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Conspiracy of Silence

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Costumes of the Knights of Calatrava

Around the time when Ferdinand and Isabella jointly ruled the Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, there were three independent orders of knights: those of Santiago, Alcántara, and Calatrava. One of the commanders of the Knights of Calatrava, Fernán Gómez, is the feudal overlord of the village of Fuente Ovejuna (“The Well of Sheep”).

When Gómez goes on a rampage of torturing the peasants and raping the women of the village, the villagers resolve to assassinate him—first having promised not to reveal the names of the perpetrators, even under torture. When an investigative judge sent by the monarchy asks for the names of the murderers, all the villagers say, “Fuente Ovejuna did it!” Faced with a conspiracy of silence the villagers are let off the hook.

Around 1612, Spanish playwright Lope de Vega wrote a play called Fuente Ovejuna which memorializes the event.

There have been two interesting examples of similar events in which the unanimity of the populace prevented a judgment against the actual perpetrators.

In 1970, a group of Icelandic farmers took matters into their own hands when a governmental agency planned a dam that would affect a large swath of land along the Laxá River near Lake Mývatn in the north of the country. According to the Reykjavík Grapevine, this is what happened:

More than a hundred farmers officially claimed responsibility for the explosion, which annihilated a small dam in the river on August 25, 1970. The area’s inhabitants were determined to prevent the construction of a much bigger dam, which would have destroyed vast quantities of this natural area, as well as most of the surrounding farmlands.

The upshot was pretty much the same as in the Lope de Vega play:

“What makes the Laxá conflict peculiar is that those who resisted also succeeded,” Grímur says. “The planned dam was never built and the area was saved.” Four years later, parliament passed a law securing the protection of Laxá and Mývatn, contributing to the explosion’s status as “the most remarkable and powerful event in the history of environmentalism in Iceland,” as Sigurður Gizurarson, the bomber’s defence lawyer, put it.

Closer to home is the case of Ken McElroy, a small-town bully who regularly committed crimes against the inhabitants of Skidmore, Missouri, without serving time for his depredations. Until one day in 1981. The Wikipedia entry on McElroy tells the story:

On July 9, 1981, he appeared in a local bar, the D&G Tavern, armed with an M1 Garand rifle and bayonet, and later threatened to kill Bowenkamp [the local grocer].] The next day, McElroy was shot and killed in broad daylight as he sat with his wife Trena in his pickup truck on Skidmore’s main street. He was struck by bullets from at least two different firearms, in front of a crowd of people estimated as numbering between 30 and 46. Despite the many witnesses, nobody came forward to say who shot him. To date, no one has been charged in connection with McElroy’s death.

As I read Lope de Vega’s play, the other incidents came to mind. I found it interesting that they closely mirrored the Spanish events of some 500 years earlier.

PCs and Nizards

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My First Book, Sort Of

Back when I was a toddler in my crib at 2814 East 120th Street in Cleveland, my mother used to tell me stories in Hungarian to help me drop off to sleep. When the stories were her own, they usually involved a fairy princess and a dark forest. But when she was running out of ideas, she would take out children’s story books from the city library on East 116th Street and translate the story into Hungarian while showing me the pictures.

One of them I remember very clearly was Dr. Seuss’s The King’s Stilts. Picture to yourself a kingdom that was below sea level, surrounded by tall dikes covered with trees. These trees were constantly under attack by flying nizards, which went after the roots.

Fortunately, there were legions of patrol cats (P.C.s) deputed by King Birtram to keep the nizards from destroying the trees and flooding the kingdom. When not busy signing proclamations, the king delighted to whizzing around his kingdom on a pair of red stilts.

One day, wicked Lord Droon decided to have the king’s stilts buried by Eric, the royal page, because he thought it was too infra dig for the monarch to be enjoying himself so much. The king was thereupon so despondent that he no longer gave orders to the patrol cats, and the nizards’ attacks were resulting in streams of water flooding into the kingdom.

Fortunately the story has a happy ending. Here, on YouTube, is the Dr. Seuss book, complete with words and pictures:

Naturally, I own a copy of the book. It is a constant reminder of my mother’s ingenuity and love.

Back to the Books

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Enjoyable Books: Just the Thing I Need!

After a month of illness, I have finally returned to my first love: reading. I started with a reread of Lawrence Durrell’s Balthazar (the second volume of The Alexandria Quartet) and then picked up John Le Carré’s Agent Running in the Field.

On Thursday, I plan to resume my weekly visits to the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles. The combination of a guided Mindfulness Meditation session with access to the vast circulating holdings of the library is my indication that things are returning to normal. Plus, I have seven overdue books to return.

This January has been my worst month in many a year. Add to that the fact that it was Los Angeles’s worst month in thirty-one years. What happened in 1994 that was so bad? The Northridge Earthquake on January 17 of that year.

Winding Down

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If you know anything about me, you know that I read a lot of books, something around 160 per year. This month, to date, I have not read anything. I just didn’t feel good enough.

To make matters worse, my apartment will be inspected by the City of Los Angeles a week from today. Not only did I not read anything, but Martine and I have been preparing to donate upward of a thousand books by January 29.

It breaks my heart to donate books that I had spent big bucks collecting, including Folio Society, Library of America, and other premium hardbound editions.

I only hope that the people who get these books appreciate their quality. In the end, it’s probably best that I don’t think too much about this. It would be even more grim if I were given a warning by the city to gut my personal library.

The Ghost of New Years Past

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Lucky New Year’s Postcard

I’ve said on many occasions, usually around this time of year, that only a fool celebrates the passing of time. Every January 1, take a picture of yourself in your bathroom mirror and note the thinning and graying of your hair, the mottling of your skin, and the network of spidery lines demarcating the zones of your face. Oh, well, it’s all a natural process.

On a more positive note, let’s see what the youthful Charles Dickens wrote about New Years Day in his first book, Sketches by Boz:

Next to Christmas-day, the most pleasant annual epoch in existence is the advent of the New Year. There are a lachrymose set of people who usher in the New Year with watching and fasting, as if they were bound to attend as chief mourners at the obsequies of the old one. Now, we cannot but think it a great deal more complimentary, both to the old year that has rolled away, and to the New Year that is just beginning to dawn upon us, to see the old fellow out, and the new one in, with gaiety and glee.

There must have been some few occurrences in the past year to which we can look back, with a smile of cheerful recollection, if not with a feeling of heartfelt thankfulness. And we are bound by every rule of justice and equity to give the New Year credit for being a good one, until he proves himself unworthy the confidence we repose in him.

This is our view of the matter; and entertaining it, notwithstanding our respect for the old year, one of the few remaining moments of whose existence passes away with every word we write, here we are, seated by our fireside on this last night of the old year, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-six, penning this article with as jovial a face as if nothing extraordinary had happened, or was about to happen, to
disturb our good humour.

Hackney-coaches and carriages keep rattling up the street and down the street in rapid succession, conveying, doubtless, smartly-dressed coachfuls to crowded parties; loud and repeated double knocks at the house with green blinds, opposite, announce to the whole neighbourhood that there’s one large party in the street at all events; and we saw through the window, and through the fog too, till it grew so thick that we rung for candles, and drew our curtains, pastry-cooks’ men with green boxes on their heads, and rout-furniture-warehouse-carts, with cane seats and French lamps, hurrying to the numerous houses where an annual festival is held in honour of the occasion.

We can fancy one of these parties, we think, as well as if we were duly dress-coated and pumped, and had just been announced at the drawing-room door.

Clarice Lispector in the U.S.

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The Jewish-Ukrainian-Brazilian Clarice Lispector (1920-1977)

If Clarice Lispector were alive today, she would be celebrating her 104th birthday. The strikingly beautiful author with the high cheekbones and wild Scythian eyes was one of the greatest women writers of the 20th century, joining such titans as Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Ursula LeGuin, Patricia Highsmith, and Wislawa Szymborska.

In my e-mail today was a message from New Directions Publishing, which publishes some twenty titles by Lispector in English translation. It contained a link to a video entitled “Dias de Clarice em Washington.” It is 29 minutes long in Brazilian Portuguese with English subtitles.

During the 1950s, Clarice was married to a Brazilian diplomat named Maury Gurgel Valente who was posted to the embassy in Washington. From her house in Bethesda, Maryland, she took part in diplomatic social functions and raised a family, as well as writing a number of books and short stories … until it all became too much for her, and she filed for divorce, after which she returned to Brazil.

I urge you to see this video and see what a great writer must do when she is pulled between her marriage and her art:

Clarice Lispector (R) and Sons

Vodka and Zakuski

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Zakuski: Hors d’Oeuvres to Go with Vodka

It’s a culinary tradition in Slavic countries such as Russia and Ukraine: When you drink vodka, you eat zakuski, which literally means “something to bite after.” It sounds like a delicious culinary tradition. Except for one thing: I’ve never had vodka.

After reading Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov’s Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv (2012), I just might get myself a bottle. Throughout the novel, the characters are dealing with a strange anomaly. The inland city of Lviv has strange incidents of seagulls, starfish, a stench of seaweed, and salt water crabs appearing in various places throughout the city.

Several residents band together to try to identify the problem, which they do after the consumption of a whole lot of vodka and zakuski. Their Lviv is a magical city in which the hand of the late Jimi Hendrix is buried in a local cemetery, having been supplied by the KGB with the help of Lithuanian operatives. Why? Apparently to study the speed of the spreading of rumors in Soviet society.

This is the fifth work of fiction by Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov that I have read. They are all of them sweet and gentle—especially as they come from a land that is now mired in a brutal invasion by Russian forces. I cannot help but think that Kurkov’s whimsy can be as deadly to Putin’s aims as any weapons in his arsenal. Anyhow, let’s hope so. I have a lot more of Kurkov that I want to read; and I hope he continues to live a long and productive life.

Doctor Destouches in Germany

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Doctor Destouches (aka Louis-Ferdinand Céline)

He will never win any humanitarian awards, or, for that matter, any awards, but Louis-Ferdinand Céline is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, an anti-Semite, a Nazi sympathizer, and probably a very decent human being otherwise. Born Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches in Courbevoix, France in 1894, Céline became a wounded war hero at Ypres in 1914

After the war, he became a physician and toured Africa and the Americas working for the League of Nations. In 1932, he published his greatest and most approachable novel, Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit). Unfortunately, in the early 1940s, he published several anti-Semitic books urging closer ties to Hitler’s Germany.

After the Allied invasion of France, Céline fled to Germany after having been identified by the Resistance and the British as a collaborationist. It was the beginning of a long and confused period escaping Allied bombing attacks and the Russian Army that was brilliantly described in his trilogy about being a guest of the Nazis as they were being pounded to pieces:

  • Castle to Castle (D’un château l’autre) 1957
  • North (Nord) 1960
  • Rigadoon (Rigadon) 1961

Years after reading the first two volumes, I have just finished reading Rigadoon and loving it. Céline and his wife are constantly being shuttled on trains from one bombed-out city to another. At one point, he escorts a group of eighteen severely retarded children from Hannover to Hamburg and manages to transfer them to a special Swedish Red Cross train taking them to safety. Unfortunately, the same train took Céline to Copenhagen, where he served a year in prison for his collaboration with the Nazis.

He died in 1961. Although his novels were a powerful influence on other novelists, Céline was never treated with the honor that his literary and medical work deserved. He spent his last years being a doctor treating poor patients in the slums of Paris.

So fair and foul a career I have not seen. I love Céline’s novels even as I detest his racial and political views. Life can be strange.

Inoculation

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I am currently reading William S. Burroughs’s The Ticket That Exploded, and what a ride it is! As Anthony Burgess wrote, “Burroughs seems to revel in a new medium … a medium totally fantastic, spaceless, timeless, in which the normal sentence is fractured, the cosmic tries to push its way through the bawdry, and the author shakes the reader as a dog shakes a rat.” Here is a little sample for your delectation:

In this organization, Mr Lee, we do not encourage togetherness, esprit de corps. We do not give our agents the impression of belonging. As you know most existing organizations stress such primitive reactions as unquestioning obedience. Their agents become addicted to orders. You will receive orders of course and in some cases you will be well-advised not to carry out the orders you receive. On the other hand your failure to obey certain orders could expose you to dangers of which you can have at this point in your training no conception. There are worse things than death Mr Lee for example to live under the conditions your enemies will endeavor to impose. And the members of all existing organizations are at some point your enemy. You will learn to know where this point is if you survive. You will receive your instructions in many ways. From books, street signs, films, in some cases from agents who purport to be and may actually be members of the organization. There is no certainty. Those who need certainty are of no interest to this department. This is in point of fact a non-organization the aim of which is to immunize our agents against fear despair and death. We intend to break the birth-death cycle. As you know inoculation is the weapon of choice against virus and inoculation can only be effected through exposure … exposure to the pleasures offered under enemy conditions: a computerized Garden of Delights: exposure to the pain posed as an alternative … you remember the ovens I think … exposure to despair: ‘The end is the beginning born knowing’ the unforgivable sin of despair. You attempted to be God that is to intervene and failed utterly … Exposure to death: sad shrinking face … he had come a long way for something not exchanged born for something knowing not exchanged. He died during the night.

Obscuridad Mexicana

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Mexican Novelist Fernanda Melchor

In this case, obscuridad is translated not as obscurity, but darkness. I toyed with the idea of calling this post “Noir Mexicana,” but I didn’t want to mix the two languages. I hope you get the general idea.

Fernanda Melchor is a very dark writer indeed. I have in the last few months read all three of her novels that have been translated into English:

  • This Isn’t Miami (Aqui no es Miami)
  • Hurricane Season (Temporada de huracanes)
  • Paradais

All three novels are about wasted lives in the vicinity of the author’s home state of Veracruz. Although short in length, all three are crammed with violence, superstition, and fear. In the background—or sometimes in the foreground—there are the drug cartels, with scenes such as Milton in Paradais being commanded to shoot and kill a pathetic old taxi driver who is begging for his life.

Reading Melchor is like reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline or the Jim Thompson of The Killer Inside Me. One is reminded that, in Mexico, it is easier to see the skull beneath the skin.