Tout va (très) bien

I'm in the early stages of a long slow re-read of Cortázar's Hopscotch, and this time I'm making a point of annotating some of the many allusions scattered through the pages of the novel, allusions which would have been time-consuming to identify in the pre-internet when I read it for the first time (c.1978?), but which can now generally be tracked down in a matter of seconds. (There's even at least one Spanish-language blog specifically devoted to the task, Mi Rayuela.)

More on that project, perhaps, another time; this morning I looked up a scrap of French that can be found in Chapter 71: Tout va très bien, madame La Marquise, tout va très bien, tout va très bien. Here's a performance of the song from which those words were taken: [Video no longer available]

For those with no French or whose French is as creaky as mine, the gist of the song is that Madame la Marquise (here played by a man in drag) has been away from home for a few weeks and calls her servants on the phone to check on things. Everything's fine, they assure her, well, except for one little incident: her gray mare has died. How did this happen?, she asks. Well, it happened when the stables burned down. In succeeding verses we learn that the stables caught fire when the château burned to the ground, and that the château in turn was set ablaze by the candles her husband knocked over in the process of killing himself, having discovered that he was ruined financially. Other than that, tout va très bien!

The song was new to me, but not the comic routine, a staple of American folklore, renditions of which I heard various times when I was growing up. A version from Missouri, for example, begins as follows:

An old Missouri farmer hardly ever leaves home. He is one of those people who doesn't trust the world to keep on turning if he doesn't keep an eye on it. But this one time he must go to the city for a few days. His first evening in his hotel, he calls home, and his hired man answers. And our farmer says, "So, everything all right at home?"

"Jus' fine, Boss, 'cept you know your dog? Ol' Shep got holt a some dead horse meat, and it kilt 'im."

The farmer is upset, of course, that dog was a good old friend. But then it occurs to him to wonder, "Where did Shep get holt of dead horse meat?"

"Well, Boss, the horses died when the barn burned, and ol' Shep got holt a some dead horse meat, and it kilt 'im."

In the US the candles that set the fire are usually on the coffin of the mother / husband / mother-in-law of the person who has been absent.

To round out this story, a few moments after I identified the source of Tout va très bien, madame La Marquise, I visited (as I do regularly) a nice slice of tororo shiru, the blog maintained by a French copain who writes under the name Tororo, and read his most recent post. The subject was a dream he had in which someone dear to him died; the title of the post: Tout va bien.

Update (2022): There's a passing reference to the song in Georges Perec's novel La vie mode d'emploi. In Chapter 44, Perec describes how, during the liberation of Paris, a young member of the resistance, Olivier Gratiolet, receives and transcribes what are supposedly encoded messages using a clandestine radio receiver hidden in the basement of the apartment building where he lives. The messages include (in David Bellos's translation) the likes of "the presbytery has lost none of its charm nor the garden its splendour," "the archdeacon is a past master at Japanese billiards," and (in the original) "tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise."

The Freeing of the Waters

"No Amount of Walls"

"At the extreme, if climate change wreaks havoc on the social and economic fabric of global linchpins like Mexico City, warns the writer Christian Parenti, 'no amount of walls, guns, barbed wire, armed aerial drones or permanently deployed mercenaries will be able to save one half of the planet from the other.'" — Michael Kimmelman, "Mexico City, Parched and Sinking, Faces a Water Crisis," the New York Times, February 17, 2017

Also this week, Mike Males writes, in the Los Angeles Times:

Over the last two decades, California has seen an influx of 3.5 million immigrants, mostly Latino, and an outmigration of some 2 million residents, most of them white. An estimated 2.4 million undocumented immigrants also currently live in the state...

And yet, according to data from the FBI, the California Department of Justice, and the Centers for Disease Control, the state has seen precipitous drops in every major category of crime and violence that can be reliably measured. In Trump terms, you might say that modern California is the opposite of "American carnage."...

Before the early 1990s, California had one of the country’s highest rates of violent death. It has since fallen by 18%, and did so as the average rate of violent death across the rest of the country rose 16%. Overall, Californians are 30% less likely to die a violent death today than other Americans.

In fact, compared with averages in all other states, California now has 33% fewer gun killings, 10% fewer murders overall, and 30% fewer illicit-drug deaths. When overdoses from illicit drugs rose 160% in the rest of the country, between 1999 and 2015, they rose only 27% in California.

In nearly every respect, California’s statistics contradict the image of America painted by Trump in his inaugural address — a place of rampant violence, drugs and crime, all stoked by liberal immigration policies.

Refuge (Harry Mathews)

The attractions: solitude and secrecy—the orchard in the hills like a kingdom, the forbidden manufacture of liquor a prowess all my own, blessed with the contemplation of fir and beech, wild plum and cherry, and the company of the shy marten and jay as well as of cocky wrens and wagtails; the challenges of hiking, labor, and barter; the relief of exhaustion; the reassurance of a smartly contracted horizon; the refuge of my dwelling, small, neat, and warm, with its pots of flowering wallpepper and thyme, my pet dormouse staring around the thyme, and the new ikon over my writing stool whose wood shines in the clear frame of stenchless fresh oil; soft if short hours in the lamplight, pen in hand, showered with the random amber of phantasmal summers, abundances, triumphs of art; visits from the widow.

The title section of the late Harry Mathews's Armenian Papers: Poems 1954-1984 purports to be an adaptation of an Italian translation of a lost Armenian original, "a manuscript of medieval poems that had mysteriously and irrevocably disappeared during the decade preceding the First World War," whose existence was revealed to Mathews, Marie Chaix, and David Kalstone in 1979 during a visit to the Armenian monastery of San Lazzaro in Venice by a certain Father Gomidas. San Lazzaro does in fact exist, and the three writers may well have made such a visit; the rest is made up out of whole cloth, perhaps inspired by a package of papier d'Arménie.

Beasts of the Northern Wild

This morning I crossed paths with a foraging possum. I'm not sure which of us was the more startled (the trail was otherwise deserted), but I took my pictures and went on my way.

Elsewhere, I found the decaying skeleton of a great horned wood-beast.

Signs & Wonders

Miscellaneous midwinter surface finds.

Krazy Kat's banjo

Cartoonist Chris Ware, in the New York Review of Books, on Krazy Kat's banjo:

I may be in the minority here, but I really think that most if not all readers of Krazy Kat during Herriman's lifetime would have had a hard time thinking of Krazy as anything but African-American... one detail in Herriman's strip that would have absolutely cemented this identity in the minds of contemporary readers has since passed into obscurity: Krazy Kat's banjo. Through received clichés and shifts of poverty and culture in America, the banjo has come to be thought of as an instrument of poor whites, but at the turn of the century, it was as emblematic as a watermelon as part of the African-American stereotype. In fact, the banjo has a solemn origin: descended from the West African akonting, xalam, and ngoni instruments, played as an accompaniment to storytelling by Wolof griots in Senegal or the Jola in Gambia, early instruments like what became the American banjo were recreated by American slaves from whatever plantation materials were at hand — gourds, turtle shells, coconuts, animal skins — to try to hold on to a memory of life and culture torn from their grasp.

To the modern reader, the banjo in Krazy Kat might seem a lighthearted accessory, but when Krazy picks it up to sing "There is a Heppy Land Fur, Fur Away," the meaning, to thoughtful readers of the 1920s to the 1940s, would have been clear. Even more astonishingly, Krazy never plays a "proper" banjo, but plays the gourd or coconut banjo, the origins of which by the time of the strip's appearance would indeed have been obscure. Herriman knew what he was doing, and it's not insignificant that the very last strip he left unfinished on his drawing table showed Krazy playing a gourd banjo.

Chris Ware, "To Walk in Beauty."

Related post: From the Archives: Krazy Kat

Sleepy Hollow, rising

Washington Irving's drowsy little village is now a busy multi-ethnic town, and today some 500 people from Sleepy Hollow and neighboring areas turned out on a beautiful winter afternoon for a march against the current administration's anti-immigrant policies. As the march passed street signs bearing names of immigrants dating back as far as Dutch times, the atmosphere was festive, friendly, and inclusive. The mayor joined the speakers in a park overlooking the Hudson, and there were plenty of dogs, strollers, and families.

Dreamers, rising

"Succeeding for me is how I can get my revenge. I want to break the stereotype of us being here taking jobs away and not helping the economy. I want Trump to see we're the total opposite of what he thinks." — Indira Islas, quoted in Dale Russakoff's article, "The Only Way We Can Fight Back Is to Excel," from the New York Times, January 29, 2017.

Also, from The Nation: "How to Fight Trump's Racist Immigration Policies."

Black lives, in black & white

"It was a real neighborhood, and a black experience no one talks about, because it wasn't filled with drugs and it wasn't filled with poverty. It was public schools, it was playing ball, it was playing music." — Arthur Bates, quoted in Anne Correal's account of how she recovered a discarded family photo album and traced the lives it recorded, from the New York Times, January 27, 2017.

Harry Mathews (1930-2017)

The writer Harry Mathews died yesterday. Weirdly, I found out because I looked him up to see what he was up to, well knowing that he was getting up there in years. I don't have anything particularly profound to say at the moment except what I would have said to Harry if I ever had the opportunity (we never met): "Thanks for writing those books." The obituary notices so far are mostly in French, but the Paris Review has a brief note and provides the one piece of good news: he completed a forthcoming new novel before he died.

My post from a few years back is here: Permutations of Mathews. Worth a listen is Isaiah Sheffer's hilarious reading of Mathews's story "Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)" (you can skip ahead to 1:10 or so).

Philip Roth: Presidents, real and imagined

From a New Yorker interview with Judith Thurman, Philip Roth on comparisons between his novel The Plot Against America, which imagined a Charles Lindbergh defeat of FDR, and our present situation:

It is easier to comprehend the election of an imaginary President like Charles Lindbergh than an actual President like Donald Trump. Lindbergh, despite his Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities, was a great aviation hero who had displayed tremendous physical courage and aeronautical genius in crossing the Atlantic in 1927. He had character and he had substance and, along with Henry Ford, was, worldwide, the most famous American of his day. Trump is just a con artist. The relevant book about Trump's American forebear is Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man, the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel—Melville's last—that could just as well have been called The Art of the Scam.

From the same interview:

I was born in 1933, the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I've been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish* than English.

On the present condition and role of the writer:

Unlike writers in Eastern Europe in the nineteen-seventies, American writers haven't had their driver's licenses confiscated and their children forbidden to matriculate in academic schools. Writers here don't live enslaved in a totalitarian police state, and it would be unwise to act as if we did, unless—or until—there is a genuine assault on our rights and the country is drowning in Trump's river of lies. In the meantime, I imagine writers will continue robustly to exploit the enormous American freedom that exists to write what they please, to speak out about the political situation, or to organize as they see fit.

* Jerkish: A term popularized by the Czech writer Ivan Klíma in his novel Love and Garbage. Said to have been developed for communication with chimpanzees, Jerkish has a vocabulary of only 225 words. Klíma characterized it as the standard dialect of Czechoslovakia's Stalinist-era politicians.

Green

These photos were taken in and around a tiny dry stream-bed or rill a few minutes' walk from where I live. Partly obscured by fallen trees, the location is only a few yards off a well-traveled trail, and there are signs of occasional visitors (water bottles, beer cans), but all things considered it's surprisingly pristine. There's no visible water in the gully, at least at the moment, but the water table is high enough to support a rich growth of mosses, lichens, fungi, and other flora. There are some interesting rock formations and veins of minerals as well.

I spent an hour or so clambering up the slope, trying to avoid crushing the delicate vegetation, taking as many photographs as I could, until I reached a knoll surmounted by the stone sentinels shown below. I'll go back again, but in the future I'll stick to the edges. Some things need their own space.