Resolutions for a New Year

(Since a certain public figure is distasteful to me, I refuse to refer to him by name. We all know who "he" is.)

Do something he wouldn't do.
Be something he isn't, and know something he'll never know.
Read something he'll never read. (That one is easily accomplished.)
Listen to music he'll never have the joy of. (Bonus points for live music.)
Care about something.
Care for someone.

Live in the real world.
Slow down. Unplug.
Go somewhere on foot. Look around.
Cook something from scratch.
Do something for the hell of it.
Live in spite of.

Tell the truth. Don't believe bullshit. Know the difference.
Know thyself.

Forget nothing.
Take the long view.
Don't expect things.

"Class Card"

Michael Leddy of Orange Crate Art has asked about the words "class card" in the Arthur Crudup recording embedded in my last post. (Some people may hear "draft card," but I don't think that's what he sings.) The entire line in which those words are found has caused problems. One version of the lyrics has the following:

Well, I got my quiet canary, my class card, too
My baby's wonderin', lord, now what am I to do?

Another has:

Well, I got my white canary, my class card, too
My baby's wondering Lord now what am I to do?

It's clear to me, however, that Crudup isn't singing about a canary, quiet or white or otherwise; the word is "questionnary," that is, "questionnaire," and that's reinforced by the fact that Crudup has another blues ("Give Me A .32-20," sometimes called "Questionnaire Blues") that opens with the following lines:

I've got my questionnaire, and they needs me in the war
I've got my questionnaire, and they needs me in the war
Now if I feel murder, don't have to break the county law

Here again Crudup distinctly adds an extra syllable to "questionnaire."

The "questionnaire" Crudup refers to is presumably the document authorized in 1948 by President Harry Truman in Executive Order 9988. This "Classification Questionnaire" (SSS Form No. 100) was sent to potential draftees in order to determine their eligibility for concription. (There may have been earlier versions.) And Crudup's "class card" was probably the "Notice of Classification," which was one of the two "draft cards" issued by the Selective Service System, the other being a "Registration Certificate."

Sources:
Executive Order 9988—Prescribing Portions of the Selective Service Regulations
Selective Service System: Draft Cards

The Wisdom of the Burrowers

Anthony J. Martin, from the author's website:

Burrows are a refuge from predators, a safe home for raising young, or a tool to ambush prey. Burrows also protect animals against all types of natural disasters: fires, droughts, storms, meteorites, global warmings―and coolings. On a grander scale, the first animal burrows transformed the chemistry of the planet itself many millions of years earlier, altering whole ecosystems. Many animal lineages alive now―including our own―only survived a cataclysmic meteorite strike 65 million years ago because they went underground.

The Evolution Underground: Burrows, Bunkers, and the Marvelous Subterranean World Beneath Our Feet

Arthur Crudup:

Flight (Eduardo Halfon)

Libros del Asteroide in Barcelona has released the seventh in a series of slim, elegant volumes by the writer Eduardo Halfon. Like the others, Tarántula explores in quasi-fictional form the complicated matter of being a Guatemalan-born secular Jew and descendent of Holocaust survivors.

Born in Guatemala in 1971, Halfon left the country as an adolescent when his family fled political turmoil there and resettled in Florida, where he temporarily adopted English as his preferred language. (He now writes in Spanish, but is apparently fully bilingual or more likely multilingual.) When he was thirteen, the narrator of Tarántula, who is also named Eduardo Halfon, was sent back to Guatemala, along with a younger brother, in order to attend a camp that taught survival skills, or, more pointedly, survival skills for Jews. The experience soon took a dark turn, and Halfon took to his heels, hiding in the countryside until he came across a sympathetic campesina. The book relates how, years later, he encountered a female fellow-camper and, eventually, had a confrontational meeting with the former director of the camp, a man with apparent ties to shadowy security organizations.

Eduardo Halfon has described how an interviewer once asked him, provocatively, which two books that he had not read had influenced him the most. In response, equally provocatively, he cited the Torah and the Popol Vuh, the latter being the foundational mythological scripture of Guatemalan indigenous culture.

When I mentioned to a friend this bizarre question-and-answer exchange with the Spanish journalist, she asked me why I didn’t just read both books now? Why did I still doggedly insist on not reading them? And I told her, with as much gravitas as I could muster, that if I did read them now I’d undoubtedly explode.

The truth, however, is that I don’t feel I need to. I already carry both of them with me, written somewhere inside me. The book of the Jews and the book of the Guatemalans, if I’m allowed that oversimplification, and if I can call books those two monumental works that represent and define my two worlds—the two great columns upon which my house is built. But a house that for some reason, ever since childhood, I needed to destroy or at least abandon. I can’t explain why I always felt that way, as if something was forcing me to run off and disappear.

I’ve spent an entire lifetime running away from home.

Halfon's declaration may or may not be strictly accurate; for one thing, he has provided a blurb for an illustrated edition of the Popul Vuh created by Ilan Stavans (a fellow Latin American writer of Jewish ancestry). Nevertheless, the powerful centripetal and centrifugal forces of influence and flight run through all of his work.

Tarántula is so far only available in Spanish (and several European languages), but an English-language edition is planned. The text of the above excerpt is available in English at the website of Tablet magazine.

Haystacks (Martin Johnson Heade)

According to the art historian Theodore E. Stebbins, the American painter Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) devoted more than 120 canvases to portrayals of the salt marshes of the northeastern coast of the United States. He also painted still-lifes, tropical flowers, hummingbirds, and a few portraits, but no subject received his obsessive devotion as did these coastal scenes. There is something hypnotic about them, individually and, especially, when viewed as a series of variations on a theme. The paintings are not large — Stebbins says few are more than 15 x 30 inches.

It's the stacks of salt hay that really set the pictures apart, the way their otherwordly forms — half mushroom, half alien landing-craft — form a middle element between the vastnesses of sky and marsh and the tiny human figures who seem much too insignificant to have built them. The weather, the time of day, and the details of the topography vary from canvas to canvas, but there is a haunting stillness to them all.

Crows (Sarah Orne Jewett)

From A Marsh Island:

It was a famous day for crows: from one field after another a flight of them took heavily to their wings, and, as if unwillingly, mounted to the higher air. They cawed loudly, and appeared to have business of a public nature on hand. Some were migrating, and others were contemptuously rebuking these wanderers, and making their arrangements to winter in their familiar woods: it was all a great chatter and clatter and commotion. The affairs of human beings were but trivial in comparison. Helpless creatures, who crept to and fro on the face of the earth, and were drawn about by captive animals of lesser intellect, were not worth noticing, and the great black birds sailed magnificently down the sky, with the fresh breeze cool in their beaks and the sunlight shining on their sombre wings. Whatever might be said of their morals, they were masters of the air, and could fly, while men could not.

I liked the cover art on this University of Pennsylvania edition of Jewett's novel, but I didn't immediately get it, in part because some elements on my copy are obscured by librarian's tape. It's a cropped version of a painting by Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) entitled Gremlin in the Studio I, and the round object in the left, just below the painting-in-a-painting, is in fact a gremlin. Harder still to notice is that water is flowing out of the marsh depicted in the upper canvas and onto the studio floor.

Update: Is it in fact "a gremlin"? I haven't been able to find out whether Heade actually used that word in referring to this painting; most sources indicate that it wasn't coined until after he died.

Harris for President

Since I have no billion-dollar media empire to protect, and since hardly anyone listens to me anyway, I have no hesitation in endorsing Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for president and vice-president in the 2024 election. That many millions of my fellow citizens see things differently speaks volumes about the current state of American political culture (bad) and about the open wounds of American history (unhealed, and probably unhealable), but doesn't alter my opinion. A lie is a lie, no matter how often repeated and spread about, and, bluntly put, everything that comes out of the mouth of the Republican candidates is a lie. I find little point in arguing with those who still refuse, or are unable, to understand the danger. There is no grey area; to quote Peter Case, this is "the fork in the road where we all have to choose."

We have a long, sad history in the United States of failing to do the right thing; somehow we have muddled through, more or less. A similar failure now may be more difficult to overcome. We can only hope that historians of the future — if the honest study of history survives — will not find in our actions rich cause for condemnation.

Notes for a Commonplace Book (31)

Gillian Welch:

About a month ago, my eye was drawn to a book that has sat mostly unread on my shelf for some time, ‘The Book of Disquiet’ by Fernando Pessoa. I picked it up and randomly read a passage of such beautiful poignancy, such exquisite human precision, that the wonderment of creative expression flooded me. I told no one about it, but kept it to myself, and the impulse to write, the need to grapple with this moment has returned to me and grown from that little seed.

(From a 2020 interview with Hanif Abdurraqib)

Woodland (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)

For whatever reason I've been listening to Gillian Welch a lot the last few weeks, and as it turns out she has a new record that has just been released. Woodland is officially credited to Welch and her longtime partner David Rawlings, probably because he takes lead vocals on a few tracks, but in any case their work has always been a collaboration.

I took a spin today to run some errands on a beautiful fall New England afternoon and put the new CD in the drive, this being probably the last car we'll ever own that has that capability. It's a pretty impressive record. Gillian's vocals are as good as ever and David's maybe better, the songs are interesting, and the instrumental textures are just gorgeous. Below is a sample track:

Woodland is available from Gillian and David's own Acony Records, as well as, of course, the usual sources.

Lore Segal (1928-2024)

The writer Lore Segal has died; the New York Times has an obituary. Two of Segal's novels have been on and off my to-read list for years, though I confess that I've never quite gotten around to them; I'm putting Other People's Houses and Her First American back at the top of the queue. What I have read, and re-read often, are her brilliant translations from the Brothers Grimm collected in The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm with the delicious illustrations by Maurice Sendak. Segal was without peer in being able to capture both the lyrical beauty of the tales and their sinister horror, as in the refrain from the title tale, which I believe I first heard on the radio in the 1970s.

My mother she butchered me,
My father he ate me,
My sister, little Ann Marie,
She gathered up the bones of me
And tied them in a silken cloth
To lay under the juniper.
Tweet twee, what a pretty bird am I!

Findings (1)

Description of Item: Cash register receipt, La Fabrique de Bagel de Montréal
Origin and Date of Item (if known): Montreal, Canada, August 8, 2024, 9:58 AM
Where and When Found: Portsmouth, New Hampshire, September 2024
Circumstances of Finding: Tucked into a library book (Edward P. Jones: The Known World)
Condition of Item: Slightly wrinkled; no evidence of folding or food stains

Analysis: Given that the item is unfolded and of no evident value, it was probably placed in the book at the time of issuance and used as a bookmark. Since the book belongs to a US library it (the book) has therefore crossed the US-Canada border twice. We interpret "sdw dejeuner" as meaning "breakfast sandwich." Two drinks, a sandwich, and a bagel were purchased, so there were probably two patrons traveling together, perhaps a Portsmouth couple on vacation. Only one of the "carrés assortis" was purchased.

Notes & Queries (Zelia Nuttall)

"Paean" isn't exactly an everyday word, but it's amusing to find it being confused with an even more obscure word, one that is new to me. Merilee Grindle:

Like the Chicago World's Fair, the [San Francisco] exposition of 1915 was a paeon to the technological, industrial, creative, and colonial achievements of the United States.

In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl: Zelia Nuttall and the Search for Mexico's Ancient Civilizations

According to Merriam-Webster, a "paeon" is "a metrical foot of four syllables with one long and three short syllables (as in classical prosody) or with one stressed and three unstressed syllables (as in English prosody)." It is sometimes confused with the far more common "paean," which is "a joyous song or hymn of praise, tribute, thanksgiving, or triumph."

That minor error aside, Grindle's book is a fine piece of work, illuminating the colorful life and notable accomplishments of a pivotal figure in the transition between archaeology and anthropology as pursuits for wealthy amateurs and archaeology and anthropology as the domain of university-trained scholars.

Pioneers

The development where we live now is a relatively new one, and there are patches of recently disturbed "vacant" ground dotted around its periphery. In particular, there's a knoll out our back window that was scraped and reshaped by earth-moving machinery just last year. In one growing season it has gone from bare earth to a thriving and complex meadow ecosystem. A cover crop may have been broadcast for erosion control, but most of what has sprouted up appears to have arisen from seeds that lay dormant in the ground for months or years, awaiting an opportunity to germinate.

My unscientific survey finds, just beyond our walls, Queen Anne's lace, yarrow, great mullein, hare's-foot clover and several other clovers, crown vetch, purple vetch, and bird's-foot trefoil, various grasses, fireweed (Erechtites hieraciifolius), asters and goldenrods (probably several species of both), boneset (which a worried neighbor mistook for poison hemlock), thistles, and evening-primrose. Down an adjoining embankment, where there has been growth for a longer period, there are cattails and phragmites, blackberry brambles, pokeweed, whorled and purple loosestrife, and agalinis. That's not counting the ones I haven't noticed or can't identify. A healthy percentage of these plants are so-called "aliens" that weren't part of the precolumbian landscape of North America but have long since become naturalized.

An even less scientific survey turns up a host of insects, notably various dragonflies, bees, wasps, beetles, and a scattering of butterflies (but few swallowtails and monarchs, perhaps because the milkweeds haven't yet appeared). There are orb-weavers and other spiders, and unfortunately ticks as well. We've had regular visits from wild turkeys and deer and occasional sightings of coyotes, groundhogs, and skunks. One evening we spotted a porcupine browsing unhurriedly and almost invisibly among the clumps of herbage.

Earlier in the summer there were woodcocks buzzing and courting at dusk, and goldfinches, bluebirds, hummingirds, and mourning doves have been abundant. We hear owls often, and no doubt they hunt for voles and other small mammals as soon as the sun goes down.There is certainly far more that we don't see than what we do.

A dirt road leading out of the back of the development has been widened and graded in the last few weeks, and further construction is expected. No doubt the resident and transient flora and fauna will be in flux for some time. But it's astonishing how quickly and vigorously life can seize hold, given half a chance.

****

Many of the plant species mentioned above, as well as their faunal associates, are profiled by John Eastman in The Book of Field and Roadside: Open-Country Weeds, Trees and Wildflowers of Eastern North America (2003). Like its companions The Book of Forest and Thicket and The Book of Swamp and Bog it is illustrated with line drawings by Amelia Hansen, and was published by Stackpole Books; all three volumes now seem to be out of print.

Parts Unknown

A young officer named Giovanni Drogo sets out on a journey to his first post in the temporary company of a colleague, and looks back over his native city.

They had reached the brow of a hill. Drogo turned to see the city against the light; the morning smoke rose from the roofs. He picked out the window of his room. Probably it was open. The women were tidying up. They would unmake the bed, shut everything up in a cupboard and then bar the shutters. For months and months no one would enter except the patient dust and, on sunny days, thin streaks of light. There it was, shut up in the dark, the little world of his childhood. His mother would keep it like that so that on his return he could find himself again there, still be a boy within its walls even after his long absence—but of course she was wrong in thinking that she could keep intact a state of happiness which was gone for ever or hold back the flight of time, wrong in imagining that when her son came back and the doors and windows were reopened everything would be as before.

I read Dino Buzzati's novel The Tartar Steppe probably forty years ago and hadn't given it much thought since (although I kept my copy) until I chanced upon a second-hand copy of an Italian edition a few weeks back. I don't speak Italian and have never studied the language, but with my Spanish and French and regular reference to Stuart C. Hood's 1952 translation I can pick my way slowly through it. There are advantages to reading this way; not only does it give me access to Buzzati's actual language but it forces me to linger over every sentence, to read and re-read. A book I could probably breeze through in a couple of days in translation should keep me occupied for weeks.

Buzzati's book has, inevitably, been compared to Kafka's The Castle (solitary man summoned to mysterious fortress for purposes that remain obscure), but it has a lightness and a sadness of its own.

In a gap in the nearby crags (they were already deep in darkness), behind a disorderly range of crests and incredibly far off, Giovanni Drogo saw a bare hill which was still bathed in the red light of the sunset—a hill which seemed to have sprung from an enchanted land; on its crest there was a regular, geometric band of a peculiar yellowish colour—the silhouette of the Fort.

But how far off it was still! Hours and hours yet on the road and his horse was spent. Drogo gazed with fascination and wondered what attraction there could be in that solitary and almost inaccessible keep, so cut off from the world. What secrets did it hide? But time was running short. Already the last rays of the sun were slowly leaving the distant hill and up its yellow bastions swarmed the dark hordes of encroaching night.

New York Review Books, which has made a point of keeping Buzzati's work accessible in English, has issued a newer translation entitled, for some reason, The Stronghold.

Don't mess with the cat ladies

Perhaps someone should have given the Republican vice-presidential candidate a history lesson:

Even a powerful park commissioner found the housewives and their perambulators blocking his way when he tried to rent out a bit of the green as a parking lot for a private restaurant he favored; and wild painters and cat-keeping spinsters united to keep him from forcing a driveway through lovely Washington Square.

Paul and Percival Goodman, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life

The "powerful park commissioner" was of course Robert Moses.

Toumani Diabaté (1965-2024)

The great Malian kora master Toumani Diabaté died last week at age 58; the Times obituary says the cause of death was kidney failure.

I think I first became aware of Diabaté's music through Bela Fleck's documentary Throw Down Your Heart. I sought out The Mandé Variations and then this record, made with his son Sidiki.

The entire record is magnificent, but I particularly admire the track entitled "Lampedusa," which the Guardian, in its review, called "a gently exquisite lament for African migrants who died trying to reach Europe."

Toumani Diabaté was descended from a long line of Malian kora players, but like many of the best traditional musicians he completely reconceived what could be done with the instrument.

Peter Case: North Coast Blues

This song appears on Peter Case's 1993 Vanguard album Peter Case Sings Like Hell, where it's the only track that isn't a cover. In three quick verses with no chorus or bridge it vividly sketches a setting without ever telling whatever story lies behind it. Accused of an unknown offense, a man sits in a jail cell, one more schlub caught in machinery that may or may not ever let him go; it could be a John Garfield flick or a deleted scene from a novel by Franz Kafka. Over the relentless syncopation of the melody the sharp, economical lines tell us everything we need to know about the attitude of the authorities: The priest came in to talk about mercy / the sergeant nodded by the door. Where is this "North Coast," with its stockyards and "the roar of the stadium"? I don't think it matters.

Now what I got is what I started with
even that I'm bound to lose
so if you hear you better say a prayer
and hope you never get the North Coast blues

Antiquariana

A quick visit to a local book sale yielded two books, neither of which I had heard of, though the topics of both are of longstanding interest to me. The first, which I haven't started reading yet, bears the eyecatching but alas entirely innocent title of The Hookers of Kew: 1785-1911; the subjects are, of course, the British botanists William and Joseph Hooker, the latter a great friend and key ally of Darwin. Written by Mea Allan, it was published in 1967. This copy has been nicely rebound in green quarter-leather with raised bands on the spine, perhaps because the original binding fell apart. Sadly, the original decorated endpapers are gone, as is the genealogical table that would have been originally bound in at the back.

The other volume is a facsimile of Robert Robinson's 1887 work Thomas Bewick: His Life and Times. Bewick (the great wood engraver), the author, and the publisher of the facsimile, Frank Graham, were all based in Newcastle upon Tyne, and the printer of the facsimile was Howe Brothers in nearby Gateshead. (More on Graham at the bottom of this post.)

Robinson's book is frustratingly organized, leaves unaddressed matters one would have expected him to touch on, and veers into digressions of questionable relevance, but for all that it's a delight, elegantly printed and abundantly illustrated with some 200 crisp reproductions of wood engravings by Bewick and his circle. There is a list of subscribers at the front, and Robinson makes clear that the volume was aimed at a very specific clientele:

To meet the wishes of friends and collectors, the size of it has been altered to imperial 8vo, so as to range with the largest paper copies of [Bewick's] Birds, Quadrupeds, and Fables, thus enabling gentlemen [sic] to have a uniform set of the whole.

There's no bio of Robert Robinson on the facsimile edition, though it's evident from the contents that he was involved in the trade in fine books and prints. With a bit of digging I turned up an obituary. According to The Bookseller (October 14, 1903), he was

at one time one of the most famous booksellers in the North of England. Mr. Robinson was widely known in connection with the literature appertaining to Thomas Bewick's life and labours, and he was also an antiquarian bookseller of more than local distinction. He was apprenticed to Thomas Brown, of the Royal Arcade, Newcastle, in 1833, and he commenced business for himself in 1840 at the "Bewick's Head" at the corner of Shakespeare Street and Pilgrim Street, occupying the same quarters for little less than half a century. His enthusiasm for the great wood engraver was unbounded; he enjoyed the acquaintance of Bewick's daughters, Jane and Isabella; [...] He was greatly respected in the Tyneside town, and his funeral, which took place in Jesmond Old Cemetery on the 1st inst., was largely attended. We notice that more than one of our respected contemporaries refer to the deceased gentleman's friendship with William Pitt, but we are afraid to believe in this precocity.

As for Frank Graham, who reprinted the book in 1972, he had a backstory one would hardly have expected from the publisher of such regional titles as View on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway and Beuk O' Newcassel Sangs ("A fine collection of local songs with magnificent illustrations by Joseph Crawhall"). Born in Sunderland in 1913, the son of a draper, he became politically engaged, joined the Communist Party, and fought in Spain with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Unfit for service in the Second World War because of wounds he had received in Spain, he pursued various occupations, including that of milkman, before becoming a teacher. Identifying a lack of regional books in the publishing market, he turned entrepreneur and eventually published nearly 400 titles (many of which he also wrote) with total sales in excess of three million copies. He sold the business in 1987 and died, age 93, in 2006. Northeast Labour History has a full obituary.

A rabbit is not an idea

New Hampshire, Summer 2024.

Road life (The Bear Comes Home)

I have no idea whether this wooden sculpture of a saxophone-playing bear, spotted while I was driving along a back road in Maine, is intended as an homage to the protagonist of one of my favorite novels, but I choose to believe that it is.

Rafi Zabor's The Bear Comes Home was published in 1997 and won a PEN/Faulkner Award the following year. I must have read it at least four times by now.

Earlier post: Of Love and Bears