A lost illusion, happily

I began reading Illusions perdues out of a sense of duty, as a required chore. My reasons: Balzac is too important not to know; several sources insist that this is his best novel; Karl Marx was a  fan; and finally, I wanted to know more about 19th-century Paris and to practice my French.

Getting through part I, Les deux poètes, was indeed a chore. It seemed to move very slowly, especially because of all the words I had to look up (I have Robert installed in my Kindle) but also because it takes many pages of description of a disagreeable illiterate printer, his antiquated printing machinery, and even his rickety house before we even meet the principal characters.

Back to my novel in progress: Eugène Varlin

My new novel is about a crisis in a different city, in a different time. Not Constantinople in the 15th century, but Paris in the 19th, and very especially the Commune of 1871. And for this I had to read this book:


Pratique militante & écrits d'un ouvrier communard by Eugène Varlin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The life and writings of one of the true working-class heroes of the Paris Commune of 1871, Eugène Varlin, bookbinder, labor organizer, promoter of women's equality in work and in the movement, and ultimately batallion commander and combatant slain in the final days of the Week of Blood, the "Semaine Sanglante" that crushed the Commune. Paule Lejeune, author of many books on feminism and French history, has pulled together letters of Varlin and other texts putting his life in context.

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I admire Varlin enormously, and was delighted to find this modest little book put together very conscientiously by a woman who has worked for years for good causes and on the recovery of obscured revolutionary history. (Check out her list of oeuvres on this Wiki site: Paule Lejeune.)

Among the reasons for my admiration of Eugène Varlin are that he was a superb labor organizer and one of the few elected members of the Commune to keep his head amidst all the frantic rhetoric and chaotic orders and counter-orders after the Versaillais finally broke through the Commune's defenses. He was also a surprisingly articulate and clear, largely-self taught radical journalist and thinker, as the articles and letters assembled by Lejeune will make clear. And very practical: it was his idea, for which he recruited Nathalie Lemel and other workers, to set up the low-cost working-class restaurants known collectively as La Marmite, which became popular centers not only for simple, cheap nutrition but also for developing social relations among workers in different métiers and of both genders.

He could have escaped, in those last desperate hours, as did many others — shaving his beard would have been a good start for a disguise. But he was almost the last commander standing — he had been elected a battallion commandant — and would not desert the barricade. When all ammunition was exhausted, he was seized and slaughtered. He was 32.

Varlin was also a founding member of the Paris section of l'Association Internationale des Travailleurs (A.I.T.), what we know today as the First International.

Bir Cihan İki Sultan — first reviews

I just discovered last night that the Turkish translation of my novel A Gift for the Sultan is now being offered on the websites of more than a dozen Turkish vendors, including this one:

Bir Cihan İki Sultan (Timur ve Yıldırım'ın Mücadelesi) - Işık Kitabevi

And more importantly, this big chain of culture and entertainment media: D&R

And best of all, the first reviews have appeared.

As far as I've been able to work out with my Turkish-English dictionary, the review at the kitaplarix.com site is pretty positive.  They seem surprised that a Westerner can be so objective — at least, I think that's what this says:

Harvard Üniversitesi'nde ders veren Fox, Yıldırım ve Timur'un ölümüne mücadelesini bir Batılıdan beklenmeyecek kadar başarılı ve objektif yazmıştır.

The Turkish in the brief comments on other websites is too colloquial for me to make out — I can't tell whether they love the book or think it's a menace.  But at least the comments show that people are aware of and reading it.

Readers of the English version have generally understood the novel to be a romance about a Byzantine princess and an Ottoman brigand; the Turks are presenting it as a political and military history of the clash between two giants of their history, Timur (or Tamerlane) and Bayezid I (Yıldırım Beyazıt). That's all fine (those stories indeed are part of the book), but I hope some readers in both languages will appreciate the broader story that frames the others: that of the struggle of a great city against an anti-urban force bent on destroying it.

In the end, as the book can only hint at in the last pages, the resolution will begin 51 years later with the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans (A.D. 1453). The city will not just survive, but by its many subtle resources will transform the Ottomans into a cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic urban power, reaching from their capital in Constantinople to govern a tri-continental complex of subject cities (Northern Africa, Western Asia and Eastern Europe). Now that was one very powerful city. And still is, under its new name of Istanbul.

P.S.: One of my Turkish friends has given me a more accurate translation of the quote above:

"Fox, who is a lecturer at Harvard University, has written about Yildirim and Timur's to-the-death struggle in such a successful of objective manner that is beyond what we can expect of a Westerner." Or, ".... that could not have been expected from a Westerner."

I'm not and never have been a lecturer at Harvard University, but I studied there, so it's a pardonable error which may sort of locate me intellectually for a Turkish reader.

Medicine & Citizenship in Venezuela | Dissertation Reviews

For those of us deeply attached to Venezuela, this University of Chicago, 2012 dissertation by Amy Ellen Cooper is especially fascinating. But it will also be important for anyone seeking to change the world, on the relationship of social context and social conditions (including especially citizen participation) to physical health.

Medicine and Citizenship in Venezuela | Dissertation Reviews

From the review by Ana Servigna (Tulane):

Health practices are generally related to healing bodies, but Cooper explains that in Venezuela, those practices have become a “political experience of citizenship” (p. 73).…

Participation in the healthcare system is not limited to doctors and patients; it also includes an extraordinary number of community health volunteers. Complementing her previous chapters, Cooper analyzes the volunteers’ experiences of providing healthcare for others. One important feature that she highlights is that most volunteers are women, a phenomenon found in many other studies as well; however in her sample, these women are not only active participants but also local leaders engaged in the solution of local problems.

oooo

One of many popular images of the miraculous doctor.

And much more. I suspect that the desire for such participation was always, down deep, what the  cult of "el Doctor Milagroso", José Gregorio Hernández,  has always represented. He was a real Venezuelan physician, d. 1919, to whom many Venezuelans attribute magical curing powers and is now in the process of beatification. Statuettes and images of him are seen all over the country, and a postage stamp with his portrait was issued on the centenary of his birth in 1864. Now citizens have other ways to work to change conditions for better health, in addition to, or instead of, seeking magical aid from the dead doctor.

Backgrounder on Turkey

Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know by Andrew Finkel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This concise, quick read will be a good starting point for anyone who needs to know about this surprising country. Finkel covers a breadth of topics and suggests linkages among them — language, regional disparities, ethnic history and conflicts, political history, current party and government structure, economic potential and weaknesses, religious tolerance and conflicts, and Turkey's complex and fluid geopolitical strategy. Not a word about the country's vibrant arts scene — theater, literature, film, painting, etc. — but on other aspects, clear and opinionated (he's a fierce defender of free speech, which is sometimes in danger).

Andrew Finkel is an American journalist with long experience in Turkey. He is also the husband of historian Caroline Finkel, author of the monumental history of the Ottoman empire, Osman's Dream, which I reviewed here earlier; she describes him (in her acknowledgements) as an "academic manqué" (he mentions having worked on a Ph.D. dissertation), and indeed he approaches journalism with a scholar's seriousness and the expectation that his readers will be able and happy to follow a sometimes subtle and sophisticated argument. He was fired from Turkey's big daily Today's Zaman in 2011, he believes for defending a critic of the paper's founder and backer, the controversial Islamic preacher and charter-school empresario (in the U.S.) Fethullah Gülen (look him up — Americans should know about him). Finkel now has a regular column in the International Herald Tribune, still reporting from Turkey.

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Neurons in harmony

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hard to believe, but this book is as good as its blurbs. Levitin is both a musician and a neuroscientist, who got into the science to understand better the music he was playing or engineering for rock bands. He knows far more music than I do, drawing on all genres to illustrate what it does, how it does it and why it matters. "Musical activity involves nearly every region of the brain that we know about, and nearly every neural subsystem." (pp. 85-86) And, he argues (against Pinker and other skeptics), it is not a superfluous byproduct of evolution, but has been essential to our survival and most probably, as Darwin himself believed, is even older than language.

Just how do we remember songs, even when the pitch, rhythm and timbre are all altered? And just what are pitch, rhythm and timbre, and how do they affect our brains? And why do you like heavy metal (or whatever you like), while I … well, many other things? These are just some of the mysteries that scientists are beginning to solve.

And what must occur in the brain for a musician to achieve full physical skill (of voice, strings, horn, whatever) and sensibility? It takes at least 10,000 hours of practice, says Levitin, for the brain to achieve complete mastery of anything (auto mechanics, fiction writing, musical composition or performance, or anything else). "Although people differ in how long it takes them to consolidate information neurally, it remains true that increased practice leads to a greater number of neural traces, which can combine to create a stronger memory representation." (p. 197) Talent — a genetic predisposition, that difference in learning time he mentions — is a big help, but it's not enough without practice.

Levitin's style is lively, his examples well chosen (even though I didn't recognize all the music he expected me to know), and his openness to examining contrary hypotheses makes him a credible guide. I especially appreciated his comments on performance and how a musician learns new pieces, by "chunking" — that is, learning whole groups or sequences of chords, melodies, etc. rather than all the individual notes a beginning piano player struggles to memorize. And best of all, the sheer emotion of listening and playing. That's what I want to hold on to as I get back to practicing. And I now have a clearer idea of the "schema" to listen for in classic jazz (I sort of knew, but never had it explained before) and how to appreciate the clever transformation Mahler achieves in his Fifth, or what and how Joni Mitchell accomplishes with her alternative guitar tunings.

So why four and not five stars? My very personal reaction: the first couple of chapters were too cute and anecdotal, an unnecessary (for me) warm-up for the truly informative, analytical stuff to come. But if you've never thought much about notes or scales or timbre, maybe you'll need that.

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Back from the U.S. of A.

Susana and I got back home to Carboneras (Almería, Spain) yesterday after nearly a month in the USA (and a few days in Madrid), our first trip back there in nearly four years: Cambridge and Boston MA, for my college reunion; Galisteo and Santa Fe NM to see old friends; Arizona to hang out with my two sons (one in Prescott, the other in Flagstaff), and finally New York, for many personal and business reasons, including a meeting with the editor for our current book-in-progress, a history of architecture and urbanism in Latin America.

So this is just to explain why you hadn't seen anything from me over the past month — we were too busy traveling and had too infrequent and interrupted access to the Internet for me to sit down and write anything interesting. Now we're back in our seaside home and ready to get back to work on projects including:

• first, that book I just mentioned (volume I, the pre-Columbian history, is written; the volume on 20th and 21st centuries is well advanced; we're saving for last what we expect to be the least challenging portion, on the long colonial period and the first post-independence century).
• My new novel, still in early stage.
• More commentary on current events. Next up, an article on Turkey and its protests.

This will keep us busy while everybody else is at the beach. Maybe we'll get to go down to the beach, too, from time to time. It's right outside my window, mighty tempting.

27% of Spaniards are Out of Work. Yet in One Town Everyone Has a Job | Portside

27% of Spaniards are Out of Work. Yet in One Town Everyone Has a Job | Portside

Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo

A friend just sent this, and I was glad to see it. As I told him,

Thanks. Yes, we know about Sánchez Gordillo. He's a colorful character and a major headache to his comrades in the Communist Party — not because of the way he runs that little town of Marinaleda, but because he has instigated peaceful "assaults" on supermarkets (dozens of activists load up their shopping carts with what are considered basic necessities and at check-out refuse to pay) and the repeated occupation of some unused government-owned land. The problem for the CP (which functions through a broader coalition called Izquierda Unida) is that it is now part of the government of Andalusia, in partnership with the Socialist Party, and therefore is responsible for upholding the law. Which doesn't permit "stealing" (they call it "liberation" of goods) or unauthorized occupation of land.

He's media-savvy, very careful to avoid violence (the supermarket raiders are supposed to be polite to the checkout girls, etc.). And he is an embarrassing example to those other politicians who are doing nothing effective to halt the hunger.

However, the Socialist-Izquierda Unida coalition in Andalucía has not really been as passive as Sánchez Gordillo would have us believe. Among the measures taken in opposition to the conservative central government (employment creation, subsidies), the Andalucía government — alone of all the 17 regional governments of Spain — has order the "temporary expropriation" of empty residential buildings held by the banks, to house those who have been evicted from their homes by those banks. The bank can avoid such temporary expropriation by making the property available for a manageable rent. In the case of expropriation (which can last a maximum of 3 years), the regional government will compensate the banks a tiny percentage of the assessed value.

For more on the painful problem of evictions, see my article written for Radikal Portal (published in Norwegian); here is my original, English-language version, Spain's many currents of protest. The Norwegian version is here.

Caricature Map of Europe 1914 - StumbleUpon

Caricature Map of Europe 1914 - StumbleUpon

100 years ago. And today's map? Germany would be a fat, greedy banker, Spain a very thin gentlemen in shabby formal clothes with his hand out, Greece a flock of raging demons pursuing foreigners in a boneyard, Italy a grinning Berlusconi sitting on top of some very unhappy people whom Beppe is trying to tickle, France a mass of angry Lilliputians trying to tie down a struggling Marianne, Hungary… , Russia… , and on and on. Things are going nearly badly as they were 100 years ago, but the crisis we're on the brink of today is probably not world war. More like general collapse.  

Lost in revolution

The Angels of Zimbabwe by Peter de Lissovoy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When Joe, a conspicuously tall young white American, hitchhikes into white-ruled Rhodesia in the early stages of the 1964-1979 "bush war" against supremacist Ian Smith's Rhodesian Front, his passion for liberty and his reckless crossing of color-lines gets him deeper into confusion and ultimately heartbreak. Hoping to help the black African liberation fighters create the free, black African nation they call Zimbabwe, Joe gets himself hired as a very junior journalist for the daily Clarion — whose editor tolerates his ironies because he's an amusing Yank — and using his position and the paper's resources, he gets to observe closely the routines of both blacks and whites in the small, rigidly segregated capital Salisbury (now Harare) — in the town center, the blacks-only bus station, the whites-only spaces but with black servants in stores and offices, the rundown black townships, police violence against black women protesters with their babies strapped to their backs, and a surprisingly multiracial garden party on a country estate. The portraits of ZANU youth activists, aspiring black journalist Shakespeare Forboni, his buddy the little auto mechanic Moses Chivera and the dour, bitter and determined revolutionary Frankie Mundie suggest the range of personality types struggling for a liberation that meant something different to each of them; among the whites, most memorable are the Clarion editor Mr. Wein, a cautious but canny "liberal," the absolutely apolitical but generally good guy sports journalist, and — most tellingly — an older, formerly influential settler who remembers pioneer days and still clings to the hope that whites like him can make a contribution in the future black republic. The ending is an undramatic fade-out with nothing resolved, either for Zimbabwe or for Joe personally, but in the meantime we have been presented a vivid panorama of that last white-racist holdout in Africa and its tensions in its last days, and some clear suggestions of the conflicts that would emerge in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

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