Responsibility

Adam Serwer, writing in The Atlantic:

Ordinarily, a politician cannot be held responsible for the actions of a deranged follower. But ordinarily, politicians don’t praise supporters who have mercilessly beaten a Latino man as “very passionate.” Ordinarily, they don’t offer to pay supporters’ legal bills if they assault protesters on the other side. They don’t praise acts of violence against the media. They don’t defend neo-Nazi rioters as “fine people.” They don’t justify sending bombs to their critics by blaming the media for airing criticism. Ordinarily, there is no historic surge in anti-Semitism, much of it targeted at Jewish critics, coinciding with a politician’s rise. And ordinarily, presidents do not blatantly exploit their authority in an effort to terrify white Americans into voting for their party. For the past few decades, most American politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, have been careful not to urge their supporters to take matters into their own hands. Trump did everything he could to fan the flames, and nothing to restrain those who might take him at his word.

"Trump's Caravan Hysteria Led to This," October 28, 2018

Enough is Enough

Image credit: The Dallas Holocaust Museum, via the website of Syracuse Cultural Workers, which notes, "This powerful artwork is a signature image of the DHM which hosts thousands of school children each year."

Monk's Mood

What to listen to when you're out driving before dawn, and the streetlights are lit up because it's never really dark anymore, and the traffic lights aren't working right and already the cars are starting to fill the streets and people are on their way to do things that give them no joy but there's another day to get through, and to hell with the ones getting into their limos who will be rolling the dice for all of us today, because it's Monk, dammit, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, 1957, and open your ears and show a little respect for once for the things that really matter.

"What Is Jazz?"

The poem below was printed in a local newspaper in 1966. As the name of the poet would mean nothing to anyone who didn't know her personally I choose to keep it private.

What Is Jazz

jazz is America's song
it's freedom
it's bebop and blues
it's bourbon street and harlem
jazz has a pulse
not a beat
(jazz is a live beast
not a metronome)
it skids and slides
it laughs and sobs
jazz can talk
it talks about yesterday and tomorrow
but mostly about today
about right now
about steamy cellars, hot coffee
and that guy sitting next to you
his troubles
his blues
and that girl he loves
jazz is young
it's always the new thing
it's always out
it wanders
alone
it's tough; it's gutsy
jazz is brave
it does what it feels
not what's right
not what's good
jazz is people who are out
people who walk the streets
it doesn't hide
lice on rats
cold-water flats
jazz gets in
it's real
it's dirty
but jazz never lies to you
it tells you when it hates
it tells you when things are rotten
then it throws back its head
and laughs
it says
man, don't let things get you down
relax baby
enjoy yourself
like this, man
then it bops off
and lets off with a good earthy roar
and ya smile and say
hi bud can I buy you a beer?
what is jazz?
jazz is life, fella
jazz is life.

Black Wall of Certainty

Amar, a Moroccan adolescent, hides out on the roof while the house he has been staying in is raided by the French, who are looking for members of the Istiqlal, an underground independence movement:

He listened: they were going back down the stairs, back along the galleries, back through the house, and away. They had parked their jeeps somewhere far out in the fields, for he waited an interminable time before he heard the faint sound of doors being shut and motors starting up. When they were gone he turned over and sobbed a few times, whether with relief or loneliness he did not know. Lying up here on the cold concrete roof he felt supremely deserted, exquisitely conscious of his own weakness and insignificance. His gift meant nothing; he was not even sure that he had any gift, or ever had had one. The world was something different from what he had thought it. It had come nearer, but in coming nearer it had grown smaller. As if an enormous piece of the great puzzle had fallen unexpectedly into place, blocking the view of distant, beautiful countrysides which had been there until now, dimly he was aware that when everything had been understood, there would be only the solved puzzle before him, a black wall of certainty. He would know, but nothing would have meaning, because the knowing was itself the meaning; beyond that there was nothing to know.

Probably my favorite of Paul Bowles's novels, The Spider's House, which was published in 1955, represents its author's most sustained attempt to depict the interior lives of Moroccans, even if the passage above seems to borrow as much from twentieth-century existentialism as it does from cultural anthropology. Other sections of the book deal, more conventionally, with an expatriate American novelist named John Stenham and a wayward young American woman named Lee Veyron. As the narratives converge, the mutual failure of understanding across cultures comes to the fore. The French colonizers, in the meantime, are depicted as cloddish torturers, while the members of the Istiqlal, who drink alcohol and sport Western clothing, are regarded by Amar (and presumably by Bowles) as corrupt and un-Islamic. Stenham, who speaks Maghrebi Arabic, deplores the encroachments of the modern world into traditional Morocco; Veyron welcomes them.

All of this no doubt reads very differently now than it did when the book was first published; the attempt of an outsider to depict (and thereby define) the consciousness of an inhabitant of a third-world country would probably be regarded as presumptuous if not downright offensive, and Bowles's pessimism about decolonization, like Naipaul's, would be seen as serving the interests of imperialism. But though Stenham seems, on the surface, an obvious stand-in and mouthpiece for Bowles, the writing of fiction exacts its toll on the characters. Stenham is a nostalgist for the primitive, but he is also an insensitive boor who ends by availing himself of his privilege as a Westerner to flee a situation that Amar has no escape from. Bowles the novelist is already a step ahead of his potential critics.

Demonloop

Carnival, September 2018.

V is for ...

A case of a ghastly linguistic muddle involving, in one sentence, no fewer than five languages:

Euclides da Cunha, who was a fanatical republican, a man totally convinced of the necessity of the republic in order to modernize Brazil and create social justice in the country ... was working at that time as a journalist in São Paulo and wrote vehement articles against the rebels in the northeast, calling this rebellion "our vendetta" because of the French reactionary movement in Britain against the French Revolution.

The passage above is from Mario Vargas Llosa's A Writer's Reality, based on a series of lectures he delivered (in English) at Syracuse University in 1988. The context is a discussion of the Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha, whose non-fiction work Os Sertões, regarded as one of the foundation stones of his country's literature, describes a millenarian (and, at least in part, monarchist) uprising in Northeast Brazil towards the end of the 19th century. (Vargas Llosa used the same revolt as the basis for his own novel, La guerra del fin del mundo.) But Euclides da Cunha, who wrote in Portuguese, never called the events in Canudos (where the revolt was centered), "our vendetta"; he called them nossa Vendée, that is, "our Vendée," in allusion to the French counterrevolutionary uprising of 1793. Not writing in his native Spanish, Vargas Llosa has mistakenly employed a false English cognate of Italian origin that in fact has no relation to the French word used in the Portuguese text; moreover, he has apparently confused Britain with Brittany, which is at least vaguely in the same part of France as the department of the Vendée.

The moral of the story, perhaps: never be your own translator.

NB: Os Sertões has been translated into English at least twice, once by Samuel Putnam as Rebellion in the Backlands, and in a recent Penguin Classics translation as Backlands: The Canudos Campaign. Vargas Llosa's novel, which has considerable merit of its own, has been translated as The War of the End of the World.

City

I'm walking the dog home across a city that bears little relation to the real one, as if Robert Moses had succeeded in his nefarious scheme to plow an expressway through lower Manhattan. On a quiet Greenwich Village street I notice a small garden with a few plants and decorations, and I say to myself, "A real hippy must live there." Up ahead, a pickup truck approaches; as it passes I see a young woman standing in the back. She's singing these words:

I'm proud to be a New York City hippy
I'm proud of dirty feet and dirty hair
I'm proud of living with the cock-a-roaches
I'm proud of living in a garbage can*

I recognize the song, and the woman is stunned when I join in halfway through. The truck keeps going. There's nothing left for me to do but pick my way east through the cloverleafs and dead ends, heading home.

* Actual song by David Peel, c. 1972.

The Impossible Book

The CD insert for a radio play by Peter Belgvad and Iain Chambers, from the limited-edition version of The Peter Blegvad Bandbox. Astute listeners may recognize the voice of the distinguished British actress Harriet Walter in the role of Agatha Christie, as part of a cast that also features XTC founder and longtime Blegvad collaborator Andy Partridge. The insert design and art are by Blegvad.

Blegvad in a Box

Chris Cutler's ReR Megacorp has just released a snazzy boxed set bringing together the four albums that Peter Blegvad has recorded for the label, packaging them along with a two-CD compilation of live performances, previously unreleased tracks, and "eartoons" entitled It's All 'Experimental,' as well as an attractively designed illustrated 70-page booklet of notes and musings*, and (if you've plumped for the limited edition) an autographed CD of a radio play entitled The Impossible Book.

I came to Blegvad's musical output (he's also a cartoonist and graphic artist) first via Choices Under Pressure, a mostly solo recording from 2001 that I love but that many aficionados are lukewarm about, and then moved on to his fine 1990 Silvertone CD King Strut and Other Stories. The ReR recordings in this Peter Blegvad Bandbox, loosely focused on a core trio of Blegvad, Chris Cutler, and John Greaves, meticulously document one of the most sustained partnerships of his career, and contain much of his best work as well as some material that is perhaps only for the true devotee.

The most recent of the four ReR CDs, Go Figure, was reviewed briefly in this space when it was released last year. Of the other three, Just Woke Up , from 1995, seems the strongest, both musically and lyrically. Hangman's Hill, from 1998, is the weakest (despite the likeable title track), and 1988's Downtime falls somewhere in the middle. (The last features several Blegvad compositions that were originally recorded by Anton Fier's Golden Palominos during Blegvad's association with that shifting ensemble; by and large the Palominos versions are stronger.) The two-disc It's All 'Experimental' is a valuable omnium gatherum featuring, among other things, two versions of "King Strut," two versions of "Shirt and Comb," and a Blegvad-sung rendition of "A Little Something," originally sung by Dagmar Krause when she, Blegvad, and Anthony Moore made up a trio called Slapp Happy.

As for The Impossible Book, it will have to wait until the CD player in my car starts functioning again.

* The designer is Colin Sackett of Uniformbooks, and the booklet includes liner notes and annotations by Blegvad, Chris Cutler, John Greaves, and Karen Mantler, as well as photographs, Blegvad drawings, and whatnot.

Life force

Images for a prospective re-reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, July 2018.

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

Betrayal

These are not normal circumstances. Nancy LeTourneau:

What we are watching is a complete reorienting of the foreign policy of the United States, and most Republicans are going along because they're too afraid of blow-back from their base. It just so happens that this reorientation is exactly what Vladimir Putin has always wanted. It not only weakens our allies, it weakens us and turns Russia into a player on the global stage. At some point, we all are going to have to recognize that either Trump is a madman swinging wildly in a way that could destroy this country, or he is, as Hillary Clinton once pointed out, a puppet of Putin's. Perhaps some of both.

Our founders attempted to provide us with tools to deal with a situation like this. What they didn't count on was that an entire media apparatus would be developed to enable this kind of madness and that a political party would sit back and watch it happen because they were too drunk with power and/or too cowardly to do anything about it.

"Why Would Trump So Viciously Attack Angela Merkel?," from Washington Monthly.

It's now sadly impossible to avoid the conclusion that the US president has become, for motives that can be speculated on if not known with certainty, the instrument if not the engineer of a conspiracy designed to destroy liberal democracy. One doesn't need to be a particular admirer of Angela Merkel — or Hillary Clinton, for that matter — to understand that everything we ought to value in common — government by consent of the people, human rights, equal treatment under the law, compassion, reason, our own future — is being betrayed. And the right wing in this country is cheering it on. Stay alert.

Summer in the woods

The longer days of late have meant that I'm spending more time outside, often in the early hours before the temperature hits the 90s, and as a result (and, to be honest, also a bit from lack of inclination), I've been posting infrequently here. What interior landscape can match these outlandish colors and patterns?

From top: efts, box turtles, Laetiporus, Russula, unidentified mushroom, possible Tubifera magna slime mold.

Like Blood from a Cut

You've got a lie underneath your tongue where it can't be seen
'Cause you wanna put the truth on a guillotine
But you might as well put out a fire with gasoline

Well you can serve dirty water from a golden cup
You can try to lock up the truth but the door won't shut
'Cause the truth just keeps comin' out like blood from a cut

Buddy and Julie Miller are a married couple who have been making records, together and separately, since 1980 or thereabouts. He's a fine guitar player, singer, songwriter, and producer who has worked with Emmylou Harris, Richard Thompson, and many other people; she's a gifted songwriter and performer who originally emerged from the Christian music scene, though much of her work has a ferociousness and grit that is anything but stereotypically "churchy." She seems to have retreated from the limelight in recent years for health reasons, but Buddy is still very much active.

"Dirty Water," one of a number of Miller compositions that employs imagery involving fluids, first appeared on the couple's self-titled 2001 record. I've taken the lines above out of context, but they seem germane at the moment.

A Point of Crisis

Former Border Control agent Francisco Cantú, writing in the New York Times:

No matter what version of hell migrants are made to pass through at the border, they will endure it to escape far more tangible threats of violence in their home countries, to reunite with family or to secure some semblance of economic stability ...

The logic of deterrence is not unlike that of war: It has transformed the border into a state of exception where some of the most vulnerable people on earth face death and disappearance and where children are torn from their parents to send the message You are not safe here. In this sense, the situation at the border has reached a point of crisis — not one of criminality but of disregard for human life.

We cannot return to indifference. In the aftermath of our nation's outcry against family separation, it is vital that we direct our outrage toward the violent policies that enabled it.

"Cages Are Cruel. The Desert Is, Too." (June 30, 2018)

Further reading: Jason De León, The Land of Open Graves.

Of related interest: "The Real Story Behind a Janitor's Border Photos of Combs, Toys and Bibles" (NYT, July 2nd, 2018)

The Last Thing

I've always had a soft spot for this song, but I've never seen this live version before. Tom Paxton is now eighty and has recorded more than sixty albums. After more than fifty years "The Last Thing on My Mind" still holds up just fine.

Hope in the Mice

The narrator of W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants visits a shuttered sanatorium for mental patients in Ithaca, New York, seeking traces of a relative who died there decades before. Its retired superintendent indulges in a gleeful fantasy of annihilation:

Besides, said Dr Abramsky, all of the material on file - the case histories and the medical records Fahnstock kept on a daily basis, albeit in a distinctly cursory fashion - have [sic] probably long since been eaten by the mice. They took over the madhouse when it was closed and have been multiplying without cease ever since; at all events, on nights when there is no wind blowing I can hear a constant scurrying and rustling in the dried-out shell of the building, and at times, when a full moon rises beyond the trees, I imagine I can hear the pathetic song of a thousand tiny upraised throats. Nowadays I place all my hope in the mice, and in the woodworm and deathwatch beetles. The sanatorium is creaking, and in places already caving in, and sooner or later they will bring about its collapse. I have a recurring dream of that collapse, said Dr Abramsky, gazing at the palm of his left hand as he spoke. I see the sanatorium on its lofty rise, see everything simultaneously, the building as a whole and also the minutest detail; and I know that the woodwork, the roof beams, door posts and panelling, the floorboards and staircases, the rails and banisters, the lintels and ledges, have already been hollowed out under the surface, and that at any moment, as soon as the chosen one amongst the blind armies of beetles dispatches the very last, scarcely material resistance with its jaws, the entire lot will come down.

Dr Fahnstock was Abramsky's predecessor at the institution. Sebald, who was evidently well acquainted with the geography of New York State, may have borrowed the name, with a slight variation in spelling, from Clarence Fahnestock Memorial State Park in Dutchess and Putnam counties a few hours to the east. If so, he may or may not have known that the park's namesake was also a physician (photo above), one who died of pneumonia in France in the closing weeks of World War I.

Photo credit: Bobby Kelley

Memento mori

Along the trail, May 2018.

Tower

In the office on the 73rd floor, high above the city, the president of the company passes me a handful of letters to mail and a note with the deli order for lunch. "Quickly!," he shouts, and I rush to the elevator, which swiftly descends the great steel and glass tower until its doors open at the ground floor. A rush of wind hits me as I exit through revolving doors, and the letters are blown from my hand and scattered. Pedestrians hurrying in and out of the building trample the letters and leave their footprints on them. I gather them up and enter the deli, but there's a crowd ahead of me struggling to be served and in the confusion I drop the letters again. Now they're torn, soiled with beef blood and grease. I run outside looking for a mailbox, for a place to wash my hands, but all in vain...

Notes for a commonplace book (22)

Pablo Neruda:

It is very appropriate, at certain times of the day or night, to deeply observe objects at rest: the wheels that have covered long, dusty distances, bearing heavy loads of vegetables or minerals, sacks from the coal yards, barrels, baskets, the handles and grips of the carpenter's tool. The contact of man with the universe exudes from these things a lesson for the tormented poet. The worn surfaces, the wear that hands have inflicted on things, the often tragic and always wistful aura of these objects, lend to reality a fascination not to be taken lightly.

The confused impurity of human beings is displayed in them, the proliferation, materials used and discarded, footprints and fingerprints, the permanent mark of humanity inundating all objects from within and without. That is the kind of poetry we should strive for, worn away as if by acid from the labor of hands, impregnated with sweat and smoke, smelling of urine and lilies, and seasoned by the various professions that operate both within and outside the law.

A poetry impure as old clothes, as a body, with its food stains and shame, with wrinkles, observations, dreams, vigilance, prophecies, declarations of love and hate, beasts, blows, idylls, manifestos, denials, doubts affirmations, taxes.

"On Impure Poetry," as translated by Mark Eisner in his biography Neruda: The Poet's Calling.