Dreamers & doers at Black Bear commune

Here's a good, short video (7 minutes) to remind us (those who are old enough to remember) or to instruct us (if we've never known anything like it) about a long-lasting effort to live a communal ideal, where women didn't accept any subordinate role.

YouTube - Canal de fmindlin

The video is a good companion piece to this book about the Black Bear commune that I mentioned earlier. Great to have the pictures of the people, the mountain wilderness, and the ramschackle buildings and vehicles.

Literature, society, and me

As you know, I devote this blog to two themes with radically different discourses, literary arts and social analysis. The former is a discourse meant to appeal to all people who use and love language. However the vocabulary and tropes of the latter, including graphs and highly technical language, are too often accessible only to the specialist, and that's a pity. We need both: works of the imagination that explore the possibilities of language to suggest new possibilities of existence, and observation and measurement to understand the real limits of our present existence.

This is why my works of imagination — novels, short stories — are usually also explorations of real present or past situations. And my works of social analysis seek to tell their stories with the fluidity of a novel or epic poem, that is, social analysis as literature.

And now, in just a few weeks, you will be able to read my new novel, A Gift for the Sultan. It's written, edited, and with cover design approved, so all that remains before printing and posting as an e-book (cheap) are two dozen minor corrections to the interior design. (If you'd like a review copy and seriously intend to write a review, just let me know.)

This is my most ambitious effort to date combining literary play and social research, so you will be able to judge how well I've been able to pull it off. The setting is Constantinople and its environs in 1402, when that celebrated capital of Eastern Christianity was on the verge of collapse before an Ottoman and mostly Muslim siege. Getting the place and time right required a lot of research in all my languages (which regrettably include neither medieval Greek nor Turkish — I had to make do with French, Spanish and English). What fascinated me and kept me going was the multi phased conflict of that time, with so many parallels to the attack on New York in 2001 (our "9/11"), the siege and bombardment of Sarajevo in the 1990s, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan today. The chronological  (more than six centuries) and the technological distance (siege machines had to be much closer to the walls than today) helped to imagine objectively, if not dispassionately. I did get emotionally involved in the lives of those historical and fictional characters, and I hope you do, too. The dynamics of power, tribal solidarity, religious passion and cynicism — at least as I've imagined them, I think correctly — are not so different from today's. But soon, very soon, you will be able to read the novel (386 pages) and judge for yourself.

And this brings me (by the roundabout circuitry in my brain) to Amartya Sen's concept of "human development" as a measure of a social system's success: judging a system by the physical well-being, cultural development (literacy, etc.) and social opportunities of its citizenry in general, rather than by its GDP (which may be very unevenly distributed) or military triumphs or the size and splendor of the monuments glorifying its leader.

In the period of my novel, Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos of the Byzantine Empire (he called it "Romania") seems to have aspired to such a measure (you can read his letters to his son, advising on good government), but there was little he could do for the "human development" of his subjects in the precarious defense situation of his diminishing empire. Sultan "Yildirim" ("Thunderbolt") Bayezid of the Ottomans, however, held exactly the opposite notion, that his subjects existed only to enhance his power and glory.

But, as Amartya Sen might have predicted, it was Manuel and not the aggressive Bayezid who survived this episode. To read more about cross-country comparisons developed from Sen's approach, check out the essay (in English or Spanish, as you choose) by Gustav Ranis in the Revista Latinoamericana de Desarrollo Humano. To read more about the conflict between Sultan Bayezid and Manuel II's Constantinople, read A Gift for the Sultan (soon).

Friday the 13th

Not that we're superstitious, but it was one of those days. We'd spent most of it shopping in Almería and Vícar (60 -70 km from home), and after a late midday meal (about 4 p.m.),  home with our load of groceries etc. found that the gate to our condo wouldn't open. We and our neighbors couldn't get our cars in, and one that was already in couldn't get out. Big problem, especially because the August 15 weekend is the biggest vacation period in Spain so the condo is full and we're expecting guests tomorrow. And try to get a repairman specialist late Friday afternoon in August in Andalucía.

We parked just outside the gate and unloaded the car and carried everything in and Susana decided to start the dryer, but when she pushed the button it plunged deep into the machine instead of popping back. When I tried to spring it loose, it fell completely inside. Now we needed not just a gate repairman by a dryer technician. And it was by then even later on Friday.

Fortunately we know a super handyman, a McGyver who is a brilliant improviser. He came right over, and after considerable study of the problem including nearly total disassembly, found a way for us to operate the gate manually, using the remote control just to unlock it. That'll get us through this weekend. He was also able to improvise a very ingenious solution to get our dryer running again. It involved a paperclip, pliers, tape and a lot of care.

But as I then drove our little Smart through the gate and up the ramp, something exploded and we heard gas escaping. Nothing vital, it turns out, but a big scare and maybe some future discomfort; it was, our McGyver thinks, a puncture in a tube of the air conditioning. Since it has reached 38º here lately (that's over 100º F), this may be a problem.

In Politics, Sometimes The Facts Don't Matter : NPR

In Politics, Sometimes The Facts Don't Matter : NPR

Thanks to Greg Weeks and his blog Two Weeks Notice: A Latin American Politics Blog for pointing to this NPR program on "backfire"—Brendan Nyhan's term for the tendency to cling even more firmly to your beliefs when you are faced with contradictory evidence. A major example right now is the outrageous and utterly false campaign in Arizona blaming illegal immigrants for crimes that aren't even occurring.

One curious thing about this transcript, if you get down to where they take calls from listeners: Every listener, it seemed to me, was eager to demonstrate that he or she, unlike ordinary prejudiced mortals, had changed views on some important issue after considering other arguments. And in each case, had ended up just as stubbornly convinced as before of his or her new "truth".  Ah, well, maybe there's no hope for rational discourse!

Public Citizen

Recommended site for all those who, like me, don't want to see the continuation of practices that destroy the earth in the name of free enterprise. Such as, for example, was exposed in the "Potosí" show at the Reina Sofía Museum this spring (link below).

Public Citizen Home Page

Check out the report on CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement) and this pdf. "Backgrounder" which begins:

Pacific Rim Mining Corp., a Canadian-based multinational firm, sought to establish a massive gold mine using water-intensive cyanide ore processing in the basin of El Salvador’s largest river, Rio Lempa. … In December 2008, the firm filed a claim under the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), demanding hundreds of millions in compensation from one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries.

Also see:
Potosí and us — my review of "the complex, exhausting, sometimes exhilarating exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía, Principio Potosí / ¿Cómo podemos cantar el canto del Señor en tierra ajena?"

Bulls

Forges, El País, 29 July 2010

Good, thoughtful piece by Colm Tóibín (link below) about the commotion around Catalonia's banning of what we call "bullfights"—though aficionados don't think of them as "fights" but as festival.

As a product of an utterly different culture, I find it hard to get engaged by the ritualistic blood ballet of the corridas. I remember attending three in my whole life. The first, in Caracas, featuring a then (1963) famous Spaniard, "El Cordobés", I barely remember. I didn't understand much of the ritual, and neither did most of the Venezuelans, as far as I could tell. Then, more recently and after reading up on what to watch for, in the Plaza de Toros in Almería, reportedly the only plaza de toros in the country where everybody packs a lunch with wine to share with everybody else at the break between toreadores. And still more recently, in the big Las Ventas plaza in Madrid, to see something different, rejoneadores taunting and ultimately killing the bull from horseback—a stunning equestrian performance.

But unlike Tóibín, I don't think those who do get engaged with it are looking for cruelty to animals. I don't even think the ritual is especially cruel; those bulls lead far better lives than any of the animals we eat. But certainly outmoded, belonging to a more primitive time, when man had to demonstrate his power to overcome brute force of nature. Nowadays Spaniards are more likely to do that (personally or vicariously) in motorcycle and auto races.

Tóibín's article is especially good on Catalan sensibilities and why the Catalan Parlament's ban is stirring so much excitement in the rest of Spain.

Bullfighting ban is sweet revenge for Catalonia | World news | The Guardian

Affaire fatale

Raymond Radiguet, Le diable au corps. 1923

In the Marché aux Pouces in Paris a few weeks ago, I picked up a small collection of postcards from the Great War. To the merchant's surprise, I didn't care as much about the pictures as the messages, some in cramped letters to pack in lots of detail, some more sprawling and repetitive, to and from a young soldier writing from different military addresses and his anxious wife and daughter and an aunt, more anxious about her own health and the hardships of scarcities than about the dangers at the front. And I started imagining the story of the things they left unsaid. And as it happened, I had with me this book by the very young Raymond Radiguet, about an adventure in civilian life but also involving a soldier, in just this period.

It was really an accident that I had picked up this book before the trip. I was simply looking for something in French to read for practice and for vocabulary. But I didn't recognize the name of the author and didn't remember ever hearing the title before. According to Wikipedia, Radiguet was only 17 when he wrote it, and 20 when he got it published, the same year he died of typhus—1923. In his short life he managed to write another novel, Le bal du Comte d'Orgel, which Wiki says also deals with adultery, a play and some volumes of poetry. And to become briefly a playmate and tease of 30-something Jean Cocteau. The book is worth reading just for the scandal it caused, and as another glimpse of that brilliant and tumultuous post-war period in Paris, where Radiguet was the boy wonder.

But it's also worth reading for another reason. It is an awful, painful and true-sounding portrait of adolescent hormonal rage and egotism unchecked. It's about a schoolboy, only "12 years and a few months old" when the war begins (just a year older than Radiguet himself), whose awkward crush on a slightly older girl blossoms into a dangerous and adulterous career that is ultimately fatal to the girl. After their first awkward glimpses of one another, the girl and boy are separated (their parents live in different places), and by the time the narrator sees Marthe again, he is 15 and she has married a young man who has been mobilized and is off at the battlefront. After playful and progressively audacious flirtation, they become lovers—their rendezvous and his sleepovers complicated by his shyness and the fact that he doesn't want his parents and the neighbors to know what he is up to. Except that he really does want them to know, because having a mistress would make them deal with him as a grown man. Except that he is not a grown man and has no idea of, and no willingness to accept, the responsibility of the relationship. Oddly, Marthe, though older and more experienced—she's a married woman, after all—lets him dominate her and seems eager to have a master, even as incompetent and confused a master as this 15 and then 16-year old boy.

There is a built-in tension in the structure of the novel, because we know that summer (when her parents are away) will not last forever, nor will the war, that Jacques, the soldier husband, will be returning and that this whole relationship is utterly unsustainalbe. And meanwhile all the neighbor's and the milkman and the letter-carrier are watching the boy's nocturnal visits to the young army wife, and her parents and/or her parents-in-law are sure to find out, probably soon. The boy, as narrator, describes all his own hesitations, bursts of bombast and other stupid mistakes, and frequently admits his cowardice—his unwillingness to accept responsibility or even the discomfort that an open break with his parents and community norms would entail. He thinks he is madly in love, but it is not a love concerned about the welfare of Marthe but one demanding that she constantly demonstrate her passion for him. He is just an awful cad, and the only excuse is his extreme youth.

There are cutting observations not just of his own conduct, but also of the ridiculous hypocrisies of the neighbors and the moral doubts of his parents, her parents and everybody. The story is probably not strictly autobiographical, but the adolescent confusions, narcissism and naked lust ring true.

Raymond Radiguet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Free land, free love, free fall

One of the joys of opening boxes of books that you've had in storage for years (in our case, shipped to Spain from New York) is rediscovering quirky little memories like this very funny, vivid cultural history of a unique moment in America, when "freedom" meant re-inventing everything as though we were the first beings to land on this planet. In the Black Bear wilderness commune in the woods of Northern California, a whole crowd of young quasi-adults in that fateful year 1968 wanted to re-invent community, sex, couture and (among other delicacies) chimichangas.

My old friend and National Writers Union comrade Don Monkerud, who is listed here as "editor," not only had a lot to do with putting the collection together but is also one of the authors, with several witty reminiscences. The funniest, to my mind, is "The Day I Disappeared."  He tells that one day, in a fit of jealousy that he couldn't display because it wasn't permitted (everybody was supposed to have license to enjoy coitus with anyone else who was willing), he abandoned the commune for days—to return to, of all people, his wife, who (he discovered) was busy experimenting with a freedom of her own. That was uncomfortable, so he walked and hitched back. And found that the Black Bear people were so zonked out, or so focused on other matters they considered more important, that nobody had noticed his absence!

Governor’s Conference to Move - NYTimes.com

My colleague and alter ego Baltasar Lotroyo has just posted a review of José Saramago's political fable Ensayo sobre la lucidez (available in English as Seeing), in which the government of an unnamed country punishes its citizens for exercising their constitutional right contrary to the desires of the government. At first you may think Saramago's premise is absurd, and it is, as absurd as that of another Saramago novel that Balta reviewed, La balsa de piedra (The Stone Raft), where the entire Iberian Peninsula breaks off from Europe and floats off into the Atlantic.

But as our daily perusal of the newspapers and viewing of newscasts reminds us every day, nothing Saramago made up is more absurd than the things politicans really do while pretending to be defending our citizens' rights.  Balta offers several examples in his reviews of both books (you may enjoy them if you read Spanish). The self-sabotage of the governor of Arizona, pretending to deal with the problem of "illegal" immigration by not dealing with it, is yet another.

Governor’s Conference to Move - NYTimes.com

Recommended for those of you who read Spanish: Balta Lotroyo's review of Ensayo sobre la lucidez and his review of La balsa de piedra.

The Spanish civil war in foreign eyes

Many of Spain's current problems stem from the fact that the Spanish civil war set back the country's evolution toward modernity and democracy by at least 40 years, from the outbreak of the army insurrection in 1936 to the death of Franco in 1975, and the distortions of justice and other institutions still persist. It was not an exclusively Spanish conflict, but a global one, acted out in Spain not just by Spaniards but by all the fascist, socialist, liberal and conservative capitalist forces in Europe and the Americas—and thus we need the outsiders' views for a full perspective.


We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War, by Paul Preston. London: Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2008. 443 pp. + notes, bibliography, index

"Spain" did not die, but it was badly wounded and still has not recovered fully. The Second Republic did die in that terribly brutal war, 1936-39, killed by a coalition of the Church, the old oligarchy and crazed ideologues who feared the power of ordinary men and women—especially of the women—to decide for themselves how to live and whom to love. Paul Preston has done a tremendous job digging up details of the lives and work of more than a dozen journalists from half a dozen or more countries who managed to reveal, and in some cases horribly distort, how that massacre was unfolding, and the hundreds of thousands of more particular murders it required. And Preston has done much more than that: He has pulled together a coherent story from notes, archives, published reports and oral reminiscences by and about those journalists, with their various languages and their diverse political views.

Of the Americans, Herbert Matthews and Louis Fischer earn Preston's greatest appreciation, for their personal courage and their insistence on getting the facts right, regardless of pressures from their respective sponsors to slant their stories. Matthews, writing for The New York Times, was expected by his editors to be more favorable to the "Nationals" (as the Franco-led insurgents called themselves) than to the forces defending the Republic. Matthews was a moral Protestant indignant at fascist abuses, but not ideologically committed to socialism, and he exposed himself to considerable danger to report personally on such horrors as the bombing and strafing of civilian refugees fleeing from Málaga (which had just fallen to the insurgents) along the coastal road to Almería, or the fighting in Valencia, even though he

was convinced that [his dogmatically conservative editors in New York] treated his copy with 'suspicion, anger, and, at times, disbelief', tampered with his wording and buried entire stories because they were perceived to favour the Republican side. In contrast, they printed unashamedly partisan material from William P. Carney, his counterpart in the rebel zone, despite knowing that it was someties faked. [p. 22]

Fischer was under different political pressures. A fluent Russian- and German-speaker and with a wife and child in Moscow, he was committed to socialism and felt comradeship to (though he never accepted the discipline of) the Communist Party. Whether he ever learned to speak Spanish fluently is unclear, though he must have managed: he had excellent personal relationships with prominent Republican (i.e., Spanish Republic) politicians, even including Juan Negrín. But despite his commitment, he perceived and reported on what he saw as gross failures in political and military policy—for example, the lackadaisical defenseworks supposedly protecting Madrid. He was especially indignant with the aged trade-unionist and prime minister Largo Caballero who was afraid to alienate his trade union supporters by ordering idle construction workers in Madrid to go out to Toledo and build serviceable trenches and breastworks.

After the fall of the Republic, Fischer had the good sense to get his family out of Russia before Stalin's paranoia could destroy them. His subsequent career included works on Gandhi and professorship at Princeton. Matthews continued with the NYT and achieved notoriety again years later for his reports from Cuba proving that Fidel Castro was still alive and his guerrilla movement going strong. Both Fischer and Matthews wrote many books, not only on Spain, that merit attention.

Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Josephine Herbst, and John Dos Passos are also here, interesting mostly for what they had to say about one another and less interesting for any insight into the Spanish struggle. Hemingway was boisterous and outrageous and having a great testosterone-charged time, at one point firing off a machinegun to no purpose but with dangerous consequences (it drew return fire), but you've got to love the big brute because in a jam, he could pull his buddies through—on at least one occasion, by sheer muscular force, rowing a little boat across the mined Ebro river with Robert Capa, Matthews and Henry Buckley aboard.

Another reporter who deserves and gets major attention from Preston is the audacious and hyperenergetic little Russian Jew Mikhail Koltsov, whose extremely vivid reports for Pravda would be his undoing when he returned to the USSR. He not only wrote rapidly, succinctly and dramatically, he also carried a pistol and didn't hesitate to intervene and give military orders (for which he had no authority) when he saw it necessary to avoid disaster. When required to do so by his party bosses, however, he was quite capable of writing outrageous lies condemning the leaders of the POUM as Trotskyists and traitors to the revolution. As Koltsov surely knew, the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista had broken with Trotsky long before and was one of the main defenders of the socialist Republic in Catalonia, but because it did not follow the dictates of Moscow Stalin ordered his operatives in Spain to destroy it—as George Orwell has famously recounted in Hommage to Catalonia. 

Stalin was suspicious of all the Russians who had served in Spain, whether as journalists or military officers, probably (in Preston's interpretation, which is persuasive) because they returned with a more revolutionary, more participatory and much freer vision of socialist revolution than Stalin's democratic centralism could tolerate. Koltsov, like others who had been acclaimed as heroes in Spain, was at first praised and then arrested and ultimately executed by Stalin's forces. 

Oddly, Preston makes only passing mention of Orwell, mostly regarding his impressions of Koltsov and his grudging review of another reporter's book, South African-born George Lowther Steer's report on the ruins of Guernica, from observations made as soon as Steer could get there after the devastating German bombardment of that quiet and undefended little Basque town. The book was essential to counter the massive disinformation campaign by Franco-ist propagandists and their allies in the Catholic Church in the U.S. and other countries, who were claiming that there had been no bombardment but that the destruction was the work of leftist incendiaries. (Orwell recognized the value of the eye-witness report but took issue with Steer exaggerated and emotional bias for the heroic Basques as contasted to the supposedly less noble Spaniards elsewhere.) Of the other British reporters mentioned here, we learn that Claud Cockburn was an imaginative Communist who, it seems, would write anything to support the cause, even if he had to make it up, and Tom Wintringham, Commander of the British Batallion of the International Brigades. Wintringham got in trouble with the CP back home because of his defense of his latest lover, American journalist Kitty Bowler, who was absurdly accused of being a fascist infiltrator (apparently because she was much better looking than most of the Communist women in party HQ in London and so aroused the suspicion of those others, including Wintringham's wife). 

The brazen Swedish nurse-turned-reporter Kajsa Rothman, a courageous and physically impressive women (much taller than most Spaniards and with bright reddish-blonde hair) also deserves mention, more for her presence than for her reporting—though she (fluent in several languages) must have been important to Swedish short-wave enthusiasts for her broadcasts from Spain. We also learn of the Spaniards on both sides of the propaganda war: Luis Bolín, the cruel and pompous chief of the foreign press in the "national" (Franco-ist rebel) zone who tried to control every word and didn't hesitate to order executions of reporters who strayed to close to the truth of the rebel massacres. On the Republican side, the chief concern of Arturo Barea and later the redoubtable Constancia Mora was to facilitate the reporters demands for access—in the belief that the truth could only help the republic—without letting them reveal military secrets (gun emplacements, etc.) which could serve enemy.

Preston ends the book with a tribute to his former professor Herbert Southworth, who got to Spain after the fighting was over but contributed mightily to undoing the myths of Franco propagandists.

Photo: The destroyed center of the Basque town of Guernica after it was carpet-bombed by Germany and Italy, from Nicholas Shakespeare's review of the book in the Telegraph.