertainments of the week of December 19th — the Windsor, Huber's Museum, the annual ball in honor of John P. Kenney, and Bartholomew's Equine Paradox — but already one of the posters has had patches of paper torn away by the wind or vandals.

The girl lives a few blocks behind where the photographer makes his preparations, at New Chambers and Cherry Streets, an intersection that today no longer exists. Her name is Cassie Burns. She has dark blue eyes and has just turned thirteen, but she's small for her age; there's TB in the family. Wearing an oatmeal skirt, she stands a bit apart from the boys, the usual playmates she watches over almost like a mother. Womanhood is already inexorably separating her fate from theirs. They will be factory workers or soldiers or will join the drunks that haunt the mission; she will have the harder path of motherhood, struggle, lonely old age.

The children, hunched up against the cold in their worn coats, finally settle themselves enough for the photographer to begin. Only after the fact does he notice that two solitary standing figures, one on either side a few yards away, have left ghostly impressions on the glass. The image is issued as a lantern slide bearing the title "N.Y. City — Homes and Ways 62. McAuley Mission, Water St."

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The above isn't a "true story," in that I don't know it to be true, but who knows how far it is from the mark? There really was a Cassie Burns in the neighborhood of Water Street and Cherry Hill when this picture was made, in the first decade of the 20th century. It's highly unlikely but not impossible that the girl — if it really even is a girl — is her, but she undoubtedly knew this block well and may well have played with the children shown here. The real Cassie Burns, it is said, would go on to have nine children of her own.