George Saunders' "Lincoln in the Bardo": Audiobook Review

"The American Book of the Dead"

If you could sum up Lincoln in the Bardo in three words, what would they be?

Disorienting. Deceptive. Daunting.

Who was your favorite character and why?

I liked the Reverend. While his role is less distinctive than the twinned main tellers, he takes longer to be noticed. But, halfway on, his appearance and the reason for it become evident. This displays nimbly Saunders' skill at delaying information until it's truly needed in fiction.

Have you listened to any of the narrators' other performances before? How does this one compare?

As so many narrate this (166), I can only refer to the main two tellers, Nick Offerman and David Sedaris. The hearty, but measured, turns of the former and the soft, sibilant delivery of the latter grace this collection of voices well, and they are particularly remarkable for their tone.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Many, especially Ch. 37. The beauty of the language may sound cliched, but the manner in which Saunders conjures up the poignant and the perverse makes for quite the combination.

Any additional comments?

I'd read the novel first. Hearing this without some preparation may discourage the faint of heart explorer of one of the most complex narrations ever attempted by a major modern writer. Considering the dreck that wins awards and shoves aside works of merit like this on the shelves, the recent attention earned by George Saunders is an encouraging harbinger. (Audible US 3/6/17)

George Saunders' "Lincoln in the Bardo": Book Review

Abraham Lincoln's eleven-year-old son Willie died in February 1862. The grieving President visited the boy's crypt in Georgetown's cemetery several times. Out of this setting of a "white stone house," George Saunders constructs his first novel. Adapting the Tibetan concept of the afterlife perceived as the transitional state of the misleading bardo, he populates his other-worldly realm with 166 voices.

Drawing from the narrative accounts in contemporary newspapers, oral accounts, and narrative histories, Saunders incorporates his research into his fiction. In an appropriately numbered 108 chapters, his tellers from the bardo alternate rapidly and fitfully. Interspersed separately are snippets from the reports of journalists, witnesses, and scholars. It makes a dizzying experience for a reader. 

Gradually, one gets used to the format. Two inhabitants of the next realm, the voluble tale-teller Roger Bevins III, and his calming companion Hans Vollman, dominate. They guide us into this strange world. Preparing us for the arrival of Willie, they also enable us to understand the novelty of Abraham's entry into this space out of time. For the father dares to touch the "sick-form" of his boy. 

The significance of this gesture resonates. Such loving appears rare in this situation. Delusions abound, and a few in the bardo succumb, to a fate uncertain to those who resist, but a state that hints at being less amenable than their current predicament. Saunders subtly reveals the set-up of this Buddhist-inspired but very Yankee take. In elegant or demotic prose, he captures the mid-19th century styles of speech, and he immerses his audience in the ways of expression during the Civil War. He also blends the perspectives of fallen soldiers, slaves, servants, and the lower classes, complicating the milieu to expand it far beyond the White House and its chroniclers, then and now. 

Within this "serendipitous mass co-habitation," the beings ponder why they are there. They agree on the fact that their entry into this enclosure has saddened their loved ones: "Our departure caused pain." Fate, time, destiny emerge as possible reasons. Another does, too, the question of "innate evil" within humans. Saunders places us among fellow inquirers. Even the President "could only stand and watch, eyes wide, having no power at all in this new-arrived and brutal realm." The Reverend Everly Thomas faces the ultimate question of all humanity once they have perished: "How did you live?"

The answers vary among those gathered. Some have been there a while, some recently transported. Suddenly, among them and throughout this story, a "familiar, yet always bonechilling, firesound associated with the matter-lightblooming phenomenon" reveals the departure of particular denizens.

Persisting as mystery to those left behind, and to us as readers, Saunders does not reveal the complete rationale for his situation within which he places his diverse men, women, and children. But an aside from Hans Vollmann suggests a struggle towards a truth. "Trap. Horrible trap. At one's birth it is sprung." In language reminiscent of James Joyce's inventive interior monologues, and contentious scenes recalling the graveyard bickering of fellow Irish novelist Máirtín Ó Cadhain's Cré na Cille (translated into two new versions, The Dirty Dust and Graveyard Clay, both from Yale U.P.), Lincoln in the Bardo fulfills the promise of Saunders' twisted, inventive, and compassionate short stories. 

In a helpful afterword, the author elaborates his conception of the next life here: "Our habits of thought just get supersized." For those who have wondered why George Saunders has taken so long to move from one type of story to another, he reasons that each "story is as long as it needs to be." He's moved this time from "making custom yurts" as if he was granted a "commission to build a mansion." In such typically quirky and aptly analogized phrasing, Saunders sustains his great talent. (Amazon US 11/30/16; NYJB 2/13/15 in different form.) 

Goodbye 2016

"For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.

And to make an end is to make a beginning."

T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding."

Yes, many mourn the celebs and rock stars who die, the election results in Britain and then America, this annus horribilis. But look at the height of the plague in 1353, or the Nazi incursions as of 1943. So my wife in her blogpost, with me under a fictional persona, part me that is, has me say to her in comfort. The compassion of a gerbil, that's me, so I'm told. And my character replies gamely how he does have a heart, if hidden, and that he prefers to keep it from the endless lamentations on social media and the constant indulgences of grief against the cold hard facts of mortality and inevitability.

That dovetails with a book landing in my hands entirely by fate this week. Harvard Law's Brazilian political philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Ungar's The Religion of the Future posits a mentality when we can summon up a force against belittlement of our talents, creations, and aspirations fulfilled, but one that somehow--here's the rub--that accepts the reality of our oncoming death, our existential groundlessness, and our insatiable desires to go beyond the limits of time, space, resignation, and life.

A heady work, and I am progressing very slowly, re-reading passages and pondering them. In a true memento mori or vademecum on my Kindle (I bought that e-book from Verso on sale). It reminds me of the scope of a book Ungar rejects for its Axial Age thesis, Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution (2011) which I labored through a few years ago, and a third, which I studied exactly two years ago, Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. Like the time-slowing-to-a-crawl labyrinthine slush of J.C. Powys novel Porius, and the tale of the most irascible SOB ever by Halldór Laxness, Independent People, the discipline of a long immersion, if over a long attenuated timespan, of challenging texts rewards me. I admit I leap between such and lighter fare, but the stimulation of these tomes I like.

Image: "Janus-like" statue, Boa Island, Co. Fermanagh. For the New Year and new hopes for healing.

"A flight of perplexed unstable minds"

My wife and I watched a 20/20 show last night about a Christian couple in Tennessee. They had 18 children. They wanted more. The wife was 44 and had been pregnant for every one of the past 22 years. The husband ran a tree-trimming business and claimed he made ends barely meet. They insisted they did not get any government aid outside of the tax deductions. They shopped at Goodwill, got loans off their oldest son who had his own business, same as his father, and they welcomed the Lord's will if He deemed fit to give them more children. The interviewer asked why they judged birth control a sin, but not fertility treatments. I did not catch their rationale, however.

Not my normal fare, but it got us talking. I reasoned that while I was wired for religion, I understood its good and bad qualities much more as I aged. I figured some of us are predisposed by genetics as well as culture to seek out spiritual paths, even if they were by nature irrational or futile before facts.

As she got older, my wife's felt disenchanted with any organized religion. She's tired of the bickering, money grubbing and score-settling that makes groups deigning to seek the will of the Almighty look so petty as they divide over doctrinal minutiae and territorial land grabs and denominational dispute. I share her discontent, as a few years ago, I found I could no longer tolerate the services we attended. The God-fearing and God-submitting pleas, no matter how explained by ancient precedent, appeared to our mindset relics of an Iron Age sky-god's petulant demands upon beleaguered desert herdsmen.

Sure, none of this is new since if not Spinoza than Voltaire. But the Age of Reason takes a long time coming to many corners of the world and into many souls and/or brains inquiring. Only recently have we reached a third of the American population daring to admit that they are not religious, even if some among these "nones" might lean towards spiritual exploration personally. I wonder how our ancestors felt free to even entertain such thoughts freed from sin and guilt? My wife thinks that our own generation might be (at least in our family cases) the first, and I'd certainly concur as to my side.

It makes me notice, too, a detour that I sense a few around me taking. If the evolutionary process has driven many of us towards monotheism under political and social pressures the past few millennia, the lingering traces of magic, astrology, rune casting, divination, sorcery, witchcraft, and sortilege may appeal to some bewildered by the current rush to destruction. If we are passing now the tipping point of global warming, and if capitalism is hell bent on turning what remains of our planet into a wasteland, we lack political solutions; we face surveillance invading our minds as it has our actions.

Certainly, the rational scoff at this retreat to discredited traditions. If those teachings in scriptures are discarded as remnants of pre-modern superstition, all the more those whom the jealous God rejected before His reign appear suspect. Yet, there may be bits of common sense in how a rejection of the Lord may reveal a less assertive, more modest embrace of the scraps scrabbled from the flakes of ink, the dust from the palimpsest, the air infused with the enthusiasms of the older yearnings in our DNA.

My skeptical outlook dominates. The British Humanist Society's quiz tagged me at 93%. I've been academically trained to sift evidence, and to study the urges in literary culture of the seeker soberly. So, I am predisposed towards objectivity. But underneath, deeper maybe than that altar boy I once was, there's a sympathy for the home team, the old gang, those who looked to Ogham or rivers and trees for direction. I am very far from them, but the centuries intervening still sustain my own quest.

I reckon I will leave this life remembering a phrase from one with whom I have no other inkling in common. Where my consciousness will go I have no idea. I am no wiser than ten billion humans who have lived and then passed on before me. My ashes will or will not be scattered where I love, under redwoods. I will return as all does to dust. Aleister Crowley's last words were "I am perplexed." As one whose first "major band" was a teenage admiration for Led Zeppelin, I can relate to that reaction.

[P.S. Long ago I enjoyed G.M. Young's A Portrait of an Age (1936). Above I use a great quote from it. This historian of the era preceding him would have been about 25 when Queen Victoria died.]

Slán a fhágáil ag Harry

Bím ag scriobh seo inniu, 2ú Marta. Chaith muid ag fáil ár piscín, Harry, ag codhladh. Tá leoicéime aige.

Bhí sé ina stríoc bán ar a driomh dubh. Bhí sé cosúil le scúnc. D'iarr muid air "scúncín."

Bhí sé an-chíuín. Mar sin féin, "purred" sé. Ar maidin, tháinig Harry chun suí agamsa.

"Purred" sé is airde. Bhí Léna ábalta chloisteáil dó ar fud an tseomra. Is é mo chuimhne air.

Bhí sé féin agus a dheartháir Jerry ach ceithre mhí d'aois. Tá brón orainn anseo. Deanfaimid chailleain Harry.

Goodbye to Harry.

I am writing this today, March 2nd. We has to put our kitten, Harry, to sleep. He had leukemia.

He had a white stripe on his black back. It was like a skunk. We called him "little skunk."

He was very quiet. Nevertheless, he purred. This morning, Harry came to sit with me.

He purred very loud. Layne was able to hear him across the room. It is my memory of him.

He himself and his brother Jerry were but four months old. We are sorry here. We will miss Harry.

Image/íomha

Slan leat, Gary-cat

Fuair Gary bás an tseachtaine seo caite. D'fhán ár cat go dtí go fhill ó ár turas. Ach, chaith sé an h-ám. 

Scríobhím seo leis brón. Ní raibh mé ag iarraidh a clóscríobh na focail seo. Mar sin féin, bíonn mé ag insint orthú anois. 

Bhí dúil mhór agam air. Shuigh sé liom. Chódail sé ar dom. 

Ós rud é go luath i 2002, chúram againn le haghaidh dó agus a dheirfiúr, Maire. Chuaigh ar shiúl a ndeartháir Larry. Ach d'fhán Maire agus Gary le breis agus dosaen bliain ar chéile. 

Tá súil agam go bhfuil ar neamh i n-spéir, dó agus ár peataí atá caite. Is fada liom uaim iad. Is mian liom iad go léir tsíocháin.
 

Goodbye to you, Gary-cat.
 
Gary met his death a week ago. Our cat waited until we returned from our trip. But, it must be the time. 

I write this with sadness. I did not want to type these words. All the same, I am telling you now.  

I loved him. He sat on me. He slept on me. 

Since early in 2002, we cared for him and his sister, Mary. Their brother Larry went away. But Mary and Gary stayed for more than a dozen years together. 

I hope that he and our past pets are in their heaven. I miss them. I wish them all peace.

Máirtín Ó Cadhain's "The Dirty Dust": Book Review

The most important prose work in Modern Irish, Máirtín Ó Cadhain's Cré na Cille has never before been published in English. This 1949 novel, as Alan Titley introduces his blunt, bold rendering into our language, carries the flow of chatter "you might hear outside a door when everyone inside is tearing themselves apart; or in a country churchyard in the light of day". The title resists easy equivalence, although "churchyard clay" has long served as as its English echo for critics. Titley, a skilled writer and critic in Irish, prefers the biblical resonance of ashes and soil, for this narrative takes place entirely in a Connemara cemetery, as its interred bicker and boast among themselves.

It was inspired by a report in the author's native West of Ireland where a woman was buried inadvertently atop her rival one day too rainy for the gravediggers to bother with niceties. An onlooker mourned: "Oh holy cow, there's going to be one almighty gabble!" Ó Cadhain set his novel, akin to what Titley calls switching channels between various conversations on a radio, in townlands he knew well in County Galway, near the Atlantic shore among its Irish-speaking community. Then, that language was still connected to those in the nineteenth century who had spoken no other. The author did not hear English until the age of six. Rich in imagery, curt in tone, this dialect of Irish can be difficult for those who encounter it today. Titley prefers a conversational, casual tide of chat, cursing, and reverie to wash over Ó Cadhain's characters. This eases the reader's challenge. The author plunges us immediately into a fictional tale told in dialogue and interruption.

Yet, even if Caítríona Paudeen's new arrival among the dead makes her by default the protagonist, the buried characters surrounding her six feet under crowd her out. Many of her neighbors resent her airs. It is best to let this rattling narrative roll on, rather than resist its banter or weary of its nagging. As a downed French pilot now and then complains in his own native tongue (untranslated): these scolds bore him. He had hoped to find peace in death, but the tomb seems not to be dead at all. Rather, the foreigner, struggling to figure out the meaning of the babble around him, finds it betrays the same old ennui. Sympathizing with his plight, I found myself drifting along as the voices resounded and receded. It's not hard to give way to them as background noise rather than scintillating exchanges.

The liveliest portions open most chapters. The "Trumpet of the Graveyard" summons souls to a reckoning. Ó Cadhain contrasts the joys of the living with the dread of the dead. He also here evokes the intricacy of Irish-language verse by departed bards: "But the flakes of foam on the fringe of a surge of a stream are slurping in towards the shallows of the river where they slobber on the rough sand." The alliteration and end-rhyme give way as they ebb into brutal phrases, and a sudden stop.

Meanwhile, without fresh news to filter into the soil, insults and laments repeat. No effort at organization lasts long; a Rotary Club, an election, a cultural society all flounder. Jonathan Swift's prediction of "a road on every track and English in every shack" threatens the isolation of the village. Its cadaverous inhabitants debate a medieval prophecy attributed to St. Colmcille about the signs of the world's end. This sense of doom deepens in the novel's vague duration during the middle of the Second World War. The corpses debate, as did their real-life counterparts, the comparative merits of the Germans and the British as allies for officially neutral Ireland. The Antichrist's return is rumored.

The talking dead are uncertain if D-Day has occurred. Only with the internment of the newest arrival, Billy the Postman, do the rest learn that none of their graveside crosses are made of Connemara marble. The dead had asserted this, each trying to put down the others, so as to boost their own status. That incident concludes this novel. Its recurring themes of discontent and rivalry dominate whatever  moments of tenderness and solidarity remain after village life has given way to common death. In this sobering depiction of a determined counter to the stereotypes of Irish rural relationships, native son Maírtín Ó Cadhain in his native language sought to correct myth with truth. As ably translated by Alan Titley, the results recall Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Martin McDonagh's play, both of which feature this same milieu, as they include too the telling phrase of "a skull in Connemara".
(PopMatters 2-24-15; Amazon US 3-12-15)

Flag Day

My mom would mark her birthday on June 14th. This is Flag Day in the U.S. But few ever flew the Stars and Stripes, I noticed. But she was tickled that her natal day coincided with what in her youth, I reckoned, must have been a far more celebrated commemoration of patriotism. It also must have been so back then, as she was born a few years after the end of WWI and was married the year America entered WWII, in which her only sibling, her beloved brother Jack and my namesake two decades later, died at Saipan.

I found recently a scarifying quote by the Indian anti-globalism activist-writer Arundhati Roy. “Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”

I thought of this watching last week this video by Neil Halloran, "The Fallen of World War II." George Dvorsky comments on how the impact of Stalin on his own civilians, whom he let die so as to make his soldiers fight harder, and the immense amount of casualties the Soviet Union endured, remains eerily evident in these data. Halloran masterfully combines narration and charts, with simple sound effects, minimal pictures, and a clear argument, to show how since 1945, the richer nations have not warred with each other. Civil war declines as nationalism grows, and now, far fewer die. Roy blames death on nationalism; India and Pakistan's birth pangs attest to this slaughter, admittedly.

Halloran would admit that such barbarism in the past few years when it happens may loom as more disproportionate. While news fills our feeds with conflict, very low numbers of deaths register. This is not to minimize loss, but Halloran reminds us that there is a growing tendency from the hard  numbers to demonstrate a definite move away from armed conflict and terror as inflicted worldwide.

At the bottom of every mortal, bloody bar chart he shows, a small flag can be seen. For these, and for of course the ideologies each nation represented (or in some cases, was forced to uphold after invasion or capitulation), I was reminded of my ambivalence towards ritual rallies. In my cubicle, a souvenir (je me souviens) magnet of Québec aside, all I have hanging are mini- Tibetan prayer flags.

This may or may not uphold my principles. In kindergarten, I cherished a booklet of the world's flags; in stamps from colonies and countries, I loved learning geography. Kashmir's partition, Bhutan's frailty, the takeover of Sikkim by India, Maoist victory in Nepal, and the predicament of Tibet all speak to another rebel flag: "Don't Tread on Me." But as the Buddhist appeal in its lofty heartland tries to remind us if unsuccessfully given its own decimation under a red banner, that the ultimate reminder of our shared humanity points to pieces of cloth we hoist with not hate but humility.

tSeirbhís chuimhneacháin ina dTailte Dearg

Thiomáint muid go dTailte Dearg go minic. Ach, níl muid imithe go dti ansin a freastail ócáid difriúil ná mar gheall ár mhac síne, Leon. Mar sin féin, chuaigh muid go dti inniu.

Fhreastail muid an tseirbhís chuimhneacháin do Kathryn Green. Scríobh mé faoi di le déanaí ar an bhlog seo. Fuair bás sí amach ar saol seo is tobann.

Chuaigh muid ciorcal ar an Ollscoil na Tailte Dearg an tráthnóna seo. Bhí chuimhne Léna agus chairde go leor eile faoi Kathryn le grá. Labhair daoine faoi a ranníaocaíochtaí agus cairdeas go fliúrseach.

Bhí mé sásta a fheiceáil cairde ó dhá sheiminear leis Liam MacDomhnall agus Caoimhin Ó Néill fós. Bhailigh muid leis mic léinn atá caite agus faoi láthair ar chéile ag an poll dóiteáin faoi na gréine. Bhí sé ina lá cothrom chun freastail ar ansin, gan amhras.

Faoi deireanach, d'ith muid ag an bialann Eureka leis Leon agus Chaiside. Bhuail mé an fear bocht óg le coiléan nua. An bhialann a íocadh a béile lena fiancess, duirt sé orm. Duirt sé liom go mbeadh sé íoc ar ais an tseachtain seo chugainn nuair a bhí íochta aige féin.

D'ólann muid leann blásta. Bhí maith liom giotán le leann Strawberry Sour (Almanac) agus La Folie Sour Brown Belgian (New Belgium) agus Ritual Red, ach is brea liom Patsy's Coconut Rye Stout (Barley Works, Costa Mesa) agus le déanaí Heart of Dankness le Ritual, an IPA áitiúl an chuid is fearr. Tósta muid di Kathryn.

A memorial service.

We have driven to Redlands often. But we have not gone out there to attend a different occasion than for our older son, Leo. All the same, we went there today.

We attended a memorial service for Kathryn Green. I wrote about her lately on this blog. Death took her out of this life very suddenly.

We joined a circle at the University of Redlands this afternoon. Layne and many other friends remembered Kathryn with love. People spoke about her contributions and friendship in abundance.

I was happy to see friends from two seminars with Bill McDonald and Kevin O'Neill too. We gathered with students who were past and present together at the fire pit under the sun. It was a lovely day to gather there, without a doubt.

After, we at at the Eureka restaurant with Leo and Cassidy. I met a poor young man and his new puppy. The restaurant was paying for his meal, he told me. He told me he would pay them back in a week when he was paid himself.

We drank tasty ale. I liked a bit of the Strawberry Sour (Almanac) and La Folie Sour Brown Belgian (New Belgium) and Ritual Red, but I loved Patsy's Coconut Rye Stout (Barley Works, Costa Mesa) and finally Heart of Dankness from Ritual, a local IPA the best of all. We gave a toast to Kathryn.

Stakeholders

How many were burned for witchcraft? Feminists in the 1970s asserted in "The Burning Times" that nine million women met this fate. Anne Barstow's Witchcraze estimated 100,000. However, recent historians lower this to 40,000-50,000. Also, about a fifth were men, further complicating figures on this controversy.

My FB feed today generated a Halloween 2013 essay  "What Witches Have to Do With Women's Health." In Salon, Soraya Chemaly links to Barstow as "the latest scholarship."

As Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English explain in the 2010 revision to their classic book “Witches, Midwives & Nurses,” between the 14th and the 17th centuries, tens of thousands of people were killed as witches. Estimates range, but the latest scholarship puts the number at roughly 100,000 people, 80-85 percent of them women. By the mid-16th century there were villages where all but one woman had been killed for practicing witchcraft.

Looking this up, I figured nearly twenty years ago may not be the most recent research. In the preview of the Ehrenreich-English book online, on pg, 14, they explain in the 1973 original (only the introduction is updated) that they relied on figures of between 50,000-100,000, and that others have claimed as many as a million murdered. They cite the leading American historian of the witch hunts, John Demos, in a necessary aside, that those killed were but a fraction of those accused or suspected.

I did find in my reviews medievalist Jeffrey Burton Russell's 2007 revision of Brook Alexander's A History of Witchcraft. This expert on witchcraft reckons 60,000 victims hanged or burned for heresy. Russell and Alexander remind us of the difficulty of defining victims. "Sorcerers, heretics, and pagans" comprise a triple definition of a "witch". If 4:5 are women, this may align with the estimate  accepted by reputable scholars today. Relying on accusers, as on hearsay, may lead to devilish errors.

In memory of Kathryn Green

This shows myself (in cap), Pat Harrigan, my wife Layne, and Kathryn Green at the end of the Lawrence Durrell seminar. This was held last late-June/early-July at the Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, on the coast near Carmel, California, under the aegis of Professor Bill McDonald. Sponsored by the alumni of the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies, now part of the University of Redlands, this convened with alumni and a few fellow-travelers such as me. We discussed the merits of the Alexandria Quartet.

I think at the end of this seminar, among 22 people, she, my wife, and perhaps fellow skeptics John Rubio and Brittany Greenbaum were the only ones dissenting from the view that, after all, Durrell's once-celebrated tetralogy was successful. I liked how we all listened and learned from one another, and again, I liked watching the Johnston community in its milieu.

Kathryn went to Johnston with my wife, and she was very generous with her time and good works to assist that experimental college in its past and present incarnations. I got to know her a bit, during each seminar. She was very quiet, making me seem a chatterbox. But she joshed me how well she and I would get along in a theoretical marriage made of two silent types. She possessed a quiet confidence and poise, that showed itself in her manners, voice, and tone. She got up around 4:30 to meditate. Her stillness was evident as she perched in a half-lotus pose during discussions, composed. 

My older son graduated from JC last Saturday. I was thinking of Kathryn then, for she and I walked across the quad of century-old trees, talking about audiobook versions of Durrell. We went to join Professor Kevin O'Neill's re-convening of some of us from the previous alumni seminar, held on death in philosophy and American popular culture, a year before Asilomar. It took place in Pacific Palisades, down the coast, and it was where Kathryn had been raised. She moved to Palo Alto and there she flourished. I found out yesterday she has died, after being hit by a bicycle, a few days ago.

"The vision of blind sleepers such as I"

As readers of this blog know, William T. Vollmann, as a hunt with that search term here will verify, remains one of my favorite authors. Although I find his fiction and essays sometimes too sprawling, and as his fierce determination to remain free of editorial control or publication fends off brevity, Vollmann reveals a restless mind, a vast range, and confident erudition seasoned with moral humility and wise insight.

He begins an essay in the New York Times about the Gnostic scriptures in his typically direct voice: "Have you ever wondered whether this world is wrong for you? A death, a lover’s unabashed indifference, the sufferings of innocents and the absence of definitive answers — don’t these imply some hollowness or deficiency? For my part, the wrongness struck when I was 4 years old. I was at my grandmother’s house, and I saw a cat torture a baby bird." He also, in other accounts, has narrated his failure as he sees it to take care of his younger sister when he was a boy, and how she then drowned. As with me, death haunts him always.

As one who has roamed into Afghanistan before the rise of the Taliban, who has investigated the plight of the poor in Asia and in Latin America, who has roamed the rails of America, and retraced the steps of the natives into the Arctic, the Maritimes, the Virginia estuaries, and the Western plains, Vollmann counters the cant or easy pieties of many of his writing contemporaries with observation.

Similarly, although many of his many books find him not taking on belief directly, he acknowledges here its hold on him. "Hoping to understand the purpose of our situation, I visit possessors of maxims and scriptures. Most of them are kind to me. I love the ritualistic gorgeousness of Catholic cathedrals, the matter-of-fact sincerity with which strangers pray together at roadsides throughout the Muslim world, the studied bravery and compassion in the texts of medieval Jewish responsa, the jovial humility of the Buddhist precept that enlightenment is no reward and lack of enlightenment no loss, the nobility of atheists who do whatever good they do without expectation of celestial candy — not to mention pantheists’ glorifications of everything from elephants to oceans. All these other ways that I have glimpsed from my own lonely road allure me; I come to each as a guest, then continue on to I know not where." His writings strive for compassion, cultivating one's patience for poverty and pain.

I understand his search. "Somewhere beyond us is the true God, or Goddess, who calls us to come home. She is calling me now. As I walk my own many-curving way toward death, I can’t help wondering how awake I am. Hence certain Gnostic lines haunt me. Someone beyond this world has named herself or himself the vision of blind sleepers such as I. This voice calls itself the real voice and insists that it is crying out in all of us. I wish I could hear its cry." He, like me, continues to wonder and wander and study scriptures and listen to accounts, even as he feels distant from many.

He is mature enough to acknowledge the weakness of those before us who have insisted that they channel the divine through themselves. "As a corpus, the scriptures are nearly incoherent, like a crowd of sages, mystics and madmen all speaking at once. But always they call upon us to know ourselves." And, Vollmann is perceptive enough to recognize their appeal, no matter our rationality.

(Image: Fra Angelico, Predella of San Marco Altarpiece, The Healing of Justinian by Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian, Museo di San Marco, Florence. I first saw this illustration in this fine book.)

Pillar of Fire

Two headlines shared last Sunday's New York Times' front page. On the left, the feature: "Brooklyn Fire Kills 7 Children, Worst Toll in City Since 2007." The subheading: "Orthodox Family's Sabbath Hot Plate Cited." On the right, with a giant snapshot of a beaming "slightly built teenager with an easy smile" it documented "From Minneapolis to ISIS" as it told of a son of Somalians who chose "a Young American's Path to Jihad, and to Syria." I considered both, signs of what faith does to people.

The story of the Sassoon family, the father a Sephardic immigrant from Israel who emigrated to join his wife's New Jersey family, is sad. The mother and one daughter escaped, but their children and siblings perished. The father, at a religious conference, did not therefore hear of their fate until after Shabbos ended. Many neighbors or friends also had no knowledge until after their observance ended.

A blech, or tin plate, is often placed on top of a range to keep food warm. In the 90-year-old house, this caught fire in the kitchen, and then spread via the stairwell up to trap the family above. A "pillar of flame," firefighters concluded, shot up to be a manifestation of death, for a young, devout family.

Abid Nur's story, as he changed from shooting hoops to posing in the desert with a Kalishnakov, demonstrates another form of devotion to a desert religion's ancient code. He started to post threats of doom on social media, and then suddenly sneaked off, after perusing the 50-page online guide to jihad the Islamic States disseminates as to how to throw off Turkish border guards and prepare citified jihadists. Nur got some supplies, such as Nikes, at the local mall before going off to join the enemies of the West. His partner was caught, and the FBI plans to use him to dissuade other youths.

I thought of the "pillar of flame" and remembered another way fire works. On the stove, at the tip of a rifle, the power of the orange burst can kill as well as comfort, blast as much as it warms or heats a meal to keep the family content and happy, not wanting to eat a day-old plate of tepid fare. In Exodus, the divine presence marks the way for the Hebrews with a cloud by day and fire by night. The Wiki entry labels this as theophany--how God shows to us. The Sassoons and Nur (the surname is associated with a wealthy Iraqi business family, surely one that has very few remaining in that Islamic nation as ISIS continues ethnic cleansing; the latter name means "light" in Arabic) both seek that force. They craved its revelation, one by leaving America to go back to a holy land, the other by leaving the hallowed and contested desert to come to a big city. Which found what they sought?

Elliot Smith's "Roman Candle": Music Review

After Elliott Smith’s death in 2003, a wall on Sunset Boulevard, where L.A.’s Silver Lake blends into Los Feliz, filled with tributes. They crept over a colorful design of an auto-repair shop’s façade, featured on the cover of Smith’s Figure 8 (2000). I drove past it often, as my wife works a few blocks away and my sons started pre-school on Sunset in this relentlessly gentrifying, lucratively twee neighborhood. My sons and I watched that wall crowd with penned or scrawled flourishes. One of my boys wondered about its boldest message, left in broad black marker, way up high in a corner: “You fucking coward”.

Similar to Kurt Cobain, a fellow Northwest talent and misfit, Smith’s sudden end generated sympathy among many and anger among at least a few. At the time, Smith’s death was locally rumored a suicide, although some averred that the two stab wounds to Smith’s heart were perhaps the result of a drug deal gone wrong, rather than a self-inflicted, fatal wound. Like other entertainers already famous or not yet so, who moved to Los Angeles and then died mysteriously, Smith’s fate shrouds how we respond to his career. Listeners may find more gloom in his terse debut album, Roman Candle, than even Smith intended. Or, this half-hour may foreshadow his mortality a decade after he recorded nine songs on a four-track machine with a Radio Shack microphone, as a demo tape for Portland label Cavity Search.

I’ve always liked Smith’s previous band, Heatmiser. While overlooked, it boasted a grittier, denser post-hardcore attack, led by fellow guitarist Neil Gust (later in No. 2), backed by bassist Sam Coomes (later in Quasi) and drummer Tony Lash (later in Sunset Valley). The fact that Smith’s fellow Portland-based musicians never sustained the success he would, as Roman Candle signaled his solo career, does not diminish Heatmiser’s compact power, with raw melodies and honest lyrics about sex or sordidness.

These low-life attitudes, if expressed in educated form (Smith and Gust met at rarified Hampshire College), permeated Smith’s tunes. The title track opens with soft but insistent strumming. Smith sought to separate himself from Heatmiser’s roar, and the grunge glory of Seattle’s Nirvana and Soundgarden. Behind the closely-miked chord changes and muted fidelity, Smith warbles and wavers, usually troubled.

His talent arrived early, for “Condor Ave.” was written when he was 17. A livelier tune, it narrates depressing subject matter with cheerful delivery, over a spritely air. This typical, dogged juxtaposition, over even this short album, can wear an attentive listener down. Smith parades his gift for lovely guitar, as on “No Name #1”, but his refusal to ease up on downbeat narratives betrays a contrary bent. In hindsight, this slant may have hastened his separation from Heatmiser (even if Gust appears on the cover and Lash helped mix Roman Candle), given his next 10 years of heavy drinking and drugs.

The titling of four songs, and three in a row, as “No Name” nods to Smith’s willful obscurantism, his insistence on obscurity. Numbers #2 and #3 stay respectable, if less memorable: “Everyone’s gone/ Home to oblivion.” Yet, pleasant singing and graceful harmony convince a casual listener (if words retreat to the background) about Smith’s wise choice to lighten cloudier moods with sunnier melodies.

“Drive All Over Town” drags; the fourth “No Name” about a breakup finds Smith straining his voice to reach a sensitive register which, while he carries it off convincingly, may have inspired his imitators to whine and moan about the lover who left. This self-pitying atmosphere does dampen Smith’s legacy.

The titles of the final two tracks, “Last Call” and “Kiwi Maddog 20/20” (a fortified wine) allude to the alcohol-fueled concerns that haunted Smith. The first song despite its put-downs and self-hatred whirls around a more aggressive guitar, recalling Heatmiser’s ornery, if textured, songcraft. The second applies reverberation for resonance (aided by a drummer) which expands acoustic textures. Both songs anticipate his self-titled second album and his third, Either/Or (which some of his fans, me included, count as his best). Major label signing followed. Then, his music became more baroque, more pop and more Beatlesque. Smith’s characteristic songwriting continued, but studios and bigger budgets muffled the punch of his direct, honest, even if uneven first three records, which better show his dynamic range.

Smith figured these songs would lead to an offer of a seven-inch single on Cavity Search. But all were accepted and released by the label. Their lo-fi nature (a 2010 remaster tweaked its frequencies, but I have only heard the CD as released in July 1994) conveys Smith’s pain, as it applies his musical remedy.

The qualities Smith brings to these sparely played, deftly arranged, yet simply recorded tracks reveal the themes and styles that led, after two more (arguably better) albums on Kill Rock Stars, to critical acclaim and modest mainstream success. Smith was accepted by those who would too soon express their sadness on that Sunset Boulevard wall. Anyone who viewed at the 1998 Oscars his nominated ballad “Miss Misery” may remember his unease, aired all alone before a billion people. Backed by the house orchestra, he curled up into one of his characteristic expressions to loneliness. His awkward stance as he sang an abridged version of the Good Will Hunting song displayed his discomfort. Fame never fit Smith, although his reputation grew. Predictably, he lost to Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” from Titanic. (Spectrum Culture 10-9-14: "Holy Hell! Roman Candle Turns 20")

Slán a fhágail dó Taffy

Fuair Taffy bás amach ar feadh an tseachtaine seo caite. Féadfaidh tú ár Corgi Phembróc in earrach seo caite anseo. Bhí maith leis a suí chomh seo liom.

Bhí Taffy ag ár teaghlach ó 2004 ann. Chuir muid sé nuair raibh sé coileán. D'fhéach sé cosúil le coileán sionnach.

Is breá liom feoil. Go fírinne, díth air a ith achan bia. Bhí léas mór ina á shúil nuair chonaic lón.

Ghlór mé Taffy "tafalach" go minic. Lig mé go raibh Taffy ina gadaí. Bhí mhaith liom a rith i ndhiadh dó amháil is dá feargach.

Bíonn Taffy i gcoirt go coitanta. Chuala muid sé ghile faoi a choisaint chugainn in ár teach agus ár clós lá agus óiche. Deanfaidh muid chailleain dó. Tá súil agam go bhfuil sé sásta leis caoireail sna scamaill anois agus i gcónaí.

Saying Farewell to Taffy.

Death took Taffy away during the past week. You can see our Pembroke Corgi last spring here. He liked to sit with me like this.

Taffy was with our family from 2004. We got him when he was a pup. He looked like a fox cub.

He loved meat. Truly, he had a need to eat every food. He had a great shimmer in his eyes when he saw edibles.

I called Taffy "tafalach" often, I pretended as if Taffy was a thief. I liked to run after him as if angry.

Taffy was commonly barking. We heard him dashing about our house and our yard to guard us day and night. We will miss him. I hope he is happy with sheep in the clouds now and always.

William T. Vollmann's "Last Stories and Other Stories": Book Review

The title may mislead. In his mid-fifties, after a five-year grant which afforded him a break from frenetic typing and prolific publishing, William T. Vollmann given his work ethic presumably intends to tell more tales. His books blur globetrotting journalism, ethics, violence, sex, travels among the down-and-out, history, cultural critique, and speculative fiction. Michael Hemmingson's 2009 monograph explains: "Vollmann's collections are not compilations of random short stories written over a certain period of time, as many collections seem to be. Each is compounded on a high concept, a grand metaphor; the volumes are cycles of related texts with recurring topics and motifs." (22) In these thirty-two sprawling stories, composed apparently during the past decade, ghosts hover, spirits tell tales, and memories linger, to settle down.

A journalist now "fat and old" returns to Sarajevo two decades after the war. His story, told obliquely, labels him only by his nationality, bound by the dictates of an internecine conflict which reduced neighbors to their territory or tribe. That war shot down any Romeos and Juliets who tried to escape the snipers, as the opening vignette dramatizes. Attracted to the crossfire the natives try to flee, the protagonist echoes Vollmann's experience as it opened his critique of justifications for violence, Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), as one of "Three Meditations on Death". This event led to his serious wounding and the death of two of his companions when their jeep was ambushed on the way to Sarajevo. Driven to investigate this, and to make a living off of documenting pain, Vollmann reflects on such collusion by a curious, compliant war correspondent: "The American felt that slight sickness which always visited him on such occasions; in part mere adrenaline, which was intrinsically nauseating, that higher form of fear in which his mind floated ice cold, and a measure of disgust at himself for having voluntarily increased his danger of death. Over the years, the incomprehensible estrangement between his destiny as a risk-taking free agent and the destinies of the people whose stories he sometimes lived on, which is simply to say the people who were unfree, and accordingly had terrible things done to them, would damage him. Being free, however, he would never become as damaged as many of them."

Some of Vollmann's characteristic tics emerge in this representative passage. As his critics contend, it might benefit from editing. Vollmann to past criticism has responded that he submits exactly what he needs to, and he refuses many excisions requested by editors or publishers. Therefore, his books tend towards heft. (See my reflections 25 November 2013 on Imperial.) Does this latest volume need it?

Six-hundred-and-fifty pages of themed stories shift from Sarajevo to Trieste for part two, and then part three in Bohemia. The fourth section leaves Trieste for 1860s Mexico. Fifth, Norway, and sixth, Tokyo follow. The seventh setting is unspecified while the eighth roams further, into Kauai, Paris, Buenos Aires, and the unknown. Here, the ninth portion concludes, as spirits intervene. The success of these restless, spectral stories depends on whether Vollmann can sustain in-depth soul-searching.

Part one explores Sarajevo of two doomed lovers, then that city as revisited earlier this current decade by the "American". The relatives of one of those killed in the jeep distrust the reporter, as if he was a "leader." They resent that he survived and not his Croatian-American friend, although the "patient fatalism" of the journalist proved not a shortcoming but a survival technique for one long bullied.

Three twined tales, for those familiar with Vollmann's themes, fictionalize his reflections on the 1994 death near Sarajevo of his classmate and later interpreter, Francis William Tomasic. What's added for this anthology is the discomfort of a boy once bullied turned middle-aged teller, who with his weary wife revisits, with mixed results for friendship or fondness, his former hosts. One story ends as these two Americans rest by the "Yellow Bastion, with heavy, fragrant clusters of white elderflowers bowing the branches down before them, and then, far down through the greenness, a hoard of those other white flowers called tombstones, rising delicately and distinctly from the grass". Vollmann prefers to underplay such prosier sections, so when these appear, they deepen their emotional impact.

The next story reaches novella length, with purpled, prosy passages filtered through a storyteller from an vague time perhaps two hundred years ago, about Jovo Cirtovich. This Sarajevan wine trader in Trieste seeks arcana of how the spheres move and the earth turns. It deepens Vollmann's immersion into this region's lore and landscape. But its meandering pace recalls digressions within Don Quixote, or or a heady, epic recital, its ending postponed for what feels a thousand nights, from Scheherazade.

This wandering attention persists over part two, with a few stories set around the Balkans. First, a boy who desecrates a statue of Our Lady of Flowers. Second, a shaggy-dog saga dramatizes a plinth of bronze statues which come to life, and then fictionalizes a surrealist painter, doubling as a slinky cat goddess. Then, a haunting episode introduces a trench ghost. Golem-like, this eerie figure animates post-WWI figurines to fight at grave sites, recalling tales of corpses restored and spirits unable to leave their places of death. Vollmann's invention strengthens over these loosely linked Trieste tales.

Back to Bohemia, part three connects stories about a vampire husband and wife, a widow, and a witch-finder. These take place in the 1630s, but retain as many tales in the first sections do a timeless sense. The folk nature of their narratives suspends them, however. A resigned tread dampens them, and they smell musty. As the Trench-Ghost tale's teller averred, "eternal stories do have a way of becoming tedious". But the last, with its showdown "come the dark of the moon" as "a squad of Holy Bohemian Dragons stood ready with garlicshooters, buckets of holy water and arquebuses loaded with silver bullets every third one of which had been blessed by the Pope", enlivens this morbidity.

From Trieste, part four opens with the Emperor Maximilian and his soon-maddened wife Carlota embarking for Mexico. Soon defeated, the Hapsburg claimant to the Second Mexican Empire spends his last night in prison imagining, in a set-piece displaying Vollmann's skill, an eerie Aztec sacrificial ritual anticipating the pretender's humbler demise before a firing squad in 1867 Querétaro. Later, a folklore student in today's Mexico falls in love with the incarnation, or deterioration, of his subject La Llorona, once La Malinche the mistress of Cortes: her lips "were cochineal-red, like the teeth of an Aztec prostitute". Finally, a diabolical fable, in the style of a notary from the Inquisition and the length of a garrulous episode from Cervantes, accounts for Veracruz's reputation for the plague. This moralizes on the fate of the Amazons, producing an allegory for colonialism's deadly sins. While scenes, set in grim prison and then in grim fantasy, benefit from detail, it seems a never-ending story.

Norwegian tales, of a spider-love, a graveyard, and a churchyard, mire themselves in the icy macabre. Perhaps the climate can be blamed. Set on an emigrant ship to Québec, part five's longer story fuels a hellish excursion, concluding in a gruesome, if at least warmer, cannery run by trolls. Two more stories, one in the first person, also end abruptly, although this leaves them lasting longer in memory.

For Vollmann's meandering prose, followed for long stretches, blurs these ghosts with doom-laden narratives. Committed to these, the dogged reader must capitulate, following the protagonists on their decaying pursuits. "The reason I had first approached her," one man who longs to turn a ghost rationalizes, "was to overcome the defining human error of despising death's carnality". This articulates Vollmann's motive, and reveals his determination to pursue hermetic themes. Embracing what repels most of us, part six's shift to Japan reaches its peak in loosely paired stories: the lover of the ghost of Rainy Mountain haunts the slopes in the feudal era; in modern times, a "camera-ghost" sucks its title character into its inner mechanisms, perhaps a setting no previous epic of ectoplasm has explored. More tales waft about the floating world of geishas, and over all them there rises a miasma.

"Defiance Too Late" comprises the total of part seven. This dour story, about Abraham's connivance and capitulation to God's command, cannot free itself from too-dutiful a recital of biblical cadences.


Part eight saunters first to Kauai for an love affair between another mortal man and an increasingly formless presence. The narrator confides for her his "capacity for affection--I nearly wrote infection"; this proves too true. At first, courtship appeals. "Swimming in her foamy white petticoats and her long green seaweed hair, she sang me the same melody she'd sung Ulysses", but the fun fades. That siren song "made little impression on me; I'd heard it all before." Vollmann lets the bracing impact of her humid, tropical, and watery allure or disgust dissipate. "Wringing out her sea-black skirt afterward, on her tiny lava-islet decorated with skulls, she offered me eternal life beneath the water; unfortunately, I was already diseased by that curse." This jaded attitude does not keep pages turning as fast as most authors may desire. As this narrator saunters off mid-tale to pursue a Greek corpse in Paris, before his return to Hawai'i, the novelty of an extended pursuit of a siren fades into narrative lassitude. A gruesome Poe-type tale of corpse robbers and flesh-eaters turns humdrum.  A fable emanating from Toronto incorporates a time-altering view from a telescope perched high on its immense sky tower promisingly, as it allows the narrator to see past and present, but it peters out. 

"The Grave House"  refreshingly, conveys spiritedly not a haunted but a haunting house. Very brief and witty, it evokes by its inversions a spooky series such as Night Gallery or The Twilight Zone.

This section concludes with "When We Were Seventeen" which at over fifty sections nears another novella. Dying of cancer, a middle-aged man rummages through his desk to conjure up, through a witch's magic potion, not only the letters from a long-ago failed romance in his teens, but the woman herself, after she has died, also from cancer. This uneasy affair between a revenant and his past object of affection, who keeps humiliating the clumsy swain who in middle age repeats the failures of his teenaged dating gaffes, enlivens this epistolary encounter. But again, energy fades, over such length. 

Part nine by comparison moves this creaky compendium briskly towards a conclusion. In its entirety, here is the first entry, "The Answer": "I asked the grave why I must die, and it did not answer. I asked who or what death was, and it kept silent. I asked where the dead I loved had gone, and its earthen lips did not open. I begged for just one reply, to anything, and then its grassy lips began to smile. Moistening itself with its many-wormed tongue, it opened. Too late I realized the answer."

Returning to the site of one of the tales in part six, Kamakura, "Goodbye" recalls earlier entries of watery seduction, subterranean skeleton-lovers, and ghoulish embraces. Then, these stories fade away, with their protagonists. They recall H.P. Lovecraft, by conjuring sinister, sinuous elongations.

In the typically diligent endnotes explaining where fact (such as Jovo or Maximiliano, or feline-obsessed one-time Trieste resident, surrealist painter Leonor Fini, whose works decorate the dust jacket) departs from fiction, Vollmann lets his sly hand show. He claims that he "cut a few pages, out of compassion" for his agent and editor. "No doubt Last Stories will make us all rich, at least in those 'hell banknotes' at certain ethnic Chinese funerals in Southeast Asia." Out of paper, Vollmann constructs his own tiger, words to howl at death. (PopMatters 7/3/14; to Amazon US 7-18-14)

William T. Vollmann's "Riding Toward Everywhere": Book Review

In "The Rainbow Stories," Vollmann paid prostitutes for their stories; in "Poor People," same for that group, across the world. So, this third investigation into how the other half (or more) lives "catching out" on the rails promises an intriguing journey. Some of the best moments in his novel "The Royal Family" were at the last tenth, when the protagonist leaves San Francisco and Sacramento (Vollmann's own residences) for taking the train all over. How does this non-fiction excursion pan out?

The best part is the first fifty pages. This is re-arranged from a Harper's Magazine piece, and benefits from cohesion, even it it sprawls in typical fashion for this author who tends to write big books. This one's comparatively brief, and it appears as if from the opening chapter, it's on target, matching author (who keeps lamenting as he's back in California that "I've got to get out of here") with a subject where he incorporates Kerouac, Twain, Thoreau, Hemingway, London, and Thomas Wolfe. But like the last-named predecessor, he rambles.

"All the waiting, that living-fieldmouse smell in the grass, was a necessary part of our experience, because it transformed motion into salvation. When I hitchhike, I experience the same feeling. And I wonder whether life can be good without the hard times." (19) But, "riding the rails, like any attempt to escape from life, must taste of failure now and then unless one is willing to die." (22) A middle-aged Vollmann will not die, of course, writing this, and he often laments his slowness compared to his buddies. One expects after the start of this adventure a lot more stories about who he meets, but as he admits very late in the narrative, "absence" dominates. It seems few hobos exist now, compared to decades ago; survivors lay low, resist intrusion, and resent "citizens" such as Vollmann.

His inquiries tend to meet with terse replies, and few stories emerge from his informants to entertain. So, he resorts to citing the authors mentioned above, or telling related stories of loneliness such as the best one, when he must kill a fieldmouse in a deserted cabin in the desert. He evokes the necessity to protect his daughter from infection and the divided loyalty between compassion and action vividly.

"I go my own bumbling way, alone or in company, knowing not precisely where to go until I am there." (73) He admits this in Wyoming and while that vast state seems to beckon, he reveals few moments why or how, and he tends in uncharacteristic fashion to gloss past much that may have happened, perhaps as it's so mundane. But we may raise questions we expect answered. Is it difficult to board a train in motion? If so, how it is done, and what is the best way to leap off, and when? How hard is it to sit for so long in a boxcar vs. a grainer, and feel the bumps and grinds of the tracks and rail cars?  What happened when people on the trains shared stories, or shut up?  How much did he carry along with his orange bucket? Even accounting for boredom surely novelty happened.

Still, no Vollmann book (and I have by now reviewed nearly all, including the ones listed above) is without value. "My darling America has become a humpyard where cars and citizens can be nudged down the hill onto various classification tracks. I've got to get out of here." (180) As he admits with the government trailing him and how since this 2008 book he has published on the Fed surveillance of himself, he tends to live largely off-grid if in the heart of Sacramento. So, he already has separated himself, as with his father--whose treatment at the hands of an officious bakery clerk he recounts in the first paragraph presciently--from much which pursues those of us who choose to live among officials and paid employees who try to restrict our liberty in the name of efficiency and conformity as the security state grows. This lesson, beneath the rather mundane situations which surprisingly fill much of this travelogue, assure that its core truths remain relevant. (8-12-14 to Amazon US)

William T. Vollmann's "The Atlas": Book Review

For newcomers, this provides a 1996 odds and ends analogy to a musician's compilation of b-sides, demos, cuts that did not fit an LP, or alternate takes on familiar songs. For instance, "The Butterfly Stories" appeared as a novel, but a section here repeats that same narrator's search for Vanna in Thailand. The scenes do not perhaps add a lot to what the novel depicted, so like a compilation not of greatest hits but of assorted miscellany the artist wants to share, this may please fans more than those meeting Vollmann for the first time. Yet, if a reader wants to learn about his signature concerns, whether trying to wrangle for liability with a rental car agent in Sarajevo after the author had been wounded and his two friends killed, rescuing a mosquito-ravaged woman from the side of a Canadian road, or elucidating a familiar theme of loneliness--an empty diner reflected in a spoon in one vignette as the protagonist sitting in a corner musters up the courage to ask out the waitress--this assortment surveys a sampling of insights. 

This works best when it allows Vollmann to roam, as the title indicates, away from his Asian and San Franciscan haunts to those of a cold Toronto, or among the Inuit. A portion here called "The Rifles" reprises that novel's doomed Reepah, or places other books of his (to date at least, given his prolific output) have not wandered into, such as Mauritius, Switzerland, and among the Australian aborigines. As in his recent "Last Stories and Other Stories," we get Mexican magic realism infusing "The Hill of Gold." As with his Asian journeys, we get an elusive object of desire, followed in the surreal search for a coin with a hole by the mortal narrator entangled with a mysterious "The Angel of Prisons." 

A few sample passages express the prose at its peak. "In hitchhiking as in so many other departments, the surest way not to get something is to need it." Loneliness permeates so much of these stories. "As the mathematician C.H. Hinton wrote: '. . . we are accustomed to find in nature infinite series, and do not feel obliged to pass on a belief in the ultimate limits to which they seem to point." Yet Buddhism speaks to a few here who seek, and a longing for meaning impels quests. "Her life was like some cold wide shallow pond rushing straight at her with fan-shaped waves, the wind picking up now, not yet strong enough to throw more than foam in her face." Among the Inuit, destiny looms. "Living means leaving, going on trying not to hear the screams." That speaks for itself, as does the title "Disappointed by the Wind." In such terrain, bleakness compels Vollmann's characters to break the ice, to try to grasp some sense of surety and comfort, even if the melt "tasted like burned desolation." 

I also liked the drug trip that reveals near Big Bend, CA a search for God which nonetheless finds that presence following the narrator like the sun behind one's back all day, never quite entering him. Instead, the "Traveller's Epitaph" here confesses "I fear death." That presence hovers over many of the figures here; unsafe sex with Thai prostitutes takes one character into a forbidding fate, while all over the sprawling centerpiece "The Atlas" with dozens of locales traversed, we find one of Vollmann's most erotic passages, a relative rarity, in his account of a narrator smitten by a married lover who will die of leukemia. The poignant emotion the author allows us to fully feel, for me, succeeds to display better the impacts Vollmann can deliver, freer from the restrictions of city streets. 
(Amazon US 7-20-14)

Slán a fhághail dó Rover

Fhilleadh Léna agus mé abhaile ar an Ceathru Iúil. Fhán ár dtrí madraí ann: Taffy, Opie, agus Rover. Ith siad lacha ó bialann Sínis ar chéile. 

D'imigh Léna agus mé go Sliabh ar an Rí ar feadh an tseachtaine seo caite. Ach, cheap muid anois go raibh ag fanacht linn Rover a thabhairt ar ais. An lá seo chugainn, ní iarr Rover a ith nó a ól ar chor ar bith. 

Bhí fhíos againn go raibh an uair ansin. Ghloigh Léna trédlia a tháinig go dtí ar theach. Thug sí drugaí dó. 

Thít Rover ina chodladh go mall. Labhraimuid leis go bog. D'inis muid faoi neamh h-aghaidh madrái leis crustaí na pizza go leor.

Shuigh muid leis Rover ar feadh tamaill. D'fheach sé suas ar an crann tangerine. Chonaic Rover an speir gorm samraidh uair dheireanach.

Wishing goodbye to Rover.

Layne and I returned home on the Fourth of July. Three dogs waited there: Taffy, Opie, and Rover. They ate duck from a Chinese restaurant. 

Layne and I had left for Monterey during the week past. But, we think now that Rover was waiting for us to come back again. The following day, Rover did not want to eat or drink at all anymore.

We knew that it was time then. Layne called a veterinarian who came to the house. She gave drugs to him. 

Rover fell into a sleep slowly. We talked to him softly. We told him of a heaven for dogs with pizza crusts galore. 

We sat with Rover awhile. He looked up at the tangerine tree. Rover saw the blue summer sky a last time.

Euripides' "Bacchae": Book Review

This tragedy's all about showdowns. Dichotomies and conflicts, as Daniel Mendelsohn, emphasizes in his preface, create a character unique to the genre. Dionysus "hovering between divine majesty and human weakness, magnificence and pettiness--and between male and female--the teasing, seductive, playful, epicene god is a great study in ambiguity." This god, an effeminate foil for the law-and-order bent, but fatally lured Pentheus, draws him and the audience into a diabolically clever trap. The horror than felt, as Pentheus is punished and then his corpse torn apart, while his own mother than slowly comes out of the bacchanalian frenzy to realize her own complicity, deepens what could have been but a strange depiction of subliminal drives into a portrayal of compassion after cruelty.

Mendelson explains how this drama "explores both the benevolent and the punishing faces of divinity." Ecstasy and terror follow  instead, as the natural wonder and delight transfers through a breakout of the repressed tendencies within us, once under some spell cast, into dread and sorrow. Euripides tells this story swiftly; this can be read in a short sitting, and it moves as rapidly as a well-written thriller might in an short television production today on some "prestige" cable network. Like shows now, the critics stay divided. As Mendelsohn notes, consensus is lacking "because its subject--among other things--is the irrational, and how conventional intellectual resources wither in the face of a wildness, a potency beyond reason."

From Robin Robinson's translation, an excerpt illustrates the swift concision of his rendering. Cadmus mourns Pentheus' end: "If anyone still disputes the power of heaven./ let them look at this boy's death/ and they will see that the gods live." Certainly the reaction of this grandfather captures the human response to the whims and imperatives of a divine plan unfathomed by mortals, yet again.

This edition includes a supplement, complete with a glossary on how to pronounce names, as this assumes we now lack this preparation. A chart of who's related to who, and an introduction to Euripides, about whom we know nearly nothing, helps the reader. It's sobering to be reminded that out of a thousand works performed in the 5th c. BC from Greece, we have only 33 of them today.
(Amazon US 9-12-14)