The men looked round the basement with flashlights.

 

1930s pressmen

[Image source: https://dk.pinterest.com/pin/88805423879125677/ .]

  "But Britten," asked one of the men, "why did the old man want this Erlone released?"

  "Figure it out for yourself," Britten said.

  "Then he thinks Erlone had something to do with the snatching of his daughter and wanted him out so he could give her back?"

   "I don't know," Britten said.

   "Aw, come on, Britten."

   "Use your imagination."

   Two more of the men buttoned their coats, pulled their hats low over their eyes and left. Bigger knew that they were going to phone in more information to their papers; they were going to tell about Jan's trying to convert him to communism, the Communist literature Jan had given him, the rum, the half-packed trunk being taken down to the station, and lastly, about the kidnap note and the demand for ten thousand dollars. The men looked round the basement with flashlights. Bigger still leaned against the wall. Britten sat on the steps. The fire whispered in the furnace. Bigger knew that soon he would have to clean the ashes out, for the fire was not burning as hotly as it should. He would do that as soon as some of the excitement died down and all of the men left.

   "It's pretty bad, hunh, Bigger?" Britten asked.

   "Yessuh."

   "I'd bet a million dollars that this is Jan's smart idea."

   Bigger said nothing. He was limp all over; he was standing up here against this wall by some strength not his own. Hours past he had given up trying to exert himself any more; he could no longer call up any energy  So he just forgot it and found himself coasting along.

   It was getting a little chilly; the fire was dying. The draft could scarcely be heard. Then the basement door burst open suddenly and one of the men who had gone to telephone came in, his mouth open, his face wet and red from the snow.

   "Say!" he called. 

   "Yeah?"

   "What is it?"

   "My city editor just told me that that Erlone fellow won't leave jail."

   For a moment the strangeness of the news made them all stare silently. Bigger roused himself and tried to make out just what it meant. Then someone asked the question he longed to ask.

   "Won't leave? What you mean?"

   "Well, this Erlone refused to go when they told him that Mr Dalton had requested his release. It seems he had got wind of the kidnapping and said that he didn't want to go out."

   "That means he's guilty!" said Britten. "He doesn't want to leave jail because he knows they'll shadow him and find out where the girl is, see? He's scared."

   "What else?"

   "Well, this Erlone says he's got a dozen people to swear that he did not come here last night."

   Bigger's body stiffened and he leaned forward slightly. 

   "That's a lie!" Britten said."This boy here saw him."

   "Is that right, boy?"

   Bigger hesitated. He suspected a trap. But if Jan really had an alibi, then he had to talk; he had to steer them away from himself.

(From Richard Wright's Native Son (1940).)

This is a relative lull in one of the elongated, crowded scenes for which Native Son is famous. The Daltons have made their appeals, the flashbulbs have stopped popping, surely the reporters will go away now. The reader's on edge, even if maybe Bigger isn't. We feel his exhaustion, but he's also excited, here at close quarters with white pressmen and with the white world of Chicago at a critical juncture, having this story unfold around him, a story that no-one yet suspects has Bigger at its centre. 

The natural thing might have been to run, but Bigger is back at the scene, he wants to steer and also to watch. Later on, the sole interest he'll retain is reading about himself in the papers. It isn't about fame but about power; the power to sway events, to write on the sky; a power that has always been denied to him until this day.  

The press pack is a brilliant example of the just-go-with-it way that Wright composed Native Son. Bigger registers their horrible eagerness when they know they're going to be fed some dope, their callousness in the midst of tragedy. At the same time there's a freshness in their outlook, the hungry professional alertness reflected in how they continue to throw their flashlights around the basement, as if a story lurks in its corners. The press are too self-interested to be inflexible, they are the controllers of prejudice not controlled by it.  They aren't worried about maintaining status over a black man. (Unlike Britten, who has all the predictable racist and anti-Red attitudes of his time, and who Bigger easily fools.) If everyone, black or white, is seen as just story material, what difference does it make?

The reporters even try to make clumsy overtures to Bigger (though no more clumsy than Jan's and Mary's were). The guy who addresses Bigger as "Mike" (America's commonest name) is evidently being friendly, saying "you're one of us" -- maybe he's genuine, but that's what you can never know with a pressman.

Bigger almost snaps at him. He's numbed to the institutional racism of being addressed as "boy" (he's 20) and answering "Yessuh". It's only when white people change the tune that he's shocked into feeling, and sees anew all his accumulated despair and hate and fury. 

It was a dangerous moment. Bigger recovers himself, and by the time of this extract he's coasting. 

But now the endgame approaches, with Jan's impressive roster of witnesses, and with, above all, the fateful cooling of the furnace. The strangely egalitarian temper of the press pack,  willing to muck in with the black boy's work, gifts them the story they've been looking for. From now on Bigger's hopeless power will be meted out only on his girl Bessie.

Men in Southside Chicago, 1940

[Image source: https://mymodernmet.com/southside-chicago-great-migration/ . One of Edwin Rosskam's photographs from Chicago's Black Belt, taken in July 1940. Richard Wright acted as the Rosskams' guide to the area. In 1941 they collaborated on the book 12 Million Black Voices.]

One of the billboard posters in the background advertises the touring production of The Man Who Came to Dinner, with Alexander Woollcott finally getting to play the lead role, originally written with him in mind. Another poster advertises Life With Father; both these hit plays were gently subversive and utterly inoffensive comedies.

In Native Son Bigger is keenly aware of billboards like these. They are a glimpse of -- indeed a hammered-home message about -- the world he's excluded from. 

Chicago skyline with snowstorm, 1930

[Image source: https://chuckmanchicagonostalgia.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/photo-chicago-skyline-panorama-aerial-sunset-with-snow-storm-note-building-under-construction-in-center-distance-1930/photo-chicago-skyline-panorama-aerial-sunset-with-snow-storm-note-building-under-construction-in-center-distance-1930/ . From Chuckman's collection of vintage photos of Chicago.]

Native Son is one of the most demonstrably significant novels. It changed the discourse about race forever; effectively, it was the first book to bring what we now call "institutional racism" into sharp relief, to show how it played out. The ground had been importantly prepared by Wright's first book Uncle Tom's Children (1938); an influential audience were already listening for what he did next. When Native Son was published on 1st March 1940 it was already a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, the Club News comparing it to The Grapes of Wrath (1939). On 12th March Wright gave his brilliant lecture "How Bigger Was Born" at Columbia; it was published as a pamphlet soon afterwards, and is included in modern editions of Native Son.

Books as significant as this always have their detractors and in a way it's right they should, because they have already made the world a different place from how it was when they were written. There's a fine risky freedom about the writing both in the novel and the essay, a boldness of trusting to inspiration without worrying how it's going to be received.

What shall I play next?

Favourite pitches #1: halfway across this footbridge leading from the carpark to the shops and cafés. Lots of passers-by, not much road noise. Also used by other musicians, homeless beggars, Big Issue sellers, so I usually only play here at quiet times. If it's a market day, recorded music from a nearby stall can make it unfeasible. 

It's beautifully simple, but there's a process. Before leaving the van, I tune the guitar with my electronic tuner. Later adjustments I can do by ear, but I do like to start off knowing that my E really is an E. It stops me imagining that the songs all seem too low today, or too high. 

A classical guitar with two unclassical aspects: a strap and a capo. (The wide-neck capo, which cost £40, is my pride and joy.) I'm highly dependent on the capo, my vocal range being so limited; often a song is only singable in one key.

And of course a hat (ground-baited with a few coins), and a bottle of water. 

That's it. No amplification and no means of taking electronic payment (these are matters of principle). 

The audiences are lovely. They're local. Elderly people, young people, children who beg a coin from mum or dad so they can put it in the hat. Sometimes people are too generous (in my view), and I've had to learn not to reject this generosity. The whole thing's about respectful human relationships, outside the withering frameworks of commerce and institution. Often, of course, I earn next to nothing, and that feels fine too. I'm singing because I enjoy it. 

I'm always learning a new song, and others have gone rusty through not being played, but here's a list of what I think I could play today without needing to rehearse; a longer list than I expected! 

I'll take a glass

Sweet sixteen

Two songs Laura found on YouTube,  performed by Finbar Furey. The latter one dates back to the 1890s. Both of them strong and nostalgic, making an instant emotional connection.

La mer

The great song by Charles Trenet that he wrote on a demob train at the end of WW2, celebrating the unglamorous Mediterranean coast near his birthplace of Narbonne; and for his nation the half-forgotten possibility, at last, of something called leisure. For some reason I decided at an early stage to switch the rhythm to triple time. (My French accent is atrocious, but it doesn't matter.)

Singing in the rain

For obvious reasons, a handy song to have in a busker's repertoire. Just four chords, and loads of fun to play.

The weight

Robbie Robertson's 1960s classic of mundane hanging around and getting tangled up in complications, that somehow takes on a biblical resonance and encapsulates a new youth culture.  Lots of opportunity for neat little guitar fills. You'd think the chorus wouldn't work with just a single voice, but I enjoy trying.

A matter of time

Evangeline

Two songs I've lived with for forty years, since Los Lobos released their first album. Both in different ways songs about leaving home, the experience of Mexicans seeking a better life in the USA. I feel I do pretty well emulating the band's arrangement of Matter of Time, but the awesome guitar introduction to Evangeline still eludes me. 

Joanne

The Michael Nesmith classic, from Magnetic South; challenging falsetto bits, a bouncy rhythm and irresistible melody.

Grandpa (tell me 'bout the good old days)

Another song Laura put me on to, bringing back distant memories of the Judds. A song whose sweetness contains irony, doubt and anger.

Our last summer

The Abba song about a Paris romance in flower power days. I always (mentally) take a deep breath before starting it; it's all action, with no pauses for thought. Of course it's not unusual for me to make a mistake, in this and all the other songs, but that doesn't matter much when you're busking, when people are mostly just hearing snatches. The emphasis is on keeping going and communicating a feeling, and playing as loud as you can without it falling apart. It's a completely different skillset from the expressive dynamics and subtleties of playing in a quiet room.

Thanks for the memory

I discovered this on a CD by one of my heroes, Mildred Bailey. Fantastic swing era number; it's a lot of fun trying to emulate a swing band on an acoustic guitar. 

Georgia on my mind

This was on the Mildred Bailey CD too; it's from her I learnt the introductory verse, which Ray Charles and The Band didn't use. I rarely have the feeling that my British passers-by recognize this song or feel strongly about it, but I do.

Get set for the blues

Another jazzy song that steps from seventh to seventh. I heard it many years ago on Julie London's About the Blues, and I've loved it ever since.

Baby I'm feeling it now

Cloud

Lay all your cards on the table

Waltz 1

Waltz 2

Three songs composed by me, and two guitar pieces that have no titles. Waltz 1 really needs Laura's harmonica. 

Please help me I'm falling

I've been playing this song so long that I can't really remember how it came about. I knew Don Gibson's version, but that was in prehistory. I think I must have been reminded of it in more recent years by hearing it on a cheap country compilation during dull commutes. 

Den första gång jag såg dig

Så länge skutan kan gå

Dansen på Sunnanö

Sjösala vals

Sol vind och vatten

Fryksdalsdans nr 2

Five Swedish songs of various ages, and a schottische to get the fingers working. (On cold days I know it's time to stop playing when I can no longer manage the chord shape of C.) No-one in England has shown any recognition of these songs, but in Stockholm they did.

Calle Schewen's Waltz

Another Swedish song (by Evert Taube, like three of the previous) -- for some reason I tend to sing this one in my own English translation.

Who knows where the time goes

Sandy Denny's song, with a lovely easy progression based on the E shape, and added guitar twiddles that vainly seek to replicate Richard Thompson. As you've already seen, I often seem to be attracted to songs associated with women singers. I think detaching the singer from the song and its protagonist, as folk singers have always done, opens up many creative possibilities. There's something appealing, too, about applying my very limited vocal skills to songs sung by amazing vocal stylists like Sandy. (The song I'm learning at the moment is Al Green's Sha La La.)

I want to see the bright lights tonight

This is another one with a woman protagonist: a Richard Thompson song originally sung by Linda. 

Streets of Forbes

Australian folk ballad, the only real story song in my repertoire. It seemed appropriate to have a bare bones accompaniment using only the middle four strings, the right hand never shifting position. 

Hickory wind

You're still on my mind

You don't miss your water

Three songs I discovered half a century ago on the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo. The lovely melody of Gram Parsons' Hickory Wind, his song about growing up too fast, is astonishingly founded on  the most basic of three-chord tricks. You're still on my mind is a George Jones swing country blues about trying to treat heartache with alcohol. You don't miss your water is William Bell's song, originally from 1961. 

I won't let you down

An obscure song these days, wriitten by the great Albert Lee; it appeared on the final album by Heads Hands and Feet in 1973. A sweet song about love and memory with an extended coda of joyous guitar at the end.

Wide open road

The W. Australian classic by the Triffids; basically the same chord progression throughout, but you can be very inventive with it.

Atlantic City

Bruce Springsteen's song about drifting into crime, again mostly over a constantly repeated chord progression. 

You wear it well

The Rod Stewart hit, a song that's strong enough to flourish even without his voice.

Warwick Avenue

One of many fantastic songs on Duffy's first album. Like a lot of others here, I learnt the chords from online sources. Some of the online chords don't seem to quite match the complex original arrangement, but it's close enough.

(Working out the chords was so much harder in pre Internet days. Nowadays you can at least start with what others have made of it.)

Always on my mind

As sung by Elvis Presley, but my version comes mostly via Willie Nelson.

Celluloid heroes

By Ray Davies: a wonderful hymn to Hollywood's golden age as seen from Muswell Hill, though it feels rather different from the songs of the Kinks' greatest years. 

The water

Johnny Flynn's song, originally a duet, about dying: the river of life debouching into the sea of eternity.

The mayor of Simpleton

By XTC; their warm-hearted hymn to being a dimbo; great fun to play on an acoustic guitar. My tribute to my Swindon years. We often used to take a walk over the fields to the big council estate where, I later learnt, Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding both grew up.

Favourite pitches #2: beside what is now just a pollard stump, but last year was a fine clean-limbed lime tree. (The council were worried about the hollow at the base.) Plenty of people going past on this riverside walk. Well away from the noise of motor traffic. Sometimes I get drowned out by birdsong; not so much the constant low-register chatter of the rooks, as the piercing jubilations of the wrens. 

the little feast

 

Dewberry

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not—some people of course never do,—the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure.

(Opening of Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady (1881).)

Well yes, I can relate to the last bit. It's like the tea interval during a test match, when you know that the longest and often most eventful session of play still lies ahead of you.

To really relish the "little feast" we seem to need an expanse of green and a lot of leisure. 

Perhaps, too, the absence of too much food: the outcome should be energising, refreshing us for a longer pull. Heavier meals slow us down, change our mood, break our impetus. But afternoon tea, not overly laden with cakes, prolongs it. 

And one final element of the agreeable hour (James' "hour" means a certain time of day, not a period of sixty minutes): the preparation of the tea should be carried out by others. Gardencourt, like everywhere else in this novel, is sustained by unnamed invisible servants. The characters in the novel need do no more than occasionally order a change of location. (It's a pitiful sign of Pansy Osmond's constrained position that she's always busying herself with pouring the tea.)

Who, actually, is experiencing this agreeable feeling? Most evidently the reader, guided by the pleasant narrator. We're perhaps being readied too for Isabel Archer's response to the scene when she emerges from the house in the next chapter. 

But as for this afternoon's three partakers (or non-partakers) it's a bit less clear. It's perfect weather for tea outdoors, though Mr Touchett must keep the shawl over his knees, Ralph insists. It's nice that Warburton has ridden over. (That's what Ralph calls him; the narrator wouldn't dare.) Still there's a consonance between the hour (mellow light, ebbing sun) and the sickly father and son, the father much declined in the last year. His tea, we'll learn later, is diluted. There isn't much to talk about. The younger pair spin jokes out of misrepresenting what they've said to each other. Father and son have gone over and over Mrs Touchett's cablegrams, teasing every possible ambiguity out of their fairly plain substance. It's evident that the unknown niece has been much talked of; Ralph is very clear about her name, though it isn't in the cablegrams. And she's very much wanted too, in these senescent, comfortably numb surroundings. The moment they see her in person, see that she's pretty and smart, both Ralph and Lord Warburton are powerfully stirred, and it's just as the elder Mr Touchett has foreseen: the crosscurrents of acquisitiveness and protectiveness that will ripple through his exclusive backwater.

The freighted word "interesting" is thrown around in relation to Miss Archer; that familiar euphemism, in 19th-century literature, for feelings of a romantic nature. Still, the word of which the gentlemen are most aware is "Miss". Isabel's availability, her not yet settled state, is apparently like the unsolved clue that people can't stop being pleasantly tormented by. The Portrait of a Lady is monomanically obsessed with marriage; this tiresome staple of mediocre novels fills its every nook.

Litter, weedkilled field

*

Marriage is apparently highly desirable, hyperinflatedly identified with the lover's self-realization and summation, yet the actual marriages we glimpse in The Portrait of a Lady seem quite out of key with that idea. If not patently unsatisfactory (like the Touchetts'), they're at best rather mundane: Lilian's you would call a happy marriage, but not a magical one of the sort that the suitors seem to think is in their grasp. Anyway, Lilian's anxiously aware that her own kind of marriage wouldn't appeal to her sister; and that Isabel might do something awful, like marrying a foreigner. 

It's crudely pictured, but her insight is sound. Lilian and Edmund are doers, their marriage and their life are productive. But Isabel doesn’t look like being one of life's doers; for her, marriage isn't about doing but about experiencing, like a visit to Egypt.

Only at the end does Isabel really do something, when she makes her small rebellion and travels to England, against Gilbert's wishes, to say goodbye to Ralph. When she goes back to Gilbert and Pansy, we hope it's to do plenty more, but that isn't an inevitability.

Blackthorn

Henrietta’s letters from Spain had proved the most acceptable she had yet published, and there had been one in especial, dated from the Alhambra and entitled ‘Moors and Moonlight,’ which generally passed for her masterpiece.

I think that's my favourite sentence in The Portrait of a Lady.

(Here, as often in Sherlock Holmes etc, "dated" refers to location as much as date.)

In his later prefaces Henry James fought a rearguard action against readers who saw too much in Henrietta Stackpole and Maria Gostrey, figures he saw as ancillary, or even light refreshment. He knew he couldn't dictate how his novels would be read, but he didn't want their central focus to be overlooked in a simplistic or perverse way. 

Nevertheless, I sometimes think he wrote most naturally and penetratingly when he wasn't so fixed on making out his theme; when he neither overtreated nor undertreated -- in fact did not "treat" at all -- but just allowed his fancy free rein. 

Late blackthorn, unopened hawthorn buds

Freedom is highly problematized here. It must be freedom to do something; if it's just freedom it's an empty set, for instance the idleness gently criticized by Mr Touchett in that opening chapter. Ralph has an idleness licensed by ill health; Lord Warburton's is maintained by a framework of opposing values (upper-class guilt, as it were) and we readily believe Ralph when he predicts that his friend, in consequence, won't do anything very much.

Mrs Touchett's freedom is mainly expended in asserting itself. For instance, by an uncowed judgment of "the great ones of the earth", or by proceeding with her own plans in proud disregard of her husband's or son's approaching deaths. Isabel "found her a strange and interesting figure: a figure essentially—almost the first she had ever met".

But that's a delusion; this isn't the kind of freedom that Isabel's looking for, which is something like freedom to fulfil her destiny. None of the Touchetts, enablers as they may be, can give her that freedom. It's a freedom that no-one can give you, you have to take it. 

Perhaps the wretchedness of being married to Gilbert Osmond confirms Isabel's youthful premonition that she, at least, needed adversity to fully come to life.

Weedkilled field

*

I wrote this after reading The Portrait of a Lady in the revised version published in 1908. 

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2833/2833-h/2833-h.htm#link2H_PREF

It wasn't a conscious choice, and I might not have chosen the revised version if I'd seen Nina Baym's essay, in which she demonstrates how it overlays a rather different story onto the one James told in 1881. (But without completely obliterating it, producing a sometimes blurry impression of character and action.)

Nina Baym, "Revision and Thematic Change in The Portrait of a Lady", Modern Fiction Studies, Vol 22 No 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 183-200.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26280289

The 1881 text can be found here: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Portrait_of_a_Lady_(James)

Rainbow

The Portrait of a Lady ... The definite article is teasing. James liked a definite article; most of his novel titles begin with "The". It usually suggests something that the novel is about: a character (The American), a symbol (The Golden Bowl), a theme (The Awkward Age)... Yet in this case the simplest thought is that it refers to the novel itself: to James's remarkable attempt to draw a large novel out of his initial vision of a young woman. Which would more naturally be A Portrait of a Lady.... like A Tale of Two Cities.

So I find myself looking for possible acts of portraiture within the story; for instance Gilbert Osmond framing his wife as a living artwork; or Isabel's own behaviour being shaped by how she wants to see herself. I'm not sure it works out, but I'll keep on being bothered about it.

In the periphery I was secret gong

In spare online moments over the last few months I've been reading poetry (and interviews etc) by Catherine Wagner. I'm not sure what started it, her name just popped into my head. I've known it for twenty years but that was all, I knew she wrote the kind of US poetry I liked; I still haven't read or seen any of her books. On the other hand, there's plenty about her books online, mostly from across the Atlantic. Of Course, her fifth collection, was published in 2020 after an eight year hiatus.

Here's a short poem, or part of a poem, from Of Course -- one of three in the Old Pal ezine. 

“In the periphery”

In the periphery I was secret gong
hanging the hammock thinking CALL MY MOM
not doing that or any other task ha
HA I'll do my job of 

putting head outdoors    the garden ringing  
unfocused my eyes allowed 
  moving shadows on the lawn       
                        like baby whales playing 20 feet underwater
   to shift their noons  

                             
Sun on green leaves brings out their yellow 
      My eye drags tree to sky, prints violet margin.

[Poem source: https://www.oldpalmag.com/issue-3/2019/9/27/catherine-wagner-three-poems .]

In the periphery, not on the periphery. 

The story continues in the next two poems. She goes out of the garden to the "trash thicket" on the border of the neighbouring golf-course -- that is where the "course" in the title comes from -- we learn there's a problem with one of her contact lenses, hence the unfocused aspect, which combines with a enhanced awareness of sound -- it's a messy, vibrant, sense-evading nature . . . we see a dead ash tree, the poet curses the Emerald Ash Borer.

In the poem sound comes from unseen sources, blurs remind of other blurs, even what is seen (green leaves) turn out to be not just green and not just leaves. Nature is squeezable i.e. reduced to this periphery ("wildlife corridor") that exploits a legal border (privacy, ownership, segregation), but nature remains ungraspable, we're in it and it's in us.

*

(Emerald Ash Borer, Agrilus planipennis, a NE Asian beetle that does not kill the ash trees of its native range but is destructive elsewhere. This is the scourge affecting ash tree species in the USA; there's plenty of it in the Cincinnati area where Catherine Wagner lives. It's also approaching Europe from the east, but hasn't reached us yet. However, European ash species are already being hard hit by ash dieback caused by the fungus Hymenoscyphus fraxineus first noticed in Poland in 1992 -- which is possibly identical to the Japanese species Lambertella albida (again, harmless to its native flora).) 

*

Re the first line, there might be more specific reference but the spiritual tradition of the gong is doubtless relevant, e.g. 

Masters of the Gong Tone of Life recognize that ‘Now’ exists suspended in the ocean of the gonging experience ...

Because the gong feeds the non-linear mind or the mind behind the mind, it is a consciousness supportive tool that fosters spiritual wholeness.

The gong is not an enemy of the linear mind, but a................

friend to all in all dimensions. Hence, the name of Maitreya or Mithra is associated with it.

The concept of the mysterious alchemist stone that the ancients sought and which is able to transfer its powers of transmutation to the beholder can also be understood to be the secret Gong Effect caused by universal resultant tones channeled through its remarkable alloy pulled by the Source, the mysterious attractor we call 1.618033989, and which is the frequency of 207.1 Hz. G#, or approximately, the orbital tone of the Uranus Gong, ruler astrologically of the new present Aquarian Age.

(Source .)

Some more extracts from  Of Course :

https://brooklynrail.org/2019/05/poetry/three-wagner

Maybe these poems come from it too. Anyway, I just liked them:

"The city has sex with Megan": https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/149690/from-the-city-has-sex-with-everything

"English is 99% buckled to a rock": https://580split.org/issue/breach/#editors_letter

"Thanksgiving is over":   https://www.benningtonreview.org/catherine-wagner

*

I walked in the house

on the flat aspect of the wood

I took rectangular instruction of the wood

...

                                                             Something electric charged into our account

and zinged out of it, pre-instructed

 

and paid for the house. I felt

house on my heel then instep and toe.

I had a bad foot and I paid

to get it fixed so I could walk here.

I paid for the house and I paid for the

foot that touches it. I paid to be

directed rectangularly and down a hall.

I curved my body to direct

my waste through a hole. I am helped

and paying for it.

 

all of me exchanged,

housing exchange.

                                   I saw us standing

   up in the world.

And we sank into

   exchange

  vibrating transparency

                 like a sea nettle

              afloat in the night sea

 

the edges of the sea-veil

      tensed slapping above, visible

when the wind crevassed and doilied

...

Just a taste of another favourite poem, "I walked in the house", from Macular Hole (2004). You should definitely read all of it -- it's only about twice as long as what I've quoted, but for some reason I got cold feet about pasting the whole lot. 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54526/i-walked-in-the-house 

I love that her two chosen examples of capitalism in action are housing and healthcare, not fluff like fancy clothes and sports cars. 

The poem bangs up against not doing this: letting the house fall apart, sitting at the broken window keeping the pain of your broken arm to yourself. 

What's maybe not so clear from the poem in isolation is that there's more at stake here for the protagonist: there's a baby (the overarching theme of the poems in Macular Hole). A roof over your head, healthy and fit ... these things matter, or they seem to. (Hence the subsequent reference to dirty bathwater, as in, throwing out with...)

More flowers of the Torrevieja coast

I've been in Torrevieja, near Alicante, for a week at the beginning of March, and of course I've taken a few snaps of the common early flowers. 

I don't promise to identify them all. My guide over here is Wild Flowers of the Mediterranean by Marjorie Blamey and Christopher Grey-Wilson (1988), a book I don't often have much joy with.

The yellow plant above is a case in point. It must be the commonest wild flower round here, but I still don't know what it is. Here's some more pics of it.

It's a scrambly sort of plant. The leaves are pinnate with narrow, backward-pointing lobes. Some have clasping leaf-bases, flamboyantly pointed. The stems are fairly slender, solid and the ones I examined were basically hairless.

Hairless, that is, except for this distinctive white felty stuff at the base of the involucre and at stem-nodes.

The backs of the ray-florets are sometimes reddish, sometimes just a bit dingy.

Anyway, with the help of online image searches I've nailed it. It's Slender Sow-thistle (Sonchus tenerrimus). I think I was put off by Grey-Wilson describing the species as "often local". I'm sure that's true, from a pan-Mediterranean perspective. But round here it grows just about everywhere.

A smallish broom-like plant, flowers just starting on 2 March. Maybe Dyer's Greenweed (Genista tinctoria), a plant I last saw in a Sussex meadow 35 years ago.

A Stork's-bill. I'll have a guess at Erodium chium. (Other leaves I've seen are more distinctly lobed than the ones in this pic.)

Well this one's easy at least. It's the ridiculously pretty blue form of Scarlet Pimpernel (Anagallis arvensis), with hairy margins to petals.

Blue-leaved Wattle (Acacia cyanophylla), native to W. Australia. A major part of the coastal scenery at this time of year.

Pretty confident this is Euphorbia segetalis, though I wish Grey-Wilson had been more specific about the height than "short". Anyway, it's a common spurge round here.

[I should say, I was pretty confident. These plants must be about 50cm, taller than most heights quoted online for E. segetalis (though they're a mixed bag). Also these plants don't look like annuals to me.]

The vicious fruits of Small Caltrops aka Maltese Cross (Tribulus terrestris). I picked them out of my hand after steadying myself to photograph the spurge.

More about caltrops:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/01/thomas-middleton-women-beware-women.html

Unopened male flowers of the local pine (Aleppo Pine, Pinus halepensis).

More about it here:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/11/aleppo-pine.html

Bermuda Buttercup (Oxalis pes-caprae). Introduced from South Africa to Malta in c. 1806, and soon a common sight around most of the Med, spreading vegetatively to form dense patches.

Yellow Sea Aster (Asteriscus maritimus), growing on a cliff wall.

It has other names. More about it here:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2016/03/asteriscus-maritimus.html

Don't know. It's very common, though. Every time I flick through Marjorie Blamey's pictures I hover over Urospermum dalechampii but that's supposed to be sulphur yellow and have backward-pointing leaf lobes, so no.

(Oh, I'd forgotten, I went through all this before. It's Reichardia tingitana.)

Purple Viper's Bugloss (Echium plantagineum)... I think. One of the commonest plants round here. You can find it at almost all times of year, but March is when it looks prettiest.

(It's also in the pic at the top of the post.)

Growing on the close-mown promenade at Mar Azul. A medick, maybe Medicago littoralis.

 

I was on my own this time, so there was a relative flood of reading.  I dived into a Spanish book that I'd bought the last time I was over, the Penguin Clásicos edition of El sí de las niñas by Leandro Fernández de Moratín, a comedy from 1806. I wrote about it in a separate post: 

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2024/03/el-si-de-las-ninas.html

When I'd mopped up all possible entertainment value from Moratín's play I switched over to Swedish, a genre novel I picked up in a charity shop, Klar Himmel by Kristin Fägerskjöld. This was her first novel (2020); I think she's up to her fourth now. It's a saga, multiple times and narrators, revolving around three women during WW2 and a dark secret, set partly in Sweden and partly in England, just the thing for expanding my vocabulary. My Swedish is now at about the same level as my French: I relish an easy novel, but literary novels remain forbidding. I read more slowly and hence with more interest than if I was reading the same kind of book in English. (Consequently, I'm learning quite a bit about what life was like in Sweden and England in 1941.)

Reading Swedish being hard work for me, needing regular breathers, I spent more time than usual looking at the cover. It's a collage, bombers flying overhead while a girl in a summer dress walks her bike idyllically. That seems to allude to Léonie's bike rides in Lincolnshire, and it's her dress (red with white spots), but she would have been in uniform. I think the girl must represent all the female leads at once, and above all the reader, entering and delighting in the world of the novel. (The leads themselves are keen readers, always looking for a quiet corner.)

I spent a bit of time wondering about the leaves, too. I don't recognize them; not a European tree, I'm thinking. Shutterstock creates strange new worlds. 

Mind you, when Léonie arrives on her bike at the old ruin in the spring of 1944, "the daffodils and goldenrods competed to see which were the most numerous..." That feels a bit like a collage, too.

*

Meanwhile, I finally managed to finish off a post that's taken me forever, about Scott's inexhaustible novel The Heart of Midlothian. 

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2024/02/sir-walter-scott-heart-of-midlothian.html

Torrevieja is a multi-lingual sort of place, and you hear a lot of Nordic languages being spoken. The first euros I made, I was singing Den första gång jag såg dig ... I was delighted to finally add a new currency to my income history, to go with sterling and kronor. I've been trying when in Europe the last couple of years, but never found the right place and time. Superficially, conditions didn't seem ideal here either, down on the seafront, which was windy all week (I don't use any amplification, so wind, crashing waves and traffic are major considerations). Nevertheless, something unlocked in the cosmos and people started coming over, the coins came and even one note. 

I cycled and ran but never felt like getting into the chilly sea. I made a batch of vegetable soup and mostly ate dinner in. But who could come here and resist tostada-tomate for breakfast, the occasional napolitana, the occasional krakauer...? My diary summarizes: Went to Bar El Botijo a few times, Elite a couple of times, Marco Polo (the one on C/ Scorpiones, handy for after shopping at Consum), El Carmen once, LaZia upstairs twice while using the launderette, Zenia Boulevard Bombon Boss twice, Miño (Av/ Desiderio Rodriguez) three times when heading Torrev direction. Andrea's bratwurst stall and our favoured restaurant whose name I think is Gelateria Italiana, though it's somewhat vague. (It's really a food place, with a German flavour to the menu; they stopped selling ice cream altogether when the electricity prices went mad, though I think it's back on now.)

Some other posts from visits to Torrevieja,  including some of the same plants...

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/03/spanish-reveries.html

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2016/03/more-march-flowers-from-torrevieja-coast.html

El sí de las niñas (Leandro Fernández de Moratín)

Don Diego (Pablo Sanz)

[Images clipped from this 1970 Radiotelevisión Española presentation of El sí de las niñas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCaebQoFFpc . ]

La escena es en una posada de Alcalá de Henares.

The scene is a guest-house in Alcalá de Henares.

El teatro representa una sala de paso con cuatro puertas de habitaciones para huéspedes, numeradas todas. Una más grande en el foro, con escalera que conduce al piso bajo de la casa. Ventana de antepecho a un lado. Una mesa en medio, con banco, sillas, etc. 

The stage represents a public room with four doors to guest bedrooms, all numbered. A larger doorway leads to the hallway, with a staircase descending to the ground floor. A chest-high window to one side. A table in the middle, with a bench, chairs, etc.

La acción empieza a las siete de la tarde y acaba a las cinco de la mañana siguiente.

The action starts at seven in the evening and ends at five the following morning. 

Acto I, Escena I

Sale DON DIEGO de su cuarto, SIMÓN, que está sentado en una silla, se levanta.

DON DIEGO comes out of his room and SIMÓN, who is sitting in a chair, gets up.

DON DIEGO.-   ¿No han venido todavía?

So they still aren't back?

SIMÓN.-   No, señor.

No, sir.

DON DIEGO.-   Despacio lo han tomado, por cierto.

They're taking a damned long time.

SIMÓN.-   Como su tía la quiere tanto, según parece, y no la ha visto desde que la llevaron a Guadalajara...

Since her aunt loves her so much, it seems, and hasn't seen her since they took her to Guadalajara ...

DON DIEGO.-   Sí. Yo no digo que no la viese; pero con media hora de visita y cuatro lágrimas estaba concluido.

Yes. I'm not saying she shouldn't see her, but a visit of half an hour, four tears and it's over.

SIMÓN.-   Ello también ha sido extraña determinación la de estarse usted dos días enteros sin salir de la posada. Cansa el leer, cansa el dormir... Y, sobre todo, cansa la mugre del cuarto, las sillas desvencijadas, las estampas del hijo pródigo, el ruido de campanillas y cascabeles, y la conversación ronca de carromateros y patanes, que no permiten un instante de quietud.

Strange decision of yours, to go two whole days without setting foot outside the guest-house. Reading gets boring, sleeping gets boring... and what's most boring of all is the dirty room, the rickety chairs, the prints of the Prodigal Son, the sound of church bells and service bells, the shouted conversations of wagoners and peasants so you never get a minute's peace.

DON DIEGO.-   Ha sido conveniente el hacerlo así. Aquí me conocen todos: el Corregidor, el señor Abad, el Visitador, el Rector de Málaga... ¡Qué sé yo! Todos. Y ha sido preciso estarme quieto y no exponerme a que me hallasen por ahí.

It suited me to do it this way. Everyone knows me round here: the judge, the abbot, the auditor, the rector of Málaga, and God knows who else... Everyone. And that's just why I chose to stay quietly here and not to reveal myself to whoever might run into me.

SIMÓN.-   Yo no alcanzo la causa de tanto retiro. Pues ¿hay más en esto que haber acompañado usted a Doña Irene hasta Guadalajara para sacar del convento a la niña y volvernos con ellas a Madrid?

I don't get why you're keeping such a low profile. Is there something more to this than you escorting Doña Irene to Guadalajara to pick up her little girl from the convent, then going back with them to Madrid?

DON DIEGO.-   Sí, hombre; algo más hay de lo que has visto.

Yes, my lad; something more than what you have seen.

SIMÓN.-   Adelante.

Go on.

DON DIEGO.-   Algo, algo... Ello tú al cabo lo has de saber, y no puede tardarse mucho... Mira, Simón, por Dios te encargo que no lo digas... Tú eres hombre de bien, y me has servido muchos años con fidelidad... Ya ves que hemos sacado a esa niña del convento y nos la llevamos a Madrid.

Something, something... You'll have to know about it eventually, and it can't be delayed much longer... Look here, Simón, for God's sake don't go spreading this around... You're a good man, and you've served me faithfully for many years ... so you see we've collected this child from the convent and we are taking her to Madrid.

SIMÓN.-   Sí, señor.

Yes, sir.

DON DIEGO.-   Pues bien... Pero te vuelvo a encargar que a nadie lo descubras.

Well, then ... But I repeat, you absolutely must not tell this to anyone. 

SIMÓN.-   Bien está, señor. Jamás he gustado de chismes.

It's all right, sir. I've never been fond of gossip.

DON DIEGO.-   Ya lo sé. Por eso quiero fiarme de ti. Yo, la verdad, nunca había visto a la tal Doña Paquita. Pero, mediante la amistad con su madre, he tenido frecuentes noticias de ella; he leído muchas de las cartas que escribía; he visto algunas de su tía la monja, con quien ha vivido en Guadalajara; en suma, he tenido cuantos informes pudiera desear acerca de sus inclinaciones y su conducta. Ya he logrado verla; he procurado observarla en estos pocos días y, a decir verdad, cuantos elogios hicieron de ella me parecen escasos.

I know that. That's why I want to trust you. I, this is the truth, have never seen Doña Paquita before. But, through my friendship with her mother, I've often heard about her; I've read many of the letters she wrote; I've seen some more from her aunt the nun, who she's been living with in Guadalajara; in short, I've had all the information I could ask for, concerning her inclinations and her conduct. I've managed to see her, I've taken the opportunity to observe her these past few days, and to be frank, all the eulogies they make about her seem to me to fall far short.

SIMÓN.-   Sí, por cierto... Es muy linda y...

Yes indeed... She's very pretty and....

DON DIEGO.-   Es muy linda, muy graciosa, muy humilde... Y, sobre todo, ¡aquel candor, aquella inocencia! Vamos, es de lo que no se encuentra por ahí... Y talento... Sí señor, mucho talento... Conque, para acabar de informarte, lo que yo he pensado es...

She's very pretty, very gracious, very modest ... And above all, what candour, what innocence! Come on, that's something you just don't find these days... And talented ... Yessir, very talented... And so, to come to the point, what I have been thinking is...

SIMÓN.-   No hay que decírmelo.

You don't need to tell me.

DON DIEGO.-   ¿No? ¿Por qué?

No? Why not?

SIMÓN.-   Porque ya lo adivino. Y me parece excelente idea.

Because I've already worked it out. And it seems to me an excellent idea.

DON DIEGO.-   ¿Qué dices?

What are you saying?

SIMÓN.-   Excelente.

Excellent. 

DON DIEGO.-   ¿Conque al instante has conocido?...

And so you knew instantly? ...

SIMÓN.-   ¿Pues no es claro?... ¡Vaya!... Dígole a usted que me parece muy buena boda. Buena, buena.

Well, isn't it obvious?... Wow! ... I'm telling you it seems to me a great match. Great, great.

Simón, Don Diego's servant (Alfonso Gallardo)

*

I've been reading Leandro Fernández de Moratín's* most admired comedy El sí de las niñas, published in 1806 (written a few years earlier).

Complete text of El sí de las niñas in Spanish:

https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/el-si-de-las-ninas--0/html/ff188e30-82b1-11df-acc7-002185ce6064_2.html

(This is the original version of the text. The book I've been reading is based on Moratín's final revision: which cuts, e.g., the bit about the Corregidor, the Rector de Málaga, etc.)

*

As they go on talking, it becomes apparent that they're at cross purposes. Simón assumes that Don Diego intends the sixteen-year-old Doña Paquita for his nephew (a much more suitable match in terms of age). Don Diego, who is 59, has to spell out that he is actually intending to marry the girl himself.  Embarassment all round. 

At this stage you might anticipate a story where a lecherous old fool gets his deserved comeuppance, like January in the Merchant's Tale. But it doesn't work like that here. Don Diego isn't much of a lecher and he isn't even, except in this opening scene, much of a fool. As the play proceeds he becomes increasingly dissatisfied with the bland assurances of the loquacious mother and the almost equally maddening compliance of a daughter who seems to be just going through the motions. 

(The title means literally "The Yes of the girls" and is usually translated as something like "The Maiden's Consent".)

Doña Irene, the mother (Carmen Bernardos)

He begins to see that there's something radically amiss with an educational system that trains girls to comply absolutely with their elders' wishes and hence to conceal all their real feelings. When he discovers that the supposedly closeted Doña Paquita is in fact in love with the aforementioned nephew, he generously stands aside, to the happiness of everyone (even Doña Irene, once she's got over wanting to scratch her daughter's eyes out).

Doña Paquita [= Francisca], the daughter (Isabel María Pérez)

*

Antonio Calvo Maturano's lively 2012 essay introduces El sí de las niñas to readers of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, usefully bringing out the differences between the literature of absolutist Spain and democratic England, the different questions being asked; the progressivism isn't all on one side, both works treading a path between conservatism and reformism. 

https://jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol32no2/calvo.html

An interesting point he makes is that Moratín's attack on unequal marriages was in line with the thinking of the absolutist regime, alarmed by an upper-class culture in which marital infidelity was becoming the norm. They thought it led to social instability (as well as a lot of young, unmaintained widows).

Rita, the ladies' maid (María Silva)

*

A chat with Doña Paquita (in Spanish), along with some fabulous pictures, by María Ángeles Merino:

https://aranitacampena.blogspot.com/2014/05/el-si-de-las-ninas-y-enamorado-mas-que.html

Don Carlos, the nephew (Carlos Larrañaga)

El sí de las niñas has been translated into English a few times over the years. I couldn't find any of the older translations online, but what I did find was a 2007 version by Christopher O. Kidder (for his Masters degree) that's a whole lot of fun:

https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/628/

It's part way between a translation and an adaptation (the sort of halfway house that was the norm in most earlier eras of drama, until copyright started to get in the way): overall, it gives a pretty faithful idea of the original play, but it slims down some of the more historical detail, turns Doña Irene's thrush into a parrot, and sprinkles the play with a bunch of new wisecracks and gags. (The idea of attaching Don Carlos' love-letter to a brick is absolutely inspired.)

Calamocha, Don Carlos' servant (Tomás Zorí)

Moratín was a firm believer in the dramatic unities, the gospel promulgated in Spain by Luzán. El sí de las niñas is set in a single location over a period of less than twelve hours, and it has just seven roles, all of them good opportunities for the actors to show their chops. (After all, it's not enough for a play to just please the public. If it pleases the actors too, it will get performed.)

You can see the good and not so good in this. In drama things happen and characters change as a result, but there's something artificial about character changes that occur within such a constrained timescale. It highlights the performance aspect of drama rather than the mimetic aspect; it unfolds like an intricate dance. But when we see Hamlet change, or Horatio, we believe it; we recognise the characteristic flow of a personality through time. Because in Shakespeare's double-time dramas, it isn't possible to say exactly how much time passes between Act I and Act V.

And lot gets excluded from such unity. Only afterwards do we wonder about the past and the future; for instance, how such an eligible gent as Don Diego happened to be still single at 59, or how a professional soldier like Don Carlos is going to square career with marriage. 

But at the same time, there's a pleasure to such a well-engineered mechanism. It feels like it can never go stale, like every time we set the play going we'll want to see it through to the end, the dramatic impetus never flagging, each new scene accompanied by fresh anticipation, and our applause at the final curtain just as assured as all the rest.

*

* That is his short name. His full name was Don Leandro Antonio Eulogio Melitón Fernández de Moratín y Cabo. He was born in Madrid in 1760 and died in Paris in 1828.