Jon Frankel's Blog, page 3

THE BLUEST DAY

The Bluest Day

There’s a glass of milk on the floor
of iron plating soon to be spilled,
arms and legs of a chair in waiting.
I watch the news with half an eye
the other out the window wondering
when the police will arrive, a life of peace
gone to waste, washed like the waters
of Mars into space. My own dead planet
bleats in the future while the bluest day
flamed and went out with a scream, the planes
like birds flying into windowpanes.

To The Dust: Vesuvius and Groomstool discuss their Lord and Lady

“What can I do for you today, Lord?” Vesuvius asked. “Tea?”
Groomstool sighed as he took his seat. No way was he going to drink Vesuvius’ tea, usually a micro dose of LSD. “No tea. I have much to do.”

Vesuvius chuckled mischievously. “My Lord, old friend, it is merely a little black tea. Nothing more intoxicating than a trace amount of caffeine.”

Despite reservations, Groomstool nodded. “Very well, if you promise.”

Vesuvius snapped his fingers and a faceless monkey man appeared, its titanium head reflecting the low, orange light. He wordlessly signalled to the hybrid beast, who returned with a pot of tea and poured them two cups. “How are My Lord and Lady these days?” asked Vesuvius.

“Honestly, they get more and more feeble with each generation.”

“It’s not my fault! Their intellect is fine, it’s their appalling personalities. True, in fixing a number of flaws, and boosting their fertility, I seem to have delayed maturity.”

“Delayed? Eliminated!”

“Their mental development is largely a function of their socialization, we can’t pretend to be other than the way we are,” Vesuvius pointed out.

“You know that, I know that.”

“They attended school with normal children.”

Groomstool shifted in his seat and sipped the tea. It was still too hot. “In what sense, exactly, is any child born here to be regarded as normal?”

“Our measure should not be Earth, at this point, anymore than a Renaissance Prince was a Roman Senator. Worlds pass, and while our aspirations and affections may be framed by the dead, reality is a quality of the living.”

Isle of Dogs Part 2: excerpt

In June, on Midsummer Night, Ruth sat in their apartment in the tower, reading a collection of Schnitzler’s short stories, her belly like a watermelon, kicked day and night by Renee, who, like her future Consort, seemed anxious to get on with it. It was a typical day, other than the fact that the Palace had been decorated with lilies, sheaves of green wheat, and grape vines; the banquet tables laid with crystal, gold, and silver; the ballroom floor waxed and buffed; and the kitchen alive, the smell of baking bread and smoked boar slowly filling the air. Extended family would convene to eat ham and celebrate Midsummer Night with bonfires, dancing in their best whites, deep into the night. Young Rulers would ride out together to drink and fuck in the woods, while she and her babies read books, alone in their room.

Phaedra lay on her stomach humming, in a purple shirt and leggings with a pink skirt, picking crayons out of a wrecked box and smelling them, placing some in a pile by a drawing pad and replacing the rest, while Sargon chased Cawdor, and Duck watched TV, her bonnet visible above the back of her chair. The lunch dishes were piled up on a tray in the corner, and the white lace curtains fluttered in the open windows. Three days of violent storms had given way to a crisp high-pressure system. Doc Hughes had confined her during the storm, convinced it would bring on labor. She was surprised when Albion arrived with the afternoon coffee and the news that the Vice President, addressing a conference of Mayors in Albany, would arrive shortly, ahead of the guests, and wished to visit them. 

Sargon rode in on horseback from Cold Spring Station with a small contingent of guards. Ruth, Duck, Doc Hughes, the children, and Balfour met him at the inner gate. Sargon dismounted Herculaya, and Little Sargon and Phaedra flew to him. “Papa!” she shouted. She did not notice his reticence, but Ruth did, compared with how he greeted the dog.

While the horses were being stabled, they walked the long graveled drive up to the portico and around to the more intimate rose garden entry, off the White Sitting Room. Here, the staff melted away to their duties, leaving the Ruler alone with Ruth and the children. Sargon spoke to them in the impersonal voice he had used to address the conference until some time had lapsed and Albion entered with a tray of lemonade and pogásca, which Ruth had not had since Mrs. Tucker left. She ate the biscuit, and her heart filled with the flavor of home. And then a painful stab in the stomach, choking it back. 

The Vice President sat in the largest chair, upholstered in snow leopard. Little Sargon grasped his knee and pulled himself up, followed by Phaedra, who said boldly, “No, Sargon, I’m sitting in Papa’s lap.” Ruth’s eyes bugged out and she could barely catch her breath, but Sargon laughed as he used to, and said, “Papa has two laps! Come my child. It’s been too long. And look how big you’ve grown. You will be a princess soon, ready for ruby slippers.”

“Princesses don’t need ruby slippers, Papa, they have ghost feet, and ghost feet don’t care about the cold.”

“Ho ho, I see you’ve learned all about princesses! But you know, here in America we don’t have kings and queens and such, do we now? Long ago, during the First Revolution, we declared our independence. Do you know what day that is we celebrate?”

“Passover,” cried Little Sargon, “When we got free!”

Phaedra solemnly shook her head no. 

“Ah, you disagree with my little Ruler. Very brave indeed. Perhaps one day you will be a great counselor to your Lady and your Sire, like Robin is. Would you like that?”

“I want to be a Martian Princess, Papa.”

Big Sargon frowned. “Then you would have to penetrate the abandoned mines of Mars.” He intoned the final word with gravity and said, “But tell me, when do we celebrate the First Revolution?”

“With fireworks and swimming! July the 4th. I gave my liberty crown to Enrico Stuffy Bear. Come, Papa, to our rooms” She craned her head back to look up at him.

Big Sargon squeezed them together and started to tickle them. “I’m gonna get you now!” They dropped to the floor and he chased them around the white room, between bone chairs, polar bear settees, and ivory-inlaid tables with vases of calla lilies until, out of breath, he landed on his butt at Ruth’s feet, his dress jacket rumpled and hair pulsing with the weak light of an aging man. “Oh, how I’ve missed this.” He rested his head against her thigh and said in a low voice, “Is it true that your time nears? Renee is so distracted with worry.”

“Why doesn’t she come to visit?”

“She won’t come to Midsummer this year.”

“What, what?” she asked in a whisper, gazing down at the flat, coarse hair with a dim wash of blue at the roots. 

“The fleet is on maneuvers in the South Atlantic.”

“The Baby Renee will be all alone here.”

“She will have you, and me, and the children, and Balfour and Cawdor. What do you mean she’ll be alone? Are you alone?”

“Yes, of course I am. I never see you. There is no one to talk to. I read. Soon I won’t have that.”

“But you’ll be nursing.”

“A cow, you mean?”

“I like when it squirts out,” he said, smiling. 

“Oh you like that, do you? You enjoy leaking—”

“Licking. And licking leaking boobs is even better.”

She slapped him softly and said, “Kiss this,” pointing to her lap.

“I’m afraid of hurting you.” Rulers had strange ideas about sex, superstitions about sperm and ova and the interplay of quantum energies. 

“What’s good for Mama is good for baby, or so the old midwife says.”

“When do you speak to old midwives?”

“This is the Hudson Valley, Sire. Many strange things happen here.”

“Yes,” said Phaedra, who had been listening. “The Headless Horseman rides at midnight, burning wicked children in the woods.”

“I think old Duck has been telling tales. Perhaps it is time for a real education.”

Ruth scoffed. “She’s not yet four. Do we not develop the imagination before reason, as a hedge against insane rational certainty?”

Sargon gripped his head. “You and Robin! I’m not a Philosopher King,” he snorted. “Not Demetrius of Phalerum.”

Phaedra shook her head. “Shsh, Papa. In America, we have no kings!”

Little Sargon plopped down on Sargon and held up his arms. “Flip!” he commanded.

“Goodness, you’ve grown.” He grasped the little Ruler’s fingers and flipped him, again and again.

“Do we have an appointment?” Ruth asked.

“Later,” he said.

After the long feast, when the dowagers, emeritus Senators, great aunts and uncles, tuxedoed cousins, and the last of the young Rulers had ridden off into the approaching dawn, Sargon came to her room. Hours later, as she sat alone, sleepily sipping bark tea in a sunny window, her water broke, dousing the lingering buzz in her nerves. 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Pastorale

On Little Sargon’s fourth birthday, his Sire gave him a box of toy soldiers. They were stored in the closet across from Ruth’s bed, under a steep eave. Ruth, dressed in grey linen pants and a black T-shirt that said je suis desole above a cartoon of a yellow duck with an egg emerging from its ass, sat on a chair by the window next to the bed, her pale, unhappy face framed by naked autumn branches. Cawdor lay curled up beside her and Little Renee, who was two, and very large, nursed, her eyes tracking the conversation. “Goddamn it,” Big Sargon said, seeing how low the doorway was. “I don’t remember having to crawl in.” 

The Vice President got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the closet. Little Sargon squatted down about five feet back from the door, hugging Balfour, watching. The scent of cedar and mothballs that was always in the air grew sharp. A smile haunted Ruth’s face. “They’re in here somewhere, I know it.” His giant buttocks shook from the effort. He cursed, and there was the sound of falling crates and glass objects rolling. Ruth covered her mouth with her hand and laughed. “Ahh!” A muffled cry of victory. He backed out dragging a wooden crate covered in dusty spider webs. “I was twelve years old when I put these away. Renee and I used to play with them all the time when Bard 2 was in office.” 

“What’s in the box, Papa?” his Scion asked, and then, pointing at the webs, “what are those?”

“Cobwebs. Surely you’ve heard of them?”

Renee pulled her head away from Ruth’s breast and stared with large black eyes at the cobwebs, her lips parted and slightly swollen. She reached out her left hand, grasped at the air, and squirmed off of Ruth’s lap, dropping to the floor. Her hair was jet black with a faint glow of dark blue, and hung straight down to her shoulders, like mylar threads. She was barefoot, in a long grasshopper-green shift that reached to her knees.  

“Yes, in books and monster movies,” said Phaedra, who was sprawled out in stocking feet on the bed, dressed in yellow pants and a purple sweatshirt that looked like she had never taken it off, reading a magazine. She flipped the pages deliberately and scanned them as if she were looking for something. “But we’ve never seen them. It’s not the same thing.”

“No, indeed it is not.” Big Sargon smiled and walked over to the bedside, stooping uncomfortably, and stroked the pale blond hair on the back of her head. “You are so smart, do you know that? You get it from your mother. I wish the House and the Senate were full of thinkers like you. Then we would get something done. Instead they bicker. Cowards.” He moved to the foot of the bed, where the ceiling was highest, and said to Young Sargon, “Well now, you can fight it out, see, with these. Let me show you.” Phaedra jumped out of bed and squatted down, resting her head on her crossed arms. He dumped out the small, intricately painted metal soldiers on the floor. Out came the artillery pieces. There was a troop of space elephants and armed bears on motorcycles. Renee, Young Sargon, and Phaedra stared at the tumbling pile of two-inch figures, an entire world in a dusty old box. 

Little Sargon asked, “What do you do with them? Do they move when you tell them to?”

Big Sargon looked at the heap and began to recognize individual soldiers by their chips and scratches, by the looks in their eyes. There was no distance in time. “No, it’s not that kind of a toy. It’s a toy that does nothing at all. You have to pretend.” 

A toy that did nothing. Little Sargon wondered what that meant. They had living dolls, foot-tall automata they could chase around the enclosed yard next to the orangerie. They had real live dwarf elephants, mastodons, camels, and bears that were brought by the zookeeper for them to play with in their toy circus. 

Big Sargon smiled and then became stern. “Now then, you have to put them away when Mama tells you to.”

“And Duck?” he asked.

Sargon chuckled. “And Duck. Especially Duck.”

Ruth, who had been silent, said, “Sire, thank you. What do you say, children?”

“Thank you, Papa! Thank You Papa! Thank You Papa! Thank you!”

#

They lugged the box, reverent and determined (though neither knew what a toy soldier was), to the outer hall at the bottom of the stairs, with the fuzzy gold carpet and the low-pitched ceiling. Little Renee toddled in on pudgy bare feet, lugging the lank rag doll, Pugsley, a clown with red star eyes, blue yarn hair, and a crooked yellow mouth. In the box was a rolled mat of black oil cloth. “Here,” Phaedra said, pulling it out. “It looks like a map. Let’s unroll it.”  

It was almost the size of the hall. The ends could be approached from the caves, the low-ceilinged areas on either side of the stairwell. Phaedra’s cave was on the right and Sargon’s was on the left. This designation came from a mash-up of two of their favorite books, Stone Age Lives, about a young Neanderthal boy named Mulligatawny who falls in love with a human girl named Claudia, and The Atlas of Lost Kingdoms, a compendium of vanished empires that included a chapter devoted to Uvegvaros. 

Little Sargon’s cave had a wooden chair and a ball, a toy piano, and a living doll named Ed, which the President gave him when he turned three. Phaedra’s was more elaborately appointed, with two child-sized wingback easy chairs; a bookcase crammed with their most essential volumes, as well as the books Phaedra wrote and bound with string; an easel; cans of paint brushes, pencils, and crayons; and a toy stove that worked. This was where they hid when Ocba was after them. 

It was a star map. A red line across the middle divided it into two zones. Little Renee dropped to her knees and crawled to the center and sat. Sargon looked up and exclaimed, “Renee!”

“Renee,” Phaedra sang. “What side do you want to be on?” 

Without hesitation, Renee pointed to Sargon’s side. 

“You sit next to him, then.” Renee didn’t move but glared at her. Phaedra picked up a soldier and became absorbed by the detail. He wore a silver spacesuit with a gold badge above the visor, engraved with letters and numbers. Seals, tubes, and rivets, even the face behind the faceplate, were rendered precisely. She imagined homuncular Ruler slaves with tiny hands and single-bristle brushes painting in the eyelashes, the crinkles in the corner of the mouth. She said, in Duck’s accent, “Behold, I come to revenge the mothers murdered by Martian Lords!”    

Phaedra stood him up on a circle close to the center line, and returned to the pile on the floor. She picked up three more. “Here my Generals sit in Council, awaiting orders from Vesta.” 

Renee crawled off the board and sat with her feet out in front of her, sorting through the soldiers. Lips and eyes dilated, she selected a space cannon and carried it over to the front of the board, placing it on Little Sargon’s side. She pointed its muzzle at Phaedra and said, “Boom.”

HELL IN A VERY SMALL PLACE

The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta 1930-1975, by David W. P. Elliot. M.E. Sharp, Armonk, NY, 2003.

I just finished David W. P. Elliot’s monumental The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta 1930-1975. The original edition is two volumes, 1500 pages including the appendices and index. It is a diachronic history of a single province in the Mekong Delta, based mostly on interviews with NLF fighters, POWS and those who changed sides, conducted by the Rand Corporation in the mid-sixties. Elliot spent seven years in Vietnam conducting these interviews. There is also a wealth of Vietnamese language materials from both the north and south, government and party documents, provincial military histories, and memoirs. The result is a rich, at times day-to-day account of events from the Vietnamese perspective. Few books of history are so dedicated to the Vietnamese viewpoint and none offer this level of granular detail. Elliot investigates both broad, socio-cultural, economic and political trends and individual decisions. He subjects theories, like the rational peasant vs. the moral peasant, to reveal the complex interplay between self-interest and a commitment to the ideal of independence.

Elliot has sympathy for both sides in the conflict. He is patient with the view that if only America had done more, stayed longer, the south would have won, while ultimately rejecting it. He is critical throughout of the northern generals and party leaders who were attempting to conduct the war from afar, and also of the southern revolutionaries who were always in a perilous position but acted at times with extreme cruelty. He discusses how the hard habits of survival learned by revolutionaries of secrecy, paranoia, authoritarianism, and ruthlessness are carried over in victory, when rebels become rulers. But as he says, the north and the revolutionaries were often down and never out and retain, to this day, legitimacy. In the end, the south, and the Americans, were never able to establish their own legitimacy, something the Communists earned over many decades of fighting the French, the Japanese and the Americans. His thesis includes the paradox that after the revolution the North was a victim of its own success. The north’s land policies and political education in the south created a wealthier, and more aware population of peasants and workers who would reject the collectivist policies of the revolution after the war. The communists had carried out land reform in the north in the fifties, redistributing land and then forming collective farms. Land reform in the south was inevitably less draconian. They broke up the large holdings and severely curtailed tenant farming and big landlords. The plan was always to redistribute land to families for use, not ownership but the collective business and farms imposed on the south after the war failed. Today there are no collective farms and rural people are free to buy and sell land. This is actually what the peasants always wanted, in addition to being free from foreign domination.

The south was always more entrepreneurial and individualistic than the north, but only to a degree. The intense and unrelenting violence of the war drove populations out of the country and into the cities where people dressed and behaved differently. The war created a desire for peace, but also altered traditional society in ways neither side desired or predicted. History changed people.

Many people know something about the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Napalm, Agent Orange, free-fire zones, strategic hamlets, search and destroy, swift boats, the Ho Chi Min Trail, the Phoenix Program, the Tet Offensive, My Lai, these are things Americans are aware of, especially if they lived through it. But the events of the 1930s are totally unknown, and knowledge of this period might have stopped the US from becoming involved. But I doubt it. From the beginning there were knowledgeable people in power who advised against our support of France, the division of the country, the refusal to hold national elections, the rise of Diem, and the invasion in 1965. It was not for lack of knowledge but rather the refusal of everyone from Eisenhower to Johnson to heed it. Towards the end Elliot reminds the reader that history is not what might have happened, could have happened, or should have happened. It’s what actually did happen.

This is a quote from an interview Elliot did for PBS. He consulted on Ken Burns’ documentary (and also, it turns out, Stanley Karnow’s):

“What lessons can government leaders learn from President Johnson’s approach to Vietnam?

“There are many lessons, but I would single out four.

“The first is that a foreign policy driven mainly by domestic politics is usually fatally flawed. It was domestic political considerations that drove Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to escalate a conflict they knew was peripheral to American interests and was probably unwinnable. Paradoxically, related to this pessimism about the prospects in Vietnam was the danger of hubris, and thinking that America has the power to make the world over into its image, the legacy of the triumphalism resulting from the victory of World War II.

“Many years after the end of the Vietnam War said a sadder but wiser McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor to Kennedy and Johnson, “…we ought not to ever be in a position where we are deciding, or undertaking to decide, or even trying to influence the internal power structure of another country.” George Kennan, a foreign service officer and student of history who had formulated the Cold War strategy of containment, came to the same conclusion long before Bundy. In the Fulbright hearings on Vietnam in February 1966 in the U.S. Senate, Kennan stated ‘Our country should not be asked, and should not ask of itself, to shoulder the main burden of determining the political realities in any other country…’

“A third lesson concerns the perils of inappropriate analogies, and applying doctrines (like containment) and sweeping but unproven theories (like the Domino Theory) to a complex specific situation. The doctrine of containment, as its originator George Kennan pointed out, did not apply to Vietnam. His testimony to the Senate on the Vietnam War has enduring relevance for America’s role in the world. He explained that Ho Chi Minh was not Hitler or Stalin and, if he was victorious, would not be a puppet of Moscow or Beijing. Assessing the costs and benefits of escalating in Vietnam (which were never systematically addressed by Washington policymakers – another fundamental error of policy making) would, Kennan said, lead to the conclusion that it would result in civilian death and suffering on a scale “for which I would not like to see this country responsible.” Again, the Washington policy makers devoted little attention to the issues of proportionality and ends and means, which should be the starting point of decision making about war and peace.

“A fourth lesson of Vietnam is the need for constant reexamination of fundamental assumptions. The world is in constant flux, and new situations require a rethinking of inherited conventional wisdom. Vietnam was seen as a peripheral problem, whose importance to the United States always derived from some larger issue; Cold War support for the French as they clung to the last vestiges of empire, a mistaken view that North Vietnam was a proxy acting at the behest of the Soviet Union and China (China was Vietnam’s age-old enemy and both Communist powers did not initially approve or support the rising insurgency in South Vietnam, doing so only after the United States escalated its involvement in 1961). Vietnam should have been seen as a local problem of decolonization, the major international current of the 1950s and early 1960s, and not as a Cold War problem challenging American global credibility.
“During my teaching career at Pomona I tried my best to pass on the wisdom of these observations, especially to students in my U.S. Foreign Policy class.” (https://www.pomona.edu/news/2017/09/25-pbs-series-advisor-professor-emeritus-david-elliott-reflects-vietnam-war)

This Proustian endeavor is obviously not for every reader. The only available edition at the moment is the concise, single-volume one. It took me a year to finish this thing. I didn’t want it to end really, his writing is so lucid, and at all times relevant to his thesis. This is a masterwork that unfortunately will only be read by a few academics. It is about the true tragedy of the Vietnamese war for independence: 45 years of fighting, including nearly 20 years of civil war. Bernard Fall’s title sums it up pretty well: Hell in a Very Small Place.  

excerpt: isle of dogs, part 3

chapter 32, sec. 5

Not long after, Ruth came looking for her again. She arrived at the box office highly agitated and spoke directly to Suki. “I’m looking for a girl, a woman of sixteen named Phaedra.”

“Never heard of her. We have a lot of young interns, but they’re all over the age of eighteen, I can assure you.”

“She’s very tall, with blond hair, and looks much older than her age. She might go by the name of Sara Stjarna.”

Suki said, “No.”

“Sara Istar? No? Any Saras at all?”

Suki shook her head. “Sorry, no. I’d love to help you. There’s a runaway board at the homeless shelter.”

Ruth turned to leave and then remembered that the Ruler Bánffy had said she sometimes goes by the name of Panic. “What about Panic?”

Suki laughed. “Panic? Sure.”

Ruth said, “Where might I find her?”

“She’s in her room on the seventh floor. Do you want me to call her down?”

“Might I visit her unannounced? I’m an old friend and I want to surprise her.”

“Take the elevator. It’s 7F.”

Phaedra was performing both sides of a scene between two people. Stefan had given her a list of ten first lines and told her to write a one-page scene every day, between two characters, based on the first line. She was working on, “There’s something I have to tell you.”

There’s something I have to tell you.

It can wait.

There was a knock at the door. “Yes,” she said.

“May I come in?” Ruth asked.

“Mama?” Phaedra asked, so mad it burst from her face and made her cry. The door opened and Ruth entered, staring warily about. “Your boss, the American Lady, said you might be here. I’ve been a dozen times.” Phaedra put down the pen and paper and faced her. “I was worried you were in one of those awful shooting galleries I’ve read about. A girl was found dismembered. I read about it in the local paper.”

“In Budapest, there is always some story about dismembered children.”

“I didn’t come to fight.”

“You came to take me home.”

“May I touch you, please?”

Phaedra stood rigidly while Ruth hugged her, her grimace uncompromising. “What did I ever do to you?” Ruth cried.

“Being alive, mother. Being alive suffices.”

Ruth clasped her hand to her mouth and emitted a pained cry. “Where did my baby go?”

“Continue like this and I will throw you out.”

Ruth wiped her eyes and said, “I’m sorry I ever raised you in that detestable family. Had I never left Hungary—”

“I would never have been born.”

“It had been better for your father.”

Phaedra asked, “Father, what father?” Ruth said nothing. “Why are you here? To make me feel like shit?”

“Because I thought you would care that your dear Duck has died.”

Now her tears knotted up in her chest and she couldn’t breathe. Phaedra turned from her mother and sat on her bed, fighting with herself, grinding her teeth. Duck dead. Of course Duck was dead. She was old, ancient. “Of a broken heart no doubt,” she spit. “Prisoner in that demented Santa Claus castle.”

Ruth lowered her head. “She was my mother through all those years alone in the Winter Palace and Hommocks Cottage, playing in the basements and the halls. She read to me, told me long stories she made up from this and that, what the old women told around the fire back in Austria when she was a child, and bathed me, and when I cried for home she held me and gave me forbidden sweets, and sang to me in German when I couldn’t sleep. When I was your age and pushed her away she didn’t hold a grudge or cry. She endured silences and rages. And when I was pregnant with you she talked to me and sat up through the night. I shared with her all my secrets, and they died with her—she kept her silence. There is an art to silence. I am so sad to lose her, but to lose you too is more than I can bear. My heart shatters in my chest and the future is lost, as if my whole life were leading up to nothing. My dream was to live with your father, as husband and wife. I thought we would sail to Europe and visit my Mama and live in a castle together. I didn’t believe in happily-ever-after stories, no, I wasn’t an idiot. I wanted adventure and danger and I found it, but it wasn’t what I expected, and your father left us, as anyone in their right mind would have known he would do. I put my faith in others. One must trust to love, but how can we trust? And what do we trust? The drift of things will not allow it. Love, like everything else, comes and goes, while we, by the action of time, erode to nothing. I have learned that this is the only truth, but I thought that you at least would be with me, when you were grown and I was old. What was I thinking? Fool. Little fool.”

Phaedra didn’t know what to say. Finally she said, “If you lived here, I would visit.”

“I am moving from Smolnik back to Castelul Bánffy to be with Oma. It is my home. It will be lonely, but I love the countryside. I will have a horse. I can ride, garden. Will you visit me there? Can I come see you?”   

“The theater is going on tour. I need my passport.”

“Where are you going?”

“Around the world! Isn’t that exciting? I might go to America. I could go home.”

“No! It isn’t safe.”

“Why? Because the President was killed? Why should they come after me? I’m no one.”

“Did you never wonder why your hair glows?”

Phaedra was uncertain. Had she wondered? She had wondered but always encountered that silence. It was the silence that had enveloped her life, the black surrounding walls of her origins wherever she went. The strange looks. The changing circumstances never explained. “I assumed you or my father had some bioluminescent trait. It’s not like no one has that.” She sat squirming, thinking about Duck. Flashes of thought came and went, blades of light slicing through the dark that vanished before she could think out loud. She tried to think of her father but the Ruler Sargon was all that came into her head, her Papa, whose shoulders bore her through the water of the pool, whose back was her horse, who gave her sweets at Christmas, who called her Mausi. He was her Papa and Young Sargon was her brother, and Ruth was her Mama. She knew nothing else. She knew the Ruler Sargon was not and could not be her father. But she had never asked who her real father was. What she had was enough. The question mark, the terra incognita, the mystery behind the curtain of flesh, did not provoke her curiosity, and desire’s lure, which ruled her as surely as any other ruse, led out not in. “Mother, Mama, who was my father?”

Ruth stared at her, her eyes frigid, like still mountain lakes, silent. “He was a Bánffy. I loved him for a summer and he went away. Doc Hughes fixed it, but, as you can see, strands of your hair glow like the sun. And your father’s body lit up like a torch. How beautiful he was at night, diving into the black water of the Sound, glowing yellow, the green phosphorescent algae streaming off his fingertips.”

“Ew. I hope it wasn’t one of Santa’s spawn. Will you bring me the passport, Mama?”

Ruth nodded slowly, her face hard. “Perhaps my Sire, the Ruler Bánffy, can help.”

Phaedra said nothing. Ruth rose and walked out the door. Phaedra suddenly thought, it is such a long way to Bonțida. She ran after Ruth and caught her at the elevator. The hall was dimly lit by a single bluish-white bulb covered in fly specks and grimed with the greasy grit that covered the worn wooden floors and coated the walls. She hugged her tight and asked, face crushed into her hair, “Mama… was Duck alone?” Ruth stroked the back of her head. “No. I went back. She drifted in and out of consciousness. It wasn’t long. I told her I loved her, and she died holding my hand, in peace.” Ruth kissed her and wiped the tears from her eyes and said, “I’m going home now, but I’ll be back with the passport, OK munchkin? I’ll be back. I love you.”      

The Look

The Look

You bit your lip, a look I took
and tucked between the pages,
young flower with the wild sun
lighting up its lion veins,
and diffident, afraid to open there,
among dry leaves I sometimes turn
to find the day the bind began,
how I stitched my heart to yours
and you searched the room for exits.
Petals pressed between papers,
lips to flesh, mind to memory,
the time wounded body in desire arrives
to touch such that brings its full
sound to the fall of day.

Why Literature?

To My Mind, or Kinbotes: Essays on Literature

By Omar Sabbagh

Whiskey Tit Press, VT & NY 2021

Omar Sabbagh’s To My Mind is a rarity in today’s literary world: an erudite, serious examination of literature that is outside of the academic mainstream, while drawing deeply from that well. Sabbagh is a poet and fiction writer who holds multiple degrees in creative writing, English literature and philosophy from Oxford University, the University of London, and King’s College, and he teaches English Literature at the American University in Dubai. All of these perspectives inform his work, especially the last, as he teaches undergraduates, not PhD students, and cannot afford to lose their interest. Thus he has a cosmopolitan portfolio and outlook. But, other than a few Americans, a Palestinian poet and, incredibly, fellow Whiskey Tit author Svetlana Lavochkina, whose 2 books he reviews, his focus is entirely English.

In these essays Sabbagh is drawn to the place where theology and philosophy cross paths and inform each other and the aesthetic choices and thematic arguments of his authors. The authors themselves are often writers that have fallen off the radar of contemporary literary discourse and fashion, GK Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc, Ford Maddox Ford, Lawrence Durrell, and Henry Miller. He locates in their work their own struggle to situate themselves in a modern world that is alienating. In the case of a writer like Ford, a self-described ‘17th century man’, this involves considerable paradox, as he is an acknowledged architect of  English Modernism and practitioner of literary Impressionism. The argument is that between totalizing system, as exemplified by Hegel, or Catholicism, and contingent nihilism. How do writers resist reduction to this binary and locate their ideas along a continuum? The seemingly random, contingent world we all occupy, which has a robust philosophical defense in modern and post-modern theory, disturbs what seems to be an innate, human sense of time and place, past and a future, selfhood and history, whether this is a divine scheme or not. Ford and Durrell intentionally examine and interrogate notions of time and subjectivity, while a writer like Chesterton settles for good old fashioned common sense only after experiencing a similar, intense personal intellectual crisis. Sabbagh does not discuss these writers’ politics much, if at all, and it is only in the fascinating essay on Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan that he tips his hand slightly with a masterful critique of both the Israeli neo-Apartheid state and Zaqtan’s response, as a poet, to exile and oppression.

These are not essays in theory, but they use theory as a tool, and Sabbagh’s toolkit is broad and diverse. Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Nietzsche all get a say and he often, with Heidegger and Nietzsche anyway, teases out aspects of their thought that are useful to his purposes and also more complex than the common academic memes. Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Zizek, Ermmano Bencivenga, Gillian Rose, Bernard Lonergan, Theodor Adorno, and Edward Said are in there too, and Sabbagh makes good use of them, relating theory to the weave of the text itself. The author’s text is primary; it doesn’t exist to prove a philosophical or theological doctrine but rather, show how writers use the language and analysis of both to work out what are often personal problems. He does not try to force literature into a box but affirms his belief that language and the arts exist and exist for a reason, as an essential facet of the human project, of culture, and of individual spiritual and psychological development.

A good case in point is his essay on TS Eliot, where he reads The Wasteland and The Hollow Men in particular as poems of personal crisis. This interpretation, as opposed to reading the poems as a conservative reaction to the breakdown of traditional society caused by modern science, philosophy, democracy, the technics of impersonal world war and the death of God, explains more, and the view is licensed by Eliot’s letters.

The writing is as vigorous as the thought and as generous too. Omar Sabbagh writes with a sense of humor and his language is playful. He does not indulge in idiosyncratic or simply bad writing as an expression of complexity. It‘s complex enough the way it is. Humor particularly is hardly absent from the tradition (William Empson and Kenneth Burke are often amusing) but it is rare enough to be grateful for its abundance here.

These are generous essays, generous to the authors, to the audience, and to the other writers he draws on. The piece on George Steiner is remarkable. I didn’t know Steiner wrote fiction. Sabbagh’s essay is about this tradition of the literary artist who also writes criticism, such as Empson, Burke, Wilson, and Eliot did. Sabbagh is here allying himself to a tradition that we ought to celebrate. To My Mind is an important and intellectually entertaining excursus into some little visited spots of the literary firmament, as well as a reminder that great writing continues to be produced, and is worthy of a thorough philosophical investigation by a sympathetic and eclectic critic without an axe to grind or even a scalpel. Just a pair of highly attuned ears and a probing, astonishingly well-read mind.  

In My Room

In My Room

I will go inside now
and keep going till I’ve found you.
All the rooms are empty,
someone’s moved or gone bankrupt,
a friendly dust on the floor
rust in the toilet. That’s how I know
where you are when I find you
in a bright parquet of sun and shade
colored by warped glass
a waver in the pane like a watermark,
the space around us bent
by the gravity of what has been, history
strewed in the path forsaken
by sorrow when I end up in this room
alone beyond the touch of reason.

IOD Part Two

I believe Part 2 of Isle of Dogs is winding its way through the digestive track of Whiskey Tit. I don’t have a pub date yet. In the meantime here is a taste of the first chapter (Chapter 11, appropriately, of the entire book):

Several weeks after the UN Massacre, Ruth headed to Doc Hughes’ office through Hommock’s Cottage’s bedrock tunnels, the faint smell of decaying antivirals in the air. Doc Hughes was possibly going to implant her with the Ruler Renee’s clone.

As a child, she had explored Hommock’s Cottage’s damp basement chambers and crawl spaces. But the New Tunnels, as they were known, were forbidden to her. Now she found herself standing before a six-inch-thick steel door with a sign that said Medical Chambers. The door slipped into place behind her. Immediately her eyes swam. The glass walls, floors, and ceilings were molded into the contours of a cave, built up of opaque and translucent tiles that refracted and texturized the light, so where one thing began and another ended was unclear. Signs—white letters on black rectangles—were drilled into the walls.

Hommocks Cottage was in the midst of being transformed from a rambling summer mansion with a blue roof on Long Island Sound to a state security zone. Hovercraft flew in and out hourly. An armada of navy vessels cruised the harbor, installing sensors and mines. The nanodome was expanding, trapping every particle of the living in its web. And Air Force One was sitting on the lawn below the eyebrow window.

Doc Hughes’ Hommocks office was newer and more pristine than the one in the Winter Palace where he preferred to work, but he could, in a pinch, implant her anywhere. He joked that once an embryo was fully designed and tested he could implant it in the back seat of a car if necessary. She tried to visualize what that would entail. It would mean raising her legs and holding them back with her arms while he crouched down on the seat before her, staring at her vagina in the dark, speculum and catheter in hand. He didn’t need ultrasound, he had the touch. No cervix was too labyrinthian for him to thread; he was the Theseus of IVF docs.

Ruth did not want to bear the Ruler Renee’s clone. She worried the embryo would be a dark, frigid weight, pushing at her bowels. It would have Her Lady’s brutal, marmoreal beauty. She wondered if women ever wanted to kill the babies inside of them. Did their bodies ever attack them like alien pathogens? She had heard of fetal rejection. One of the Big Scares, of the many. But her births went well; they were good births. She was strong and her womb was ripe. That phrase repulsed her. It made her feel like a sac. Thoughts raced around her head. Her sense of abandonment, of being gut-punched by life, became acute. Renee. Cold, formal Renee.

There had been awkward gestures over the years. Sometimes Renee would find Ruth strolling alone among the peonies and roses of the side garden, where they both liked to walk in high spring, when the air was sweet with the scent of unfolding petals covered with ants, and crimson rosebuds breaking on long, arched canes. Renee would smile at her and Ruth, unsettled, wouldn’t know if it was a real smile or a trap.

Renee’s expression was a lock without a key. She would return the smile, preferring silence, and fall back upon a childish preoccupation with bugs, examining the ants milling busily over the peony buds… Sometimes Renee broke the silence, and even Ruth could read the uncertainty on her lips and the tentative crack in her voice as she said hello. 

Then there was that time Renee walked with her under the wisteria, which hung down from the pergola like bunches of grapes, and told her that her father was dead. Ruth tried to remember her Papa’s face but couldn’t. She ran away and Renee followed her, behind the high stone wall, to the woodland garden, shaded by a massive paper birch with a rope swing. Ignoring her, Ruth grabbed the rough hemp rope and stood up on the knot at the bottom, swinging in slow arcs over the dense ivy. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to imagine her mother and their rooms at home. All she could see were the halls of mansions. What place was hers? Who was her father? He was a forester. He managed an estate in Transylvania. None of these facts was a picture, or a smell. She could smell her mother’s apron, and her skin, like laundry and lilacs, but her father was a blank.

Papa, she thought. No face came but a pair of muddy boots and an old rifle and a burlap sack. A brace of quail and pheasants hung across his shoulders. But that wasn’t him at all. It was the hunter on an antique Black Forest clock in the Time Room at Hommocks Cottage. Out and up she swung, the air still and heavy and hot, humming with the buzz of bees and wasps swarming over the flowering English ivy that smothered the garden walls.

Ruth didn’t want to cry but she felt she must. She summoned a lump to her throat and waited for tears to break, but they would not. She couldn’t weep for nothing, and wouldn’t pretend. Renee stood by the tree waiting, and Ruth was afraid. She opened her eyes and let the swing slow to a stop. She leapt off and said, “I have no father,” and then Renee touched Ruth’s forehead. Her hand was warm. She was surprised. They were usually ice cold and so white. In Hungary, people weren’t as white as that. Renee said, “Neither do I.”

the jones men

The Jones Men, by Vern E Smith, is hands down one of the best crime novels I’ve ever read. Relentless and bloody, with minimalistic prose, it is a simple story about a Detroit drug war in the early seventies. Smith, an accomplished and important journalist, published the book in 1974 after reporting on the heroin business. It is his only novel. Since he’s still alive, one can hope he has another one in him, or that the screenplay he wrote (and which got a table reading in New York) will be produced. Long before David Simon’s epic Homicide/The Corner>The Wire, Smith laid it all out.

It starts with the funeral of a low-level dealer, whose cocaine-dusted corpse lies in repose for a carnival of Detroit’s finest smack merchants to admire and gossip over. Among the mourners are Willis McDaniels, the biggest dealer in town, and two guys looking to take over: Lennie Jack, an intelligent, enigmatic, Vietnam vet and his lieutenant, Joe Red.

A junky overhears a conversation and tells another junky what he overheard who tells Lenny Jack: McDaniels is expecting a huge shipment of pure heroin from New York. Lennie and Joe rob the shipment and assassinate T.C. Thomas, McDaniel’s Luca Brazzi. From here on the book details, day by day, McDaniel’s search for Lennie Jack, and Lenny Jack’s increasingly desperate moves to sell the heroin and score an even bigger shipment with the money, supplanting McDaniels. The blood flows abundantly, no one is safe, the cops are always one step behind, and the guys betray each other for as much as tens of thousands of dollars in cash and for as little as a few capsules of dope.

There are many joys in this book: the relentless pace, the dead-on dialogue, perfectly staged murders and shootouts, doors flying off their hinges, slow elevators in the projects, seedy shooting galleries, but most of all, the color of seventies Detroit: the cars the dealers drive, described with as much love and detail as an exploding head, and the clothes, the fur coats and hats, the goatees, the glittering swag, the glasses of Courvoisier and piles of coke. This is a world in the midst of transformation, as the heroin trade slips out of the hands of organized crime and into the hands of local operators, one of downward metamorphosis, devoid of romanticism and sentimentality, even of love, as all relationships, even between brothers, are transactional. A few brave souls hold out nearly to the end, but they all talk and the end always comes. It is just breathtaking.