Of barricades, and dreams

Things seem to be happening so fast of late -- governments falling, state houses under occupation -- that it can be hard to know what to make of it, let alone what to say about it in a space like this, which has by intention never been particularly directed towards politics or news. And this at a time when, according to an article in today's New York Times, blogging is itself apparently passé in any case, displaced in the attentions of the young (though not those in my age bracket, I note) by services such as Twitter and Tumblr. As one adopter of the latter explains:

"It's different from blogging because it's easier to use... With blogging you have to write, and this is just images. Some people write some phrases or some quotes, but that's it."

God forbid you should have to write! -- but then the practice of teasing one's thoughts out of the written word isn't for everyone, as much as I remain devoted to it. (In fairness, I also use Tumblr on occasion, as an adjunct or when I have images to share about which I have nothing momentous to say.) Mindful of short attention spans (including my own), I tend to keep these pieces short, except when they insist otherwise. But in a world of Tweets perhaps even three or four paragraphs are too much to expect someone to read.

In one sense I don't consider myself a "political person," in that I don't get a thrill out of the sport of politics the way some people do from basketball or football. And yet I follow political events with some degree of attentiveness and even passion, when they touch on things that I think matter to me as a citizen. Other than voting and shooting my mouth off, here and there, about this and that (most of which comes down to preaching to the choir), I'm not particularly "active" politically. (There is one exception which I won't go into but which some people very well might not even recognize as activism.) But I do believe that as a citizen I have a responsibility to be informed about public affairs, to attempt to make reasoned judgments about what I see taking place, and, to the extent that I'm able, to take at least some small steps towards advancing the prospects of the kind of society I want to be a part of. To dismiss politics altogether is, in effect, to renounce part of one's self, because politics, for all its well-known sordidness, is nothing more nor less than the practice of arranging how we as human beings manage our interactions with each other. Pace Margaret Thatcher, there is such a thing as society, and most of us have no choice but to live in it. How that society is organized isn't something that just happens; it's something that is negotiated by its members. Some are stronger and exercise great influence; others are weak and exert barely none at all. But we are all affected, and we are all, in one way or another, implicated.

Nevertheless, I don't write a political blog, because, for one thing, many other people already do so and I'm not at all convinced that, however much attention I might devote to it, I have much to contribute in that format that isn't already being said better and with more assurance than I could. Also, frankly, because politics is not a particularly restorative avocation. I have sought in this space, quite selfishly, to create a small opening for things that I believe in that give me joy and that I think would interest the like-minded, things that might otherwise be lost in the noise (and there's plenty of that). So this blog remains my indulgence; with minor exceptions, its only political aspect is perhaps to imagine the vague tentative contours of what might be a better world if we ever able to lay aside our bad faith and trust each other enough to work in common instead of clutching desperately onto our own little piece. Whether, in the midst of all the upheavals and revolutions, what I do is of the slightest significance, whether I am what Katya Princip in Malcolm Bradbury's Rates of Exchange called "a character in the world-historical sense" at all, I leave to others to judge.

Illustration: Delacroix, Freedom at the Barricades

Supertest

Ganonoque, Ontario, 1940

Adele

She never knew her mother's family and had few memories of her father, none of them distinct. When she was four years old he had walked out of their rented clapboard house one morning carrying a suitcase. If there had been a fight or other preamble she must have slept through it, but in any case he never came back, and since as far as she knew her mother never inquired after his whereabouts she assumed that his departure had been at her invitation. Somehow her mother made ends meet until Adele was old enough to go to school and she could return to work and begin to bring in a little money. They moved with regularity, almost every year, usually in the summer, until her mother remarried. She didn't particularly care for her stepfather -- he was aloof and heavy-set and smelled like hair tonic -- but no longer having to be the one girl in her school without a father came as a relief. She suspected it was mostly her mother's fault when he too decamped, but Adele never forgave him anyway. When he appeared at the house, now and then, to visit her much younger half-brother, she usually managed to be out.

When she was sixteen she left home after a row with her mother. It wasn't really such a big deal -- they'd had worse -- but she was fed up with school and just didn't feel like going back. It was the sixties and it was what the people she hung out with were doing. She didn't exactly "run away." Her mother knew where she was living and Adele went home once a week or so when she wanted some of her things, but after she started traveling and later wound up on the West Coast eventually she just stopped coming home. She hated writing letters but kept in touch, at least sporadically. The years went quicker than she thought. She worked in a fish hatchery and a bar and a doctor's office and even in a factory once for a couple of weeks, then she got a GED and bought a camera and started taking photographs for a local weekly. She got to be good enough at it that after a year or so someone gave her a lead to some magazine work, and after that she was on the road a good part of the time. She sent her mother postcards. There were men in her life and they were decent guys for the most part but she somehow never wanted to settle and one by one they moved on or just stayed friends.

Her little brother, so unlike her in this regard, thrived in high school; when he was accepted to Stanford he came out to see her. They were all but strangers at first but he was a good kid and they wound up hitting it off. For a couple of years he spent part of the summers with her -- that is, in her house, as she herself was often elsewhere -- but when he graduated he went back east. When she returned for her first visit in twenty years she found her mother remarried again, older than she imagined, and not well. After that she made a point of coming back as often as she could get away, but when her mother entered her final illness she was in Mexico and didn't get word until it was too late.

Her mother's widower was a gaunt, quiet older man who treated her without reproach. She felt guilt-ridden and terrible but his kindness and her brother's affection and surprising level-headedness -- where had he gotten it from?, she wondered -- carried her through the week after the funeral. Her mother had left her a little money in her will. It wasn't much and she certainly hadn't been expecting anything, but the last maternal gesture touched her more than she expected. As a keepsake her stepfather offered her a photo album she barely remembered from her childhood. Except for a few pictures of a smiling Adele riding a hobby horse or building sandcastles all of the photographs were from the years before her mother first married; the few blank spots, Adele surmised, were the ghostly traces that were all that remained of her own father. The little album with its pale blue faux leather cover held a few score images, all of them black and white. There were a few images of typical if unidentifiable scenic New England vistas, but the rest were of Adele's mother, groups of smiling young women who must have been her friends, and a few shots of a stout older woman in white gloves, stiffly posing next to a man in a summer suit and boater. None of the snapshots had captions and Adele never could find out who any of them were.

Margaret and Alexander Potter

This Puffin picture book, which was published in the mid-1940s, is by the husband-and-wife team of Margaret and Alexander Potter. The human figures are almost unbearably crudely done (the cover is by no means the worst example), which is a shame because some of the colored spreads inside are quite appealing.

I don't know how the Potters divided their duties, but they were capable of sophisticated work, at least in terms of architectural draftsmanship (Alexander was an architect by profession). The following three images are from Houses (1948) and are reproduced from the page devoted to the Potters from Chris Mullen's web project called The Visual Telling of Stories.




Chris Mullen incidentally also has some scans from A History of the Countryside, but his images are evidently from a different, perhaps later printing, as they lack the background colors seen in the two-page spread below.


I rather like this layout, which is accompanied by a simple but intelligent discussion of urban planning. Here are close-up scans.



The Independent has an obituary of Margaret Potter, who died in 1984.

Chris Mullen reports that many of the early Picture Puffins, of which he reproduces a number of examples, were lithographed by the printing firm of W. S. Cowell of Ipswich. According to an interview he conducted with a former CEO of the firm, much of the Cowell archive was eventually discarded and burned.

Swedish Summer

While trying to scan some photographs from an old paperback I was having issues with pixelation. Rather than try to fix the problem (and not being especially adept at these things), I decided to roll with it instead. Using the Black & White setting, these images emerged.





The above, by the way, is the Gondolen restaurant in Stockholm, which is still in operation.


With apologies to Bertil Hultén.

The Coup

Just ahead of dawn the young sentry in the lobby of the interior ministry, bored and sleepy after yet another overnight shift alone, heard tapping on the plate glass door as he made his rounds of the long empty corridors. Startled, he adjusted the strap of the rifle that was slung over his shoulder, straightened his cap, and made sure his shirt was tucked in all the way around. Visitors were rare on his watch; most likely it was an inspector, and it wouldn't pay to be looking unkempt. He strode quickly to the main entrance and peered out through the glass at the plaza that surrounded the ministry, lit up by the spotlights along the building's exterior.

When he reached the door and saw who was there he stood panicked and puzzled for a moment. It wasn't an inspector at all but three girls, identically dressed in the uniform of the national university that occupied a bluff a half-mile away along the river. As soon as they saw him they began calling to him urgently. One, the tallest of the three, held aloft a large manilla envelope that appeared to have some kind of official stamp on it; the flap was open and several sheets of paper were protruding a bit, though he couldn't tell what kind of documents they might be. The other two girls, after a brief pause when they first caught sight of the sentry, began banging on the glass again, pleading with him to unlock the door.

He stared at them, then shook his head. Obviously it was against regulations to open the door until the ministry officials began to arrive for their morning office hours and he was relieved by the day shift. He nervously felt for his radio, but decided it wouldn't be wise to disturb the chief of the security detail, no doubt still asleep in bed with his mistress, for a trivial matter he could handle himself. Hadn't he once received a dressing down for calling an alarm, in the middle of the night, because he had heard what turned out to be windblown acorns bouncing against the side of the ministry? He shook his head at the girls again, emphatically this time, and gave them a dismissive wave of the hand to make them go away.

But they didn't go away. Instead, the one holding the manilla envelope, who seemed to be their leader, drew out some papers and held them up. She seemed very indignant. Perhaps she was the daughter of some official, dispatched to deliver urgent correspondence to the ministry, though the more he thought it over the more unlikely that possibility seemed. He shook his head one more time, looking as severe as he could, hoping the girls would understand that the matter was now settled and that further entreaties would be a waste of time, but he didn't resume his rounds.

The girls turned away from him, conferring by themselves, then the tall one pulled out a cell phone and punched a number. She gestured at the door and shook her head while she spoke into the phone; she leafed through the papers, then slapped them against her thigh in evident exasperation. In the meanwhile the other two girls had returned their attention to the door. They banged on the glass and beckoned to him; he couldn't make out what they were saying but he distinctly heard the word “idiot.”

The sentry tried to pretend he was ignoring them, but as this clearly wasn't having the desired effect he thought it over, reached for his radio again, then changed his mind. Instead he strode firmly to the door and demanded their business in a firm voice. The girl on the cell phone broke off the call, and all three began chattering at him at once, more frantically than before. They held up a sheet of paper; it looked official, but he couldn't catch its import from where he stood. Finally he reached to his belt for the key and inserted it in the door.

The girls rushed in all at once. One of them immediately darted to the bottom of the stairs. He yelled after her, started to follow, until he noticed that somehow, from out of nowhere, another cluster of students had appeared and were shoving their way through the half-open door. This group included some male students, as well as a couple of burlier, older men. Before he could react one of them had seized the rifle that still lay slung on his shoulder. He resisted but they pulled it away and subdued him, then pushed him aside.

Another cell phone snapped open, and within seconds a crowd was forming, a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty people, students mostly but not all, running individually or in twos and threes across the plaza between the oak trees, scattering or crushing the newly fallen acorns as they came. Swiftly, largely in silence, they made their way inside and swept up the stairs to the offices above.

Upstairs the corridors were mostly deserted, but the crowd barged into an office where a dozen startled men and women sat at desks, headphones on, cigarettes between their fingers. One of them drew a revolver and waved it around; the intruders swarmed past him and out of the room, hurrying down the hall towards the private elevator that led to the minister's office. The man with the pistol put it away and reached for the telephone. Then he noticed that his fellow-workers had all abandoned their posts and disappeared.

The door to the minster's office was locked. While the crowd debated how to proceed a guard rushed in and fired a pistol shot into the ceiling. At the sound the throng drew back, at first, but the force of new arrivals propelled them forward again, trapping the guard against the door for an uncomfortable moment, until word was passed back and the shoving stopped. A harried-looking functionary, bloodshot and tieless in a glum disheveled suit, foced his way through, unopposed. After a moment's parley he dismissed the guard and produced a key, then stood aside as the crowd burst into the inner sanctum of the ministry.

At the headquarters of the national broadcasting service, a little after dawn, the staff suddenly rose, seemingly as one, and stormed into the studio just as the morning newscast was beginning. The perplexed announcer froze, looked up at the crowd gathered around him, then took off his earpiece and yielded the microphone to one of his subordinates. The camera crew continued filming without a pause. A producer darted in from the control room, infuriated, yelling and threatening, but was soon subdued by an offer of immediate defenestration.

As the city woke up and the news began to spread the downtown districts filled with pedestrians, most of them hustling towards the presidential palace and the ministries that surrounded it. Traffic began to back up, as a tide of cars and trucks, all heading in the same direction, inundated the main avenues, tying up streets for hundreds of square blocks. By the time the army arrived the entire area was gridlocked. The lead tank tried to ram its way through, pushing three or four cars aside and riding over the top of another, but the situation was quickly understood to be hopeless, especially after the military vehicles became trapped, in their turn, by another wave of incoming traffic behind them. The soldiers abandoned their stalled vehicles and stood around in groups, shouting into radios and cell phones, until the crowds began to swell around them and they broke up, retreating on foot to their barracks or just heading home.

The president had slept in, as usual, and was shaving when he heard the commotion outside. He set his razor down, hastily grabbed a towel, and strode to the window in his sleeveless undershirt and shorts. The sight of the crowed stunned him; just then the phone rang. It was the minister of defense, calling from his home in the hills on the outskirts of the city. Had he heard the news? What were his orders? The president said he would call right back, then pulled on a pair of pants and rushed into the hallway, looking for his chief of staff. The offices around him were bustling like a hive; papers were being shredded, desks emptied out. His secretary breezed by him, securing her purse on her shoulder as she hurried off, giving him just a quick glance and a weak smile before she darted towards the elevator.

He went over to a window, hid himself behind a curtain, and peeked outside. The plaza was jammed with thousands of people; they seemed to be in the mood for celebration. He looked in vain for any sign of the police, or his personal bodyguard, but except for one police cruiser parked on the far edge of the crowd, its lights flashing, they were nowhere to be seen. He retreated into his private chambers, pulled down a briefcase and a plastic shopping bag, and began to gather his personal effects. When he left, walking in a daze down the hall towards the elevator as the transitional committee assembled in his office, no one even noticed him.

The above was first written in 2007. I am reposting it and dedicating it to all those in Egypt, Belarus, and elsewhere for whom it must, for now, remain only a fantasy.

Jules Shear: Between Us

Jules Shear has been around the music business for more than two decades, having composed several songs that became at least minor hits for other people, but were it not for this CD, which grew out of a series of concerts by songwriters that he hosted in the '90s at the now defunct Bottom Line in Manhattan, I most likely either wouldn't recognize his name or would confuse him with Jule Styne.

There seems to be general agreement that the biggest rap against Shear has always been his voice. (Typical: Jon Pareles, in The New York Times: "An exceptional songwriter will always have friends among musicians; a limited singer may need them. Jules Shear is both …") He's no Aaron Neville to be sure, though once you get used to it his singing has a kind of agreeable smokiness to it that I've come to be quite comfortable with. If you prefer your music with no seams showing you're not going to like Between Us, but I'm quite fond of it. Every now and then I dig it out and remind myself of how good a record it is.

Shear has recorded solo and as part of several fairly obscure bands (including one called Jules & the Polar Bears which if nothing else deserves some recognition for having a really cute name). On Between Us he shares vocals in a series of duets with some very good female singers (Paula Cole, Suzzy Roche, Amy Rigby, and others) as well as some male singers (Ron Sexsmith, Freedy Johnston, Curtis Stigers) whose chops are not necessarily out of line with Shear's own. There is one instrumental track, "Entre nous," a duet with bassist Rob Wasserman. Collectively the songs -- at least the ones that have lyrics -- anatomize a relationship that is evidently on the rocks, regarding it with varying proportions of whimsy, melancholy, and resignation. As with lovers since at least the troubadours, the truest evidence of his faith is in the depth of its disappointment.

The lyrics have an improvised, back-of-the-envelope feel to them, which is not at all to suggest that they aren't actually carefully crafted. The same can be said of the arrangements, which are mostly built around Shear's acoustic guitar (he is said to play it idiosyncratically upside-down) with some well-chosen guests on everything from mandolin and banjo to trumpet and sax. The style is eclectic, borrowing as much from torch song and chanson as from folk and country, with a good handful of theatricality thrown in. Shear writes breathtaking bridges, and almost every song here has a great one. It's hard to say how well any of these songs would hold up removed from their context, but taken together they work superbly well.

Almost every cut here has its little delights, in the melody and in the lyrics. One of my favorites is in the final verse of the last song, "You Might As Well Pray," which seems to hold out (if only then to whisk away) a vision of reconciliation:

it's no use backtracking
& wondering where we went
it's like watching where the dog
ran through the wet cement
there's no way in this world
we'll ever be content
so try to make it like the dream we had
the peaceable kingdom
where no one's betrayed
you might as well pray

you might as well pray
you might as well pray

(From 2008; reposted because I'm listening to it and because that's the kind of day it is.)

A Manhattan Mission

The Cremorne McAuley Mission, at 104 West 32nd Street near Sixth Avenue, New York. The engraving, which probably dates from around 1883-84, is from Jerry McAuley: His Life and Work (Second Edition), edited by Rev. R. M. Offord. The artist is not credited.

Judge on Trial

I first read this novel in 1993, the year it was published in the US by Knopf, but the copyright date of the Czech edition, Soudce z milosti, was 1986, and even that was for a reworked version. According to a review by the late Malcolm Bradbury, the book was originally written and circulated as samizdat in 1978. The events of the novel itself take place around 1972; that is, four years after the premature end of the Prague Spring in which Ivan Klíma, as the editor of Literární noviny, was an active participant. There are also several long digressions dating back to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia during World War II. The book remained unpublishable in Klíma's own country until the collapse in 1989 of the Czech Communist regime, which to the end of its days was one of the Soviet Bloc's most hardline members.

The protagonist of Judge on Trial is Adam Kindl, is a jurist assigned to hear the case of a man accused of the murder, by gas asphyxiation, of his landlady and her adolescent granddaughter. The incident wasn't political in nature but its consequences may be. The defendant faces a possible sentence of death; Kindl, though no dissident, had once incurred the displeasure of the Communist Party, years before, by writing an article calling for the abolition of the death penalty. The judge suspects that he has been assigned the case as a test of his loyalty. If he refuses to impose a death sentence he will lose his job and his decision will likely be overruled upon appeal anyway.

Except for the fact that its author is by profession a writer and not a lawyer, much of the book appears to be loosely autobiographical. Like Kindl, Klíma was born into a thoroughly assimilated family of Jewish descent and spent much of his childhood in a concentration camp. The details of the judge's family members, his affiliation and eventual disenchantment with the Communist Party after the war, and even his marital infidelities seem to echo the author's own background. The chapters dealing with the concentration camp coincide with many of the details of the story "Miriam," included in Klíma's My First Loves. (It will be interesting to see to what degree they will also correspond to Klíma's as yet untranslated memoirs.)

In contrast to much of the literature of the same period, whether from Eastern Europe or elsewhere, Judge on Trial is neither ironic nor phantasmagorical. Its manner is realist, its tone earnest. It presents no difficulties, in terms of following the action or interpreting the motives of the characters, but on the other hand it makes no attempt to amuse or divert the reader either. It's not particularly grim -- the deaths of the old woman and her granddaughter are left on the periphery, and the horrors of war and Stalinism are implied rather than described -- and Klíma is fundamentally a writer of moderation, of the prosaic and ordinary rather than the romantic and heroic, but there is no mistaking the fact that this is, in the best sense of the word, a serious novel.

As is the case with much of the literature of Eastern Europe produced between 1945 and 1989, the inescapable question is whether, now that the political situation has changed and an entire generation has come of age with no memory of life under Communism, the book still bears the same urgency. The specific conditions under which Kindl lives no longer exist, at least in what is now the Czech Republic, but I think the book is more than a historical document. Its underlying theme is the inescapability of moral choice, whether in a legal decision that is literally a matter or life or death or in choosing between one's wife and one's mistress. (Kindl's lover is the seductive but cruelly manipulative wife of a senior colleague.) Tyranny complicates the predicament because the regime recognizes only its own moral authority, and will relentlessly punish anyone who refuses to do the same. Kindl is therefore simultaneously compelled to make moral choices and constrained from doing so in a disinterested manner. Our own situation is very different, and it would be a mistake to romanticize it by likening it to life behind the Iron Curtain, but it seems to me that a little of Klíma's earnestness is something we could use.

The translation of Judge on Trial is credited to A. G. Brain, a pseudonym for Gerald Turner. I speak no Czech but his rendition seems fairly adept compared to other Klíma translations I've read. There are a few slang terms and Britishisms that may stick in American ears, but nothing that will interrupt the flow of reading. One curiosity: Kindl's mistress describes a book she has been reading by a Latin American writer, in which a group of characters revere an author they have never met, then wind up meeting him by chance after he is accidentally struck by a car. Though the book isn't named, it's clearly Cortázar's Hopscotch, a different section of which is also discussed by two characters in Klíma's My Golden Trades. It's hard to think of two authors less superficially alike, but perhaps at bottom there's a kinship after all.

Acrobats

Like Ivan Klíma himself, the narrator of the "The Tightrope Walkers," the fourth and final story in this 1985 collection, has spent part of his childhood in a wartime concentration camp. Though he survives physically, he isn't unscathed:

Perhaps it was a result of my wartime experiences or of a self-pity typical of my age, but I had never quite been able to surrender to pleasure or joy, or to relax. As if I never ceased to be aware of the connection between happiness and despair, freedom and anxiety, life and ruin. My feelings were probably those of a tightrope walker on his high wire. No matter how fixedly I was looking upwards I was still conscious of the drop below me.

As the story begins, the young man is en route to visit a classmate, Ota, who has a cabin in the country. Along the way he recalls an experience, a year or so after the end of the war, of seeing a traveling troupe of acrobats. While he had been waiting for their performance to begin, a young woman had approached him selling tickets, and though he never spoke to her he had been quite smitten by her. Later he had watched the same girl, now wearing a different costume, ascend one of the masts to take part in the show.

With Ota at the cabin is his girlfriend Dana, whom the narrator has never met. She too has painful memories: both of her parents were executed in the war, her grandmother has recently died, and she herself is still recovering from a serious illness. She and the narrator become friends, and later they exchange visits, books, poems, and eventually kisses. Finally, still loyal to Ota, she implores the narrator not to see her any more, then collapses and has to be brought to a hospital. Three days later, recovering at home, she sends him a letter, ardently declaring her love and informing him that she has broken it off with Ota. He hurries out to go to her, but on the way he is racked by second thoughts:

If only her letter hadn't been so totally urgent or her offer so unconditional. Did I even have the right to reject her after what I'd caused? But what feelings did I have for her? Did I have any feelings of the kind she wrote about?

Suddenly, on the way to Dana's apartment, he comes upon the acrobats again:

As I stood there in the crowd, gazing up at the celestial acrobat who, high above our heads, above the dark void, was invoking that vaster void with the starry face, it seemed to me that I was beginning to understand something of the secret of life, that I would be able to see clearly what until then I had been helplessly groping for. I felt that life was a perpetual temptation of death, one continual performance above the abyss, that in it man must aim for the opposite mast even though, from sheer vertigo, he might not even see it, that he must go forward, not look behind, not look down, not allow himself to be tempted by those who were standing comfortably on firm ground, who were mere spectators. I also felt that I had to walk my own tightrope, that I must myself sling it between two masts as those tumblers had done, and venture out on it, not wait for someone to invite me up and offer to carry me across on his back. I must begin my performance, my grand unrepeatable performance.

His resolution soon fades, however, and the story ends ambiguously, as he stands staring up at her window, still uncertain, suspended on the high wire.

(Translations by Ewald Osers, very slightly emended.)

Wish list

If someone would like to translate these books for me as a personal favor I'd be really quite grateful. Thanks.


Ivan Klíma, My Mad Century, Vols. I and II. Edice Paměť, Prague.

Update: An English translation of My Crazy Century will be published by Grove Press in November 2013.

Notes for a Commonplace Book (7)

Tony Judt:

We often find ourselves asserting or assuming that the distinctive feature of modernity is the individual: the unreducible subject, the freestanding person, the unbound self, the unbeholden citizen. This modern individual is commonly and favorably contrasted with the dependent, deferential, unfree subject of the pre-modern world. There is something in this version of things, of course; just as there is something in the accompanying idea that modernity is also a story of the modern state, with its assets, its capacities, and its ambitions. But taken all in all, it is, nevertheless, a mistake—and a dangerous mistake. The truly distinctive feature of modern life—the one with which we lose touch at our peril—is neither the unattached individual nor the unconstrained state. It is what comes in between them: society. More precisely civil—or (as the nineteenth century had it) bourgeois—society.

The railways were and remain the necessary and natural accompaniment to the emergence of civil society. They are a collective project for individual benefit. They cannot exist without common accord (and, in recent times, common expenditure), and by design they offer a practical benefit to individual and collectivity alike. This is something the market cannot accomplish—except, on its own account of itself, by happy inadvertence. Railways were not always environmentally sensitive—though in overall pollution costs it is not clear that the steam engine did more harm than its internally combusted competitor—but they were and had to be socially responsive. That is one reason why they were not very profitable.

If we lose the railways we shall not just have lost a valuable practical asset whose replacement or recovery would be intolerably expensive. We shall have acknowledged that we have forgotten how to live collectively. If we throw away the railway stations and the lines leading to them—as we began to do in the 1950s and 1960s—we shall be throwing away our memory of how to live the confident civic life. It is not by chance that Margaret Thatcher—who famously declared that “there is no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women, and there are families”—made a point of never traveling by train. If we cannot spend our collective resources on trains and travel contentedly in them it is not because we have joined gated communities and need nothing but private cars to move between them. It will be because we have become gated individuals who don’t know how to share public space to common advantage. The implications of such a loss would far transcend the demise of one system of transport among others. It would mean we had done with modern life.

From "Bring Back the Rails!," in The New York Review of Books

Out with the Old (2010)

The second annual retrospective of the year's postings at this address.

The Frogs' Discovery

When the Money Was Gone

The Assault of the Roly-Rogues

Up in the Downs

Written & Printed And Bound

Corinne West & Kelly Joe Phelps: "Amelia"

Found in translation (Mark Strand)

Bad Guys

Conrad at Anchor

Things Gone & Things Still Here

Aventura

Cortázar: All Fires the Fire

From a Green World (Kayano Shigeru)

Abocurragh

Of empires and dreams

December
Looking back, I wish I had been able to do more with ephemera and manuscript materials this year, or at least with printed books that aren't readily obtainable, but I seem to have picked all the low-hanging fruit in that regard and must venture further afield (i.e., out of the house). There is, of course, a virtually inexhaustible amount of material to be mined on the web now, some of which could benefit from fresh attention and presentation, but the fact is that there are people out there who have more time and energy to devote to it, and who are already doing a better job of sifting it than I could do.

As to the tales, sketches, and other original writing in which I've indulged in the last twelve months, I'm in general happier with the shorter pieces than the longer, but I'm content to set the latter down as experiments that, while perhaps not ultimately successful, served their purpose at the time and at least provided me some amusement while I was writing them.

If all goes according to plan I'll be taking a breather for the rest of December and will be back, hopefully with fresh inspiration, after the first of the year.

The Boatmen of Venice (The Passion)

Jeanette Winterson:

Rumour has it that the inhabitants of this city walk on water. That, more bizarre still, their feet are webbed. Not all feet, but the feet of the boatmen whose trade is hereditary.

This is the legend.

When a boatman’s wife finds herself pregnant she waits until the moon is full and the night empty of idlers. Then she takes her husband’s boat and rows to a terrible island where the dead are buried. She leaves her boat with rosemary in the bows so that the limbless ones cannot return with her and hurries to the grave of the most recently dead in her family. She has brought her offerings: a flask of wine, a lock of hair from her husband and a silver coin. She must leave the offerings on the grave and beg for a clean heart if her child be a girl and boatman’s feet if her child be a boy. There is no time to lose. She must be home before dawn and the boat must be left for a day and a night covered in salt. In this way, the boatmen keep their secrets and their trade. No newcomer can compete. And no boatman will take off his boots, no matter how you bribe him. I have seen tourists throw diamonds to the fish, but I have never seen a boatman take off his boots.

December

Katazome (stencil-dyed) calendar page by Keisuke Serizawa (1895-1984). (Scanned from a commercially issued reproduction.)

The telegraphist (conclusion)

All was quiet the next morning. There were a few heavy clouds along the horizon that he thought might portend a storm, but the next time he looked in that direction, a few moments later, they had vanished without a trace and the air around him was as searing as ever. He didn't even bother to look in on the mule, of whose existence he had by now in any case forgotten. He had lost track of time and only occasionally remembered how he had come to be stranded in such an isolated, godforsaken place. The thought occurred to him that he might in fact be dead, but after trying to get his head around that notion for some time he decided that he couldn't form a conclusion one way or another and so put the matter out of his mind. He opened a fresh can of beans -- there weren't many left but he wasn't eating very much anymore -- mouthed a few spoonfuls, and set it aside. The telegraph bell rang now and then, but he paid no attention to it.

He passed two or three days in a state of intermittent delirium, shaking with fever and too weak to get up, until in a brief lucid moment he realized that he must soon drink something or die. Filling a bucket from the wooden barrel, he drank steadily for several minutes until he felt himself about to retch. He returned to his cot and almost immediately fell asleep.

When he awoke -- it could have been the next morning, or the day after, he wouldn't have been able to say -- he felt much better and his appetite had revived. He grabbed the same can of beans, brushing away the flies that had congregated around it, and sat up at his desk. As he was pushing the first spoonful through his cracked and blistering lips he heard the alarm ring. Seconds later the message came down:

Nesabap alaba barababaranap mana ba STOP Palaba banabarep arefep ber erabet geret nasefaterabat gret bara basarep

He carefully wrote the words down, then examined them at length. Their significance was as inscrutable as ever, and yet the longer he looked the more there seemed to be something in them -- some delicate gesture, some faint hint of tenderness -- that desperately longed to be conveyed. He read them backwards and forwards and out of order, anagrammatized them and spent at least an hour simply staring at the forms of the letters as if the shapes alone bore some critical message that had nothing to do with any language known to man, a message that arose from some other realm where nothing was arbitrary symbol, where every communication was a direct encounter with some truth so profound and absolute that it couldn't be expressed in anything as insignificant and arbitrary as language but only as itself. Before he even knew he was doing it, he began to tap out a response:

Qa balaqa STOP Barabasabaraq qaraq ablababap STOP Balap rabelaba perap salap balarepareb na nabap

The reply was almost instantaneous:

Gasap beragera aramerabap STOP Beragabaragap blagap gasa berarqaraba basaraba berap asanta nabep rebasapar raba berabasep

He sat back, contemplating the words. At that moment they seemed to him as soothing as the freshest spring rain, as deep as a desert well, as tender as a mother's love for the infant at her breast. Weeping with gratitude at their beauty, he stood up and spoke the message aloud, chanting it over and over as he circled the room, kissing the paper on which he had written it out. Trembling with joy, he leaned over the key and tapped out a response that he knew, with complete certainty, would be received and understood as his irreversible declaration of utter and undivided submission:

Garaqasap abamaba maserab berasseraber STOP Asarabageram merasapa aba basapa mergaraga berasaperaba STOP Meragerabarap birab qaru nagraba barasabar

With one motion he swept everything off the desk -- his books, his water jug, and his lamp, which shattered onto the floor -- and awaited the answer that he knew would soon be forthcoming.

*****

When the relief party arrived at the oasis they found the mule still barely clinging to life in its stall. Out of mercy they shot it. The body of the telegraph operator was slumped over his desk, surrounded by page after page of incomprehensible scribbling. At the orders of the officer in command of the party they buried him just beyond the edge of town; then they gathered all of his papers in a pile and set them ablaze. After that they cut the telegraph wires and stripped them off the poles; the copper, at least, could be used again. When they were done, right before they left, they dynamited the command post, just to be sure.

Of empires and dreams

At first glance, the life of Roger Casement, the British diplomat turned Irish nationalist who was executed for treason in 1916, might not seem an obvious subject for a Peruvian novelist, even one as cosmopolitan as the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature. But after narrating, in the first third of what is at times as much a novelized biography as a biographical novel, how Casement's investigations of atrocities in the Congo led to the unraveling of Leopold II of Belgium's empire in Africa, Mario Vargas Llosa begins a new chapter and a likely explanation emerges:

When, on the last day of August 1910, Roger Casement arrived in Iquitos after some seven weeks of exhausting travel...

Iquitos, where Casement, after the conclusion of his mission to the Congo, was dispatched by the Crown to investigate similar abuses and atrocities on the part of a British-incorporated rubber company, is of course familiar territory for Vargas Llosa, who set parts of several of his earlier novels in that hub of the Peruvian Amazon. But though the chapters devoted to Casement's activities in Peru make up the longest section of the book, they don't overshadow the rest. Tying the novel together, and alternating with the narration of Casement's activities, in the Congo, South America, and Europe, are scenes from Casement's last days, as he awaits execution in a cell in a British prison and reflects on the events of his life.

Born to an Irish Protestant family (his mother retained Catholic sympathies and secretly baptized Roger in the faith), Casement shipped out to Africa as a young man and worked for a time alongside the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley. Over the course of the twenty years he spent in the Congo he became increasingly disturbed by the ruthlessness with which Leopold's colonial enterprise was being conducted. Ostensibly in the name of civilization and Christianity -- but in fact almost entirely in the service of greed -- the African inhabitants of the Congo Free State were subjected to a pattern of kidnappings, forced labor, savage whippings, amputations, and outright murder, all to ensure that the flow of rubber continued unabated. The number of victims, directly or indirectly, of Leopold's reign is reckoned in the millions. Casement's report to the British government, published in 1904, was instrumental to the successful international campaign to wrest the Congo from the king's control.

Subsequently posted on routine consular duties to Brazil, Casement was soon sent to Iquitos to verify reports of atrocities committed by the Peruvian Amazon Company. During his mission he traveled to remote areas of the Amazon basin that lay well beyond the reach of the government in Lima. His investigations revealed not only abuses at times more horrific than those in the Congo, but also a pattern of official collusion and of persecution of those few journalists and officials who were brave enough or foolhardy enough to try to document the atrocities. As Casement began to name names his own life began to be at risk, and during his second visit to Peru he was dissuaded from venturing into areas that were effectively under the Company's control.

If Casement had withdrawn from public life after presenting the findings of his Peruvian report to the Crown, he would probably be universally regarded as a hero of the anti-colonialist and human rights movements. But there was one more chapter in his eventful life. Increasingly identifying himself with his heritage, he retired from the British Foreign Office and was drawn into the Irish nationalist movement, becoming a friend and ally of militant leaders like Patrick Pearse and Eoin MacNeill, and when war broke out in 1914 he was dispatched by the nationalists as an emissary to the Kaiser's Germany. After attempting with little success to organize a corps of pro-independence soldiers from among the ranks of Irish POWs, he arranged for the delivery by Germany of a shipload of guns and ammunition intended for use during the Easter Uprising of 1916. Infiltrated into Ireland by a U-boat just before the uprising, Casement was quickly captured by the British and subsequently convicted of treason and hanged. His remains were buried in an unmarked grave within the prison grounds, and only repatriated to Ireland in 1965.

Any novelist or biographer depicting Casement's life must deal with the vexed question of the "Black Diaries," ostensibly in Casement's hand, portions of which were revealed by the British government as he awaited execution. The diaries, which describe a series of furtive sexual encounters with other men, were used to help discredit Casement at a time when a number of British and Irish intellectuals (among them George Bernard Shaw, but not Casement's old friend Joseph Conrad) were urging clemency. The controversy over whether or not the diaries are genuine has never been fully settled; Vargas Llosa takes a compromise position, suggesting in an Epilogue -- and perhaps not entirely convincingly -- that though the diaries are genuine some of the events that they narrate may not be.

My own impression -- that of a novelist, to be sure -- is that Roger Casement wrote the famous diaries but that he didn't live them, at least not entirely, that in them there is much exaggeration and invention, that he wrote certain things because he wanted to but could not live them.

El sueño del celta ("The Dream of the Celt," "the Celt" being a nickname given by some of Casement's friends because of the passion he came to develop for Irish history and culture) has just been published by Alfaguara. As the novel would seem to pose no major obstacles to translation (unlike some of the author's earlier works), an English-language version can probably be expected in a year or so.

The telegraphist (II)

At the beginning of the seventh week all communication with Z---- was broken off again, this time for three days. It resumed promptly and without explanation on the fourth morning at 0600 hours, but two days later it ceased and did not resume. A slave to protocol, he submitted no daily reports, since none had been requested. To break the monotony he began to make his morning rounds in a counter-clockwise direction. He was struck by how different an aspect the oasis revealed when examined in this fashion, but after a few days the novelty wore off. He began to alternate, walking clockwise one day and counter-clockwise the next, and this seemed to be the most tolerable arrangement.

After the second full week of silence he caught himself softening his steps, listening for the engines of the relief party that by now was overdue. He heard none, nor were there any unexpected visitors, suspicious or otherwise. The worst of the heat of the dry season, suffocating and blinding, lay upon the desert, and he spent as much time as he could asleep with wet rags over his eyes. Scarcely animate, the lethargic mule stared at him from its stall with unblinking and (he half suspected) unseeing eyes, and barely summoned the energy to eat.

He was writhing on his cot in a semi-delirious state, somewhere between night and morning and between sleep and waking, when the alarm rang. He leapt up and rushed to the telegraph. It wasn't the operator at Z---- but the outward post, and the message, as ever, was incomprehensible:

Ba bara sabara rebapara azera ba STOP Sarabara berisa seribisarabisa serata bezera razara ra STOP Berisol sorisoriso bazara sarisarasarisab STOP

He transcribed this seeming gibberish into his logbook, returned an acknowledgement, then relayed the message to the operator at Z----. There was no response.

The following day, at around the same hazy hour of dawn, another message came down:

Saraba barisaserisab azarasaraza bazirazep STOP Azirasora sarizap borisoq qrabba oraseraborisep prebanamarasarasap STOP Azapep STOP

Again he acknowledged, transcribed and forwarded the message, and received no response from Z----. To his surprise, however, an hour later an identical message arrived. Perplexed, he carefully compared it with the previous one and acknowledged it, but almost immediately a third came, and then a fourth. He duly forwarded each transmission, but when the fifth and sixth arrived he held back. Clearly the operator in the hinterlands was not receiving his acknowledgments and was repeating himself in the mistaken belief that his messages were not getting through. There was no point in annoying the authorities at Z----, if they were indeed listening, with obvious repetitions. For several hours the wires carried message after identical message, dozens, scores, eventually hundreds. He transcribed each one, for a while, then simply gave up, walking away and returning every hour or so to see if the incoming transmission was the same as the others. It always was.

The messages trailed off in late evening, then sputtered to a halt. He was awakened once during the night, then again around 0500, and after that the pace began to pick up again until the incoming transmissions had become a virtually continuous stream of characters. He walked away from his desk and went outside. The wind had gathered and a sandstorm was obscuring the horizon, but the heat was as relentless as ever. The mule stood motionless and he wondered whether it had died standing up during the night and had simply neglected to fall. He threw it some hay regardless.

When he went back inside the telegraph was still chattering. He recorded a few lines, then threw his chair back in a huff and started to walk away, rage rising within him. On the verge of losing control completely, he was about to smash the instrument and put an end to his torment once and for all when he caught himself, finding that a greater fury was welling up inside him, and coldly and meticulously typed out a message to the operator on the other end:

Raberaparabep barabap parabarabagarap garap baregatarat top barop roparaoparop bererep qrabab STOP Garep arepabap gop STOP

These syllables, though they meant nothing to him, he transmitted without a single pause. To his surprise, the machine did not pick up where it had left off. Instead there was silence for a few moments, then a brief acknowledgment, and then it lay still.

No further transmissions arrived until late that evening. He was dozing in the cot, his spoon rattling in the empty can of beans beside him with every labored breath, when the alarm woke him and a message trickled out:

Garabarep farabara barana marabap amar raba raba barabaramop STOP Garabananana badarap badar badar badarap bada STOP

He wrote out the message, then tore it roughly out of the logbook and paced the room, reading it over and over. He had been instructed in the making and cracking of basic ciphers during his initial training, but this fit the pattern of nothing he had ever seen. He leafed through his logbook, carefully examining old entries. There seemed to be too few unique letters, too much obvious repeated filler, for the messages to contain any but the most rudimentary communication. No doubt there was a key, known to the operator on the other end and also at Z----, or maybe not even there, maybe the transcriptions were referred to another operator at some distant headquarters, perhaps even all the way to the home country, to some intelligence officer in the national palace, who perhaps decoded them for the eyes of M. le Président himself. One way or another it was clearly beyond his ken.

While he was considering this the alarm sounded again, and another string came through, this one identical to the last:

Garabarep farabara barana marabap amar raba raba barabaramop STOP Garabananana badarap badar badar badarap bada STOP

And then it seemed to wait, patiently, expecting an answer. He put his hand on the key and tapped, hesitantly at first, then fluently:

Morarerabap aramara marabeparepamar berererapap STOP Beraqraba garab megaraba babap babap babap ma garabarap STOP Serabep arbaraba barapep a pep perapebabep merera baramabap STOP

A brief acknowledgment followed, and then nothing for the rest of the night.

(To be continued.)

The telegraphist (I)

He was the last one left. Just before decamping the legionnaires loaded up the barrels of gunpowder that remained onto carts, piled on all the old carbines and anything else that was portable, and blew it all up at the edge of the desert. The shock wave whipped the overhead wires that hung slack between the weatherbeaten poles and blew out two windows of the command post, but the adobe walls held firm. The little generator in the next room, after skipping a single beat at the initial concussion, resumed its steady chugging, brushing off the aftershocks that echoed, ever more faintly, for the better part of an hour.

They left him a mule and some fodder, a rifle and cartridges, and enough fuel and food and water for two months, three if he was careful with it, and not very much rum at all. By the time his provisions ran out, if he was lucky, he would be relieved; in the meantime his presence would be essential to communication along the line, sporadic though it might be. In the absence of the lieutenant, who had never returned from a reconnoitering expedition the year before and was assumed to be among the casualties of war, the sergeant formally transferred his authority in a brief ceremony several times interrupted by boisterous outbursts on the part of his subordinates, all of whom were in varying states of drunkenness and immune to the sergeant's halfhearted rebukes. They wished him good luck, embraced him one by one in turn, and clambered into the back of the hulking, wheezing truck just as the driver, who perched alongside the sergeant was by no means the soberest of the lot, ground on the gears until he managed to cajole the reluctant vehicle into lurching forward, blowing up clouds of dust and sand as it lumbered haltingly to the edge of the oasis. He watched them drive off for a moment, waved his cap three times over his head, and returned to his desk.

During the first few weeks his duties kept to their normal routines. He slept in a cot in the office within earshot of the alarm. Each morning, at precisely 0600 hours, the office at Z---- would transmit an identical message inquiring for his report. He would respond that all was well and await instructions. A few moments later the machine would jigger into life again, with a one-line order to expect a further communication at 1800 hours. After breakfast and coffee he would make a brief circuit of the immediate environs of the command post in order to stretch the kinks out of his legs, he would feed and water the mule, and then go back to sleep until evening, when there would be a similarly terse exchange with the operator on the other end. He would warm up a few more spoonfuls of canned rice and beans, knock back a single precisely measured shot of spirits, and call it a night. On rare occasions and at unpredictable hours a brief message came down from further up the line, transmitted by an operator in some even more isolated and woebegone outpost. When that happened he tapped out an acknowledgment and promptly relayed the information; as these messages were usually encrypted and he had not been entrusted with the key this entailed the careful replication of a string of apparently meaningless syllables, a task for which, he decided, he was particularly suited.

Only twice did he see any sign of life other than the vacant and imperturbable mule. One morning, during his constitutional, he discovered the faint traces of hoof prints across his path. That the marks were visible at all, considering the incessant drifting of sand over every square inch of the oasis, proved that they had been made the previous night, perhaps just before dawn. He traced their origin back as far as the last palms, but no further, then reversed course and followed them to the point at which they trailed off into the desert. He determined that there had been three camels, that their riders had never dismounted, and that they had found nothing of interest to detain them or even to cause them to veer from their course. A week later, by chance, on one of the few relatively windless days, he spied a small caravan -- twenty riders or so, from the look of it -- very far off, but it never approached and he lost sight of it, even with his binoculars, after an hour. His report of each incident was duly noted and acknowledged, but nothing more was said of either one.

It was somewhere near the end of the fourth week, or perhaps the beginning of the fifth -- he had become increasingly indifferent to the calendar -- that his orders failed to arrive on schedule for the first time. He wasn't alarmed by this. Interruptions along the line, due to downed poles or balky generators, weren't particularly unusual or unexpected. The lack of communication posed no imminent danger, as the front lines -- to the extent that those could be defined in a guerrilla conflict in inhospitable and poorly charted terrain -- lay hundreds of miles off, and even the odd raiding party, should it by chance happen to break through, would have no reason to venture into a region that offered little in the way of opportunities for pillage. The telegraph remained dormant through the evening, but when at 0600 the next morning the alarm sounded and the operator at Z----, making no reference to his silence of the previous day, inquired for an update on local conditions, the telegraphist neither sought an explanation nor gave it a second thought.

Night piece (North)

Possibly it's the end of the world, she's not the one to say, but if so as luck would have it the end of the world finds her in a city far from where she was born, where they speak a different language she never quite masters though no one seems to mind, where it's lovely along the lake in summer but winter comes hard and fast. She meets a man who has many friends but no ties and before long they find they are bound by love and she moves her things into his apartment three flights up and two blocks down a crooked alley from the center of town. In the evenings, when they come home from their jobs, he browns stew meat and onions on an old gas stove and she settles into a chair in a corner underneath a lamp where she can continue to draw after the sun goes down. He leaves the radio on while he cooks, too low for her to decipher the words but she likes the music, the strains of accordion and fiddle that bend around the singers' voices. After dinner they disconnect the phone, sometimes they put a record on and dance slowly and silently for a while but mostly they just sit by the window. In the beautiful chill night, above the muffled sounds of the city, the vault of heaven is filled with uncountable stars.