Benjamin Black's "Even the Dead": Book Review

This seventh entry in the Quirke series set in mid-1950s Dublin satisfies. It circles back to elements of the first installment, Christine Falls, but it does not feel stale. You could begin here, but as only asides to the increasingly complex inner life and love affairs and family traumas the protagonist endures emerge, it's better to read Benjamin Black's evocations of the dreary city and the coroner's office in order. Again, we find David Sinclair at the latter, while Inspector Hackett accompanies Quirke on what he reasons is his desultory quest for justice, given his intense "absence of a past" felt.

This emerges at the climax. As before, whether as Black or John Banville, this writer prefers a slow pace. In these mysteries, much work is done by others, and although the three coincidences tallied by characters do defy probability, Dublin's a small place where many of its people cross paths, for dark purposes. Quirke, battered in a previous account (reminiscent of the aging Jack Taylor in Ken Bruen's equally fine Galway noir contributions to this genre), suffers a brain lesion and feels increasingly fuzzy-headed. His confidant Mal also faces weakness, and in a typically eloquent passage common to this writer's works, he makes a poignant analogy. Facing onset of mortality, Mal opens up to Quirke.

"It's like discovering that all along you've been walking on a tightrope, and suddenly the end of the rope is in sight. You want to get off, but you can't, and you can't stop or retrace your steps, you just have to go on, until you can't go any further. Simple as that." (142) The stoicism they share continues.

But as always, there lurks beneath the power and corruption of Church and State glimpses of comfort. "And still the day refused to end. At ten-thirty the sky was an inverted bowl of blue raised radiance, except in the west, where the sunset looked like a firefight at sea, a motionless Trafalgar. He stood at the open window of the flat, craning to see, up past the tall houses opposite, a single pale star suspended above the rooftops, a dagger of shimmering light. It was a long time since he had felt so calm, so untroubled. Serene: the word came to him unbidden. He felt serene." (68) Quirke has solace.

There's also bits of gallows humor, given the trade. "Amazing the number of people who drive into trees or stone walls by accident in the middle of the night, or fall into the Liffey with their pockets full of stones." (17) So Sinclair opines. He leavens the growing sorrow of his senior, Quirke the pathologist. He battles drink, the memories of abandonment and betrayal and guilt, and the drudgery of his tasks. He seeks romance, and even if "love" is but the term people use, he reasons, when they run out of other words to express their predicament or their yearnings, it may comfort him--for now. (Amazon US 12/2/16)

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)

Yellin' with "Ellen"

Waiting for my physical, one other person preceded me. An obese man in his thirties. T-shirt, shorts, sandals with socks. Resembling the character on "30 Rock" with the ironic trucker's cap. His hair, brown and wavy, hung down his back from beneath a UCLA hat with smaller letters my lenses could not make out. His lenses were standard hipster heavy plastic black frames. Which complement very few facial types. He stared into his phone, its smallness evident against his bearish paws. I chose to sit beneath the t.v. rather than face it, knowing from previous long perches the added aggravation of the daytime fare it peddled. At Loma Linda, where I had often taken my wife for dental work, Fox went on and on, and I endured the news cycle every half hour, repeating nothing in particular. At least in Burbank, it was tuned to one of the networks, with what used to be deemed housewife fare, "Ellen." She boasted of turning 59, amid her schtick. Canned or not, cheers followed every utterance.

I had snatched up a book before I dashed out. Traffic filled the 5. I took Riverside Drive along that concrete stretch, through Griffith Park. A few glimpses of the riparian and hilly settings that I have witnessed nearly all my life, usually from car windows. I got to my appointment just in time, not that it mattered. Still had three-quarters of an hour ahead, and then five others entered. All greyer than me.

First a solicitous yenta, showing the indifferent receptionist an ad from "one of your magazines." Then her husband, more rotund, on what used to be deemed a cane. He looked dazed and pale. She and he watched the television. So did another couple, a dark-dyed haired wife who looked happier than her dour tubby husband. Finally a stiff balding man walked in and took the chair next to mine, dragging it away from me towards the door. I felt a bit hurt, wondering what I looked like to him.

I dipped into a book I can drift in and out of. John Cowper Powys' 1934 autobiography is an odd work for its time, the kind of upper-middle-class account of nature, prep school, Cambridge, an allowance to live on sparely (if it seems always at ease) from father, and the first job teaching, in a girls' school. That's where I am about 40% in, not that much happens. His intent is rather to give the mental and emotional state of himself, curious even by English eccentricity. His measured admissions of sadism, and his decision to excise his mother, his wife, and any other female paramour except by vague allusions attests to his oddity. Apparently not to offend, but the imbalance given his preoccupation with keeping his savage impulses controlled leaves an strange impression. A muse, a magician, a would-be mage, JCP argued for a native, natural, and naive approach to life in its energy.

His erudition evident, but his preference for his attenuated "Celtic" wild quality makes his claims rather specious, he one of many children of a Derbyshire cleric. He wrote his life around the age of 60, and four years after his first major and of course heavily autobiographical novel was published.

He had lived as a lecturer in the U.S, and his turn to writing to support himself as radio displaced the appeal of the wandering entertainer indicates an era when the written word still commanded enough of an audience among the discerning and the curious to pay the bills in upstate New York. He might be a blog pundit now, with his own YouTube channel. He spoke of his own wish to fit in with the hardy folk as he strolled about Cambridge's flat fens, even if he stayed balanced enough to realize he resembled "a caricature of Taliesin." This reminded me of the scene around me, in everyday Burbank.

A city I had begun my childhood in, having moved there in pre-school and left after second grade. We lived two blocks from the 5 Freeway, where my parents ran a dog kennel on an industrial street. Now the world's biggest IKEA looms over "Beautiful Downtown Burbank," while a shopping sprawl with the usual big-box logos replaces the aircraft factory my mom had worked at as a secretary. Watching these streets for over five decades, it used to be mocked in my childhood on "Laugh-In" but now the Middle-American complexions of its residents had given way to the gray, in a place heavily Armenian and Latino, as much of the San Fernando Valley, now that Bob Hope was dead and gone.

I've related last November my conversations on the bus tour of Irish Montana with an anthropologist who had retired from the Army to live with her family off the grid near the northern border. She and I wondered where smart misfits fit in, who cannot handle either the earnest platitudes of the urban intelligentsia with its kale smoothies and NPR (ok, I listen now and then, when the classical station has a pledge drive) or the inspirational claptrap of the super-sized Wal-Mart megachurch heartland.

These dovetail with a decision of a colleague who relocated to Cascadia, weary of the academic betrayals and "misguided liberals" who thwarted her path in SoCal. How many share the quest of these two women, with doctorates, who dwell far from the "hot, brown, and crowded" sprawl (to twist a term from globalization shill Tom Friedman, used by a third Ph,D. to refer to her and our hefty sitter's UCLA thirty thousand aspirants, at our drought-plagued, charm-challenged alma mater)?

Around me, those at the doctor's waiting room gazed up at "Ellen." A woman with a vacant expression except of utter awe, grey hair like a hippie caricature, face pink and soft, eyes wide open, heard the celebrity and a singer named Adam who apparently replaced Blake as Nicole Kidman's arm-candy ramble about paying off an audience member's "wedding debt" to braying applause. And this was the "better" of the humbugs taking up the allegiance of the yearning masses breathing free.

Like JCP, if from a source far closer to the toilers than he, I'm a coddled holder of an elite degree among the masses. Unlike him and some of the Whole Foods contingent (ok, I have shopped there for their great beer selection, but I prefer a local-run place near work), I don't romanticize the hoi polloi.

The current fetish to laud "immigrants" regardless of their legal status as heroic reminds me of the folly of liberal rhetoric. You get Nobel laureates and shot-callers, Boston bombers and studious refugees, shady scammers and diligent toilers. The pitch made by progressives elevates all as if fleeing annihilation, when nearly all of the million-plus entering the country yearly come as part of a family chain, preferred over those with skills unmet by the American-born. For every twelve people we could aid in their own country, we pay for one to come here. I remain rarely moved by appeals to heartstrings, and this may betray my rational bent, as I'd like less immigration and fewer people overall. The more people in America, the heavier their environmental footprint. On the other hand, call me out as a father of two, and a hypocritical immigrant's son who burrows back into the oul' sod.

I know how corrupt, ecologically damaged, spiritually wounded, and socially unequal Ireland too remains, alas. There's no shelter for the pessimist, the cautious idealist, the searcher for solace. As JCP learned in his upstate hideaway, the world demands us back. He had to leave for England as the war loomed, and then fled to his dim ancestral Wales to claim his turf as if its lord. We mix our real and our fantasy lives, as he knew well, and we must endure as mortality looms and doctors await us.

Photo:"Celebrity Worship Syndrome"

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.

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)

"Belfast Noir": Book Review

The Noir series from Akashic Books proliferates, as cities around the world inspire writers to set tales of crime in them. Long into the selection process now, it's Belfast's turn. As co-editors Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville introduce this short story collection: "You can see Belfast's bloodstains up close and personal. This is the city that gave the world its worst ever maritime disaster, and turned it into a tourist attraction; similarly, we are perversely proud of our thousands of murders, our wounds constantly on display." So, these fourteen contributors, many who live in the city or nearby in the province, display their fictional characters, full of wounds and eager in many cases to keep inflicting more wounds, despite two decades of (relative) peace. No matter what, death beckons.

Part One, "City of Ghosts," opens with Brian McGilloway's story of undertakers, a logical cover for nefarious goings-on as certain men driving hearse and a coffin try to cross the border and back again. Lucy Caldwell's "Poison" refreshingly avoids death or corpses, and her account of daring schoolgirls fascinated by their language teacher and their former classmate, a few years ahead, who he left his wife for, turns awry in convincingly matter-of-fact fashion. Lee Child's "Wet With Rain" captures the haunted quality around Great Victoria Street. Ruth Dudley Edwards' "Taking It Serious" sidles around dissident republicanism, and its appeal to those who look to the generation of executed rebels in 1916 and after as their heroes, to the discomfort of the established republicans who have largely accepted the status quo in spite of their regular parades and graveside rhetoric to the contrary. While many stories here seem as if the speakers could have lived anywhere in the English-speaking world, her story feels despite its contemporary setting as if from an earlier time that Sean O'Faolain might have conveyed.

"City Of Walls" looks at divisions within Belfast. Gerard Brennan's "Ligature" squints around the city through the disoriented eyes of an unsteady young woman who winds up incarcerated after a series of desperate actions throughout a city half-gentrifying, half-divided. In this realm which his novels have long detailed in impressive fashion, Glenn Patterson's "Belfast Punk REP" typifies his ability to capture the fractured psyche of some in Belfast, through the career of a disreputable ugly fellow nicknamed Milky, who also winds up behind bars. Ian McDonald, known for his fantasy and science fiction, here offers in "The Reservoir" a story of revenge, inflicted after a rival's daughter's wedding.

In the third part, "City of Commerce," Steve Cavanagh's "The Grey" roams the court system, a setting otherwise if tellingly largely skirted by his fellow contributors. Claire McGowan in young P.I. Aloysius Carson may have a protagonist who can outlast the foes arrayed against him; the winningly plucky and self-deprecating hero draws the reader into his adventure to track down the owner of "Rosie Grant's Finger." Another enduring if fictional hero outside these pages, Karl Kane, in Sam Millar's "Out of Time" returns to inflict mayhem and utter hard-boiled dialogue in reliably pulp fashion. Garbhan Downey's "To Die Like a Rat" compares a testy rodent's fate with a human victim.

Finally, entries in "Brave New City" feature fresh takes on the drama of dead bodies. Known for his "Resurrection Man" (1988) novel dramatizing some of the most brutal of the thousands of contenders for murder in Belfast, Eoin McNamee's "Corpse Flowers" uses the ubiquity of CCTV and surveillance installed in the city to set up a haunting, elliptical story. Arlene Hunt's "The Game" turns the tables on some who make sport out of the torment inflicted on those unable to bear it, and like all three stories in this concluding section, it ends suddenly and effectively. Last of all, Alex Barclay's "The Reveller" starts with comeuppance of Paddy the Publican and ends in an unsettled state of mind.

Not every story hooked me all the way through, for a few dragged, whatever they may have tallied in pages. Still, while some did not capitalize on the Belfast setting or its complex heritage as much as I'd have expected, the mix of those troubled by the sectarian past and present for their actions and those who were more disturbed by the conventional motives for revenge and retribution that crime fiction and fact thrive on in any city make for a generally satisfying contribution to this ongoing Noir series.
(11-3-14 to Amazon US)

Damon + Naomi's "Fortune": Music Review

Their music grows more reflective as this couple mature. Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang, for over two decades, explore subdued moods on their intimate songs and vocals. After the demise of Galaxie 500, this drummer and bassist continued their partnership, insisting on an organic, integral sense of music that turned inward more than their previous band.

These eleven brief tracks accompany Yang's half-hour video piece, "a silent film with a live soundtrack" of the same name, Fortune. It commemorates both her late father's passing and portraits from the middle of the last century painted by the father of Norman von Hotzendorff. Norman inherited his father's archive, as Naomi had her father's photography. Add tarot cards to the title of this album, which conveys a autumnal, contemplative series of songs.

Recorded and played entirely by the duo, this album is closely miked. Acoustic guitars and reflective keyboards play off gentle washes of snares and a steady bass. The pair had brought their talents to Galaxie 500 in Damon's jazz-based percussion and Naomi's self-taught and insistent bass patterns. many years later, these qualities merge with their voices, intertwined as on "The North Light" beautifully, and on some of the other tracks, separately.

The first few songs set the melancholy but not despairing tone. They blend together. They merge into a tapestry of introspective meditations on loss and recovery. They are dignified, and they drift along.

Halfway into the sequence, "Shadows" stands out as a fine example of the layered, meticulous pace that Krukowski and Yang have mastered. Hushed, it does not let go of emotion, but it cradles it. Damon's yearning vocals over his distant percussion and Naomi's faint backing voice carry sorrow.

"Towards Tomorrow" and "Hurt House" offer lovely instrumental interludes. Yang's "Sky Memories" and allows her a lead vocal. Her contributions to Galaxie 500 before the mike were far fewer than guitarist Dean Wareham, but her unhurried phrasing always complements her measured bass lines.

Concluding with the longest song on an album clocking in at twenty-eight minutes, "Time Won't Own Me" hearkens to Damon + Naomi's signature sound. It's slyly jaunty beneath a shy exterior. It asks for connection; its modest arrangement and hushed delivery confess a desire for closeness. Fortune, another confident expression of this couple's quiet command of music and lyrics, wins us over again. (Amazon US 3-5-15; PopMatters 3-22-15) Artist's website: http://damonandnaomi.com/

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.)

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")

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 "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.

"Walter Potter's Curious World of Taxidermy": Book Review

"Anthropomorphic tableaux" entertained Victorian audiences; when I was at a 2001 revival of Victoriana at the Victoria and Albert Museum, I turned a corner of the crowded exhibit to find under glass a fantastic scene. Twenty stuffed cats, arranged in 1890, at "The Kitten's Wedding." I burst into laughter (a rare occurrence) and summoned my wife and sons (then at an impressionable age) to this must-see display. As we chortled, other museum goers looked at us and the display, askance, silent.

This anecdote illustrates the changes between the time that Walter Potter crafted hundreds of animals, amphibians, and birds into intricately assembled dioramas for the delight of his fellow Britons, and today's more uneasy reaction (well, for most people, perhaps) to taxidermy that so faithfully and eerily mimics our own rituals. Potter sought, from boyhood, to teach himself how to dramatize nature surrounding him in rural West Sussex. London-based taxidermy expert Pat Morris and Brooklyn curator of The Morbid Anatomy Library and Museum, Joanna Ebenstein, present an illustrated compendium of her photos and his brisk text to explain what we know now about Potter.

First of all, born in 1835 and dying in 1918, this naturalist was no relation to Beatrix Potter. Her own renderings of animals resemble strongly the real ones Walter gutted, stuffed, and wired, but the authors surmise that since Beatrix's first book did not appear until 1902, any supposed influence was from him to her, and not vice versa. As a lad, he "tamed jackdaws and taught pet starlings to speak". In his village of Bramble, he began to collect the critters who comprised a tourist attraction, aided by a local brewery who saw such marvels as "The Athletic Toads" as a draw for consumers of their ales.

How did Walter create his displays? He began with cardboard models "until suitable animals became available" as Morris and Ebenstein diplomatically phrase the reality. I preferred when seeing those wedded felines to pretend they were all lovingly resurrected from kittens who had passed away peacefully. While a similar fiction was perpetrated by the museum curators who succeeded Potter, the facts prove that the beasts and birds arrived in less placid ways. Visitors brought in birds killed by cats or found on roads. Surplus kittens from farm litters were put to death. Stillborn rabbits and, at Potter's own self-taught hand, rats and toads contributed to the skin and fur out of which he made art.

Nearly fifty rabbits crowd a village school, with classes on needlepoint, math, sewing, and writing. "The Death and Burial of Cock Robin" (as pop art pioneer Peter Blake comments upon in a preface) represents one of Potter's most ambitious efforts. It took him seven years of spare time to build up all the birds needed to play out this nursery rhyme's plot. Croquet and tea, squirrels at cards and rats at gambling, kingfishers within their underground lair, "The Babes in the Wood", "The House that Jack Built", and, fittingly or ironically, ferrets hunted by miniature figurines fill out the tableaux depicted.

Part two of this short book reveals the details of these tableaux. Unlike the one at the V+A, where the minutiae of the crowded ceremony could not be seen from a distance and under glass, the vivid color and captions help the reader envision Potter's meticulous attention better than a museum display may. For instance, the authors point out one blue-clad fellow. "This male cat looks disgruntled at the matrimonial proceedings. He once held a book open at the wrong page and glued to the stumps of his paws, but it is now lost." This passage verifies the next lesson of this book: the fate of this collection.

As part three tells, the museum at Bramble was sold in 1970. Moved first to nearby Brighton and then Arundel, next to faraway Cornwall, after 150 years the collection, having been turned down by the National Trust, was auctioned off. No purchaser summoned up the funds to keep it all intact. A few postcards, many showing the "freaks of nature" that also engrossed past audiences more than present, flesh out these curious contents of Walter Potter's now-scattered world, attesting to its eccentricities.

PopMatters 4-15-14; Walter Potter Taxidermy book site;  in shorter form 4-17-14 to Amazon for US version and British printing

Leo Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilych + Confession": Book Review

The pairing of these two accounts of mortality, Mary Beard explains in her introduction, reveals Tolstoy's interest in death during his fifties. Although he lived another quarter-century or so, Leo Tolstoy's fascination with what transpired as the body aged and fell apart animates the story of forty-five-year-old Ivan. His fate, well-known and well-translated by Peter Carson, possesses its own poignancy. As Beard relates, the finished manuscript of these paired translations was delivered by his wife one day before his own death in January of 2013. An editor at Penguin, he came to the choice of texts ideally suited, being raised by his Russian mother and Anglo-Irish/French father trilingually. Rosamund Bartlett's afterword elaborates on Carson's rendering compared to his predecessors in English.

He favors for Ivan a plain style. You can see his use of repetition, suiting the matter-of-fact manner of Ivan and his colleagues and family, indirectly telling his story by the coolly omniscient voice in plain fashion that Tolstoy adapts for this streamlined, efficiently conveyed novella. His wife "began to wish that he would die, but she couldn't wish for that because then there would be no salary. And that irritated her even more. She considered herself terribly unhappy precisely because even his death could not rescue her and she became irritated; and her concealed irritation increased his own irritation."

Similarly, you see Ivan's own haunted realization that he must share our common fate. "He tried to defend all that to himself. And suddenly he felt the fragility of what he was defending. And there was nothing to defend." I've heard and admired this as read by Oliver Ford Davos for Naxos on audio (review 7-5-12), and Carson's version provides Ivan Ilyich and his harried household a fitting tribute.

"Confession" is less familiar to readers, but as Beard shows, in the manner of Augustine or Rousseau, it preoccupies itself with similar concerns, and indeed the fact and fiction of Tolstoy's pursuit of mortality enters into this purportedly non-fictional treatise as it does his story. He assumes the kind of air that sounds like Ivan and his circle at the bar or while he plays cards, too. "People with our kind of education are in a position where the light of knowledge and life have dissolved artificial knowledge, and either they have noticed this and emptied that space, or they haven't yet noticed it."

He tells of his youthful turn from Orthodoxy to rationalism, although this text anticipates his controversial return to a fervent evangelical, idealistic, but committed phase late in his life. It's valuable for recording the type of mindset Tolstoy and many advocated in the mid-19th century, when Russian intellectuals chafed against tradition and piety. He agonizes over the loss of comfort the aesthetic pursuit affords and how helpless he feels he can ease his family's support, when "the truth is death." He and Ivan combine to show the ridiculousness of vanity and the feebleness of ambition.

He anticipates the existentialists and complements Dostoevsky perhaps as he looks into himself and finds emptiness, and contemplates suicide at the age of fifty. "Is there any meaning in my life that wouldn't be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me?" Science does not satisfy his quest, either. Socrates, Shakyamuni, Solomon, and Schopenhauer gain citation, as Tolstoy looks to philosophy and speculation for wisdom. While this segment for me rambled, like Ivan as he interrogates doctors, undergoes treatments, and tries on remedies to no avail, Tolstoy here wonders: "Why do I live?"

Most of us, he avers, do not investigate so diligently. Rather, the majority prefer ignorance (especially when young) or escape into Epicureanism (often when not so young, too). A third way, he suggests, lies in "the way of strength and energy." If life's a joke, take action and strangle evil. Fourth, weakness presents a way to be dragged along; this resembles Ivan's choice after his illness invades. Life is "contrary to reason," so why is it that so few seem to recognize this, while so many shrug it off and plunge into pleasure or denial?

One answer may lie in the "consciousness of life" that impels generations to create and improve our lot. But, standard definitions of faith cannot easily satisfy Tolstoy as he wrestles with a trust in the unseen or the irrational solution. He must redefine it as "the knowledge of the meaning of man's life, as a result of which man does not destroy himself but lives."  Some of this smacks of romanticism, and much of it rambles, but Tolstoy's intelligence prevents him for long from indulging in idle reflection. He keeps returning to the need to make sense of his life, and to balance reason with a less measurable but still present sense of a force that eludes mathematics or the laboratory.

In the common people, he witnesses a faith that helps them endure and find comfort. They also die a "calm death," one that by the way Ivan Ilych fights and only meets at the last moments. Tolstoy abandons himself to a belief that he can assent to out of conviction, his own melange. He is saved from despair by this message: "Live seeking God, and then there will be no life without God." He finds the shore after being pushed into a boat and cast adrift, and he uses his oars to steer accordingly.

Three years re-learning the truths of Orthodox Christianity on, Tolstoy bristles at that denomination's hostility to other Christians. He resigns himself to the human manner all seek the life force. He accepts truth can reside outside an institution's definitions. Falsehoods are mixed in, it being human.

He ends this with an eerie vision of suspension, a dreamlike state evoking the vertigo of Ivan in his torment, three years after writing the early chapters. It's an odd conclusion but a complementary one to Ivan's own tale, and a fitting inclusion for these two thoughtful works, together at last. (Amazon US 11-13-13)