I would tell you to keep the tip, but I see you already did

It would be wonderful if attending the Gede bacchanal at Miami Beach's Tap-Tap Restaurant became an annual ritual, but for the moment it has to be considered just a coincidence that I am back in Miami a second year in a row for the Haitian day of the Dead.

A familiar cast of characters turned up, both from the spirit world and from among the local supporters of Haitian culture. There's nothing quite like a perfect shrimp créole with voodoo drumming pulsing in the background, and so before the revels I had dinner at the front of the restaurant with my old friends Dori and Joseph Vuksanovic.

As we were settling up the check, Dori pointed out that the tip was included. It has been common for years in New York to add the tip onto the check for parties of six or more, presumably because twenty percent of such a significant sum proves to be such a daunting lump that large groups are emboldened to downsize the gratuity. But we were only three, and as a New Yorker it was shocking to find myself removed of all agency in the decision of how well to remunerate the wait staff. Dori laughed and explained that it is this way all over South Beach, because so many of the customers are tourists from Europe, unaccustomed to tipping.

I was reminded of an episode from my illustrious career as a temporary automotive storage specialist at that venerable hash-slingery, the Water Club, a fine dining establishment floating in Manhattan's East River. A good friend of mine, a waitron, as we valet parking attendants referred to the waiters there, came very close to losing his job after adding the tip to a check. The customer had run up quite a total, dining a deux and drinking Cristal champagne. He was of German origin. In thirty years in the city he had gained a New York attitude without losing anything of his accent. Our friend, who shall remain nameless, smelled a stiff. He assumed the gentleman was a Bavarian fat-cat just off the Lufthansa flight, someone accustomed after paying his bill to leaving on the table nothing but a few small coins and some pocket lint. His date was probably a pro. So he wrote his 18% onto the back end of the check.

Bitterness, tears and agony ensued. The man stormed about the dining room, proclaiming in a loud voice that he was not some tight-fisted Schwabian rube here to be taken advantage of. He owned an apartment nearby, he said. He had lived here for years and never seen such an outrage. He shouted, and pouted, and called for the head of the waiter on a platter, in lieu of an after-dinner mint. He told the manager that he wanted to see the manager. In this serene environment of white tablecloths and candlelight, with the East River burbling by outside the grand plate-glass windows, drama like this was unacceptable. The next day a memorandum was issued by the administrative offices of the restaurant informing all wait-staff (and, inexplicably, the valet corps) that under no circumstances were gratuities to be added onto checks.

That Miami Beach has abandoned any remaining pretense of the gratuity's relationship to service is, just like Halloween in Red Hook, an indicator of America's growing sense of entitlement and inevitable, concomitant decline.

Halloween and the end of US dominion

The arrival at my home on Saturday night of only one miserable trio of trick-or-treaters is a compelling indictment of the contemporary American way of life. A barometer, falling, of our standing in the world. I don't want to make too much of it, but the "financial crisis" might easily have been predicted by an astute analyst sitting through any recent long and lonely Halloween evening in my living room.

It isn't that there is anything to fear out on the local streets to account for the dismal turnout. The crack wars ended more than a decade ago; for most of this millenium the nearby blocks have been filled with the sounds of young pioneers, hammering and sawing and renovating Red Hook into its current state of eminently trendy desirability. My once edgy neighborhood has been conclusively gentrified. On days other than Halloween, I am known to gripe and moan that one can scarcely walk down the sidewalks any more, so clogged are they with strollers. In a few brief years this formerly marginal stretch of industrial waterfront has become as Park Slope, the Upper West Side, or any of the other notorious baby-making neighborhoods of New York City. There are, in short, an abundant supply of toddlers, and grinning, fawning parents eager to accompany them as they trick and treat, holding their moist, plump little hands while escorting them about the neighborhood.

But it is well-known that the Halloween pickings here are comparatively slim. The buildings are widely spaced, and there is still the occasional vacant lot. There are even one or two uninhabited shells, undoubtedly haunted. The stoops are steep, the doorbells ersatz and erratically positioned. On many blocks residences are mixed in with anonymous businesses that operate behind unwelcoming steel doors.

Contrast this with the uniform brownstone rows of Park Slope, where dozens of affluent households may be visited on any given stretch of street, and one will quickly appreciate that children there enjoy what economists call a "comparative market advantage." Here in Red Hook the aspiring pre-pubescent candy-collector must wander past an apartment building, cross in front of a vacant lot, and pass a small factory or sweatshop before finally collecting hard-won treats from one or two strange and isolated houses. Not so in Park Slope, just across the Gowanus canal. It is the neighborhood of choice in which to harvest the low-hanging fruit of the treat orgy, a place in which nobody poor or dangerous or threatening could possibly afford to live.

If you lived here in Red Hook, you might do the same as the local folks, which is to exploit this inefficiency in the market. In other words, pack your ten-year old in the station wagon and drive him or her the mile-and-a-half up the hill to the Slope, to knock on the doors of complete strangers who are not neighbors. It is more secure, the bag is filled easily and quickly. The parent spends less time, and the child is more richly rewarded. In investment terms going to Park Slope is a low-risk strategy with a market-beating rate of return. But at what cost?

 Unexploited resource

It isn't that I feel lonely, or neglected, although those emotions are close to the ones I felt in the moment, as I puttered about the kitchen, cooking, a lonely and hopeful wooden bowl full of candies placed on a chair near the front door. Ultimately I don't particularly mind that I myself did so little business. After all, I will be subsisting on those undistributed sweets for weeks to come. But viewed from two quite different perspectives, last night's pathetic showing can only be seen as another powerful indicator of the decline of United States hegemony, an explanation for the falling dollar and the surging deficit. In it are manifested, on the one hand, our sense of entitlement, and on the other, a grievous lack of initiative.

The origins of the trick-or-treat tradition are murky, but clearly it was once a pagan ritual involving a symbolic extortion and redistribution of wealth. Treats were doled out in order to purchase protection against unspecified tricks. As late as the 1970s in central New Jersey this contract was understood to mean that in return for handing out candy a homeowner would be exempted from having his aluminum siding pelted with eggs. Such notions may persist to this very day in some suburban enclaves.

If this ritual once delivered a social good it was surely that one had an opportunity to better know the neighborhood, to meet and greet one's neighbors, admiring their children and exalting the creativity that went into their costumes, irrespective of their wealth or social standing. All this has now been swallowed up in a tidal wave of consumerism. Everyone from the children to the candy companies and the costumer licensees of the latest Hollywood entertainments now look on Halloween as a fundamental cornerstone of the commercial calendar. There is no earning of treats with implied threats of violence, no messing about chatting with the neighbors on the stoop; a sackful of confections is simply an inevitable and predetermined reward waiting at the end of October. Whether it comes from working one's way through one's own neighborhood or targeting a reliable and high-density alien zone seems not to matter. From the parents' perspective, taking a drive out of the neighborhood is the fastest way to fulfill the child's expectations.

Our society feels there is nothing wrong with this strategy, because we have come to take the full bag of candy for granted. The social lubricative advantage of the original ritual has been lost; the only thing remaining of importance is what ends up the sack. In broader economic terms the meteoric rise of outsourcing, and the desperate promotion by our government of favorable "free trade" policies in the neo-liberal age, are obvious parallels. Both the exported labor, sent chasing the lowest possible wage, and the tariff-free importation of the goods thereby produced, amount to nothing more than an effort to keep our candy bag topped up to the brim. We seem to feel we deserve a certain standard, although we are no longer the ones struggling for it.

Viewed another way, where are those children willing to trample all over the others in their mad rush to get at the sweets? Where are the contenders? I have a whole bowl full of uncollected candy sitting over here. Where are the kids who went to Park Slope first, racked up, came home, dropped off the loot, and then headed right back out for more? Where are the envelope-pushers of trick-or-treating? Where are the teenagers who are perhaps just a bit too old and really ought to know better? Where are the late-comers who ring the doorbell just after you've gone up to bed, willing to offend in order to collect just one more candy bar? Where are the innovators, offering their leaf-raking services in return for an extra Snickers? How about a little competitive spirit?

I like to think it runs in the family dept.

Watch my erudite father discussing his new book, The Anti-Communist Manifestos, on C-Span.

From A Brooklynite on the Ice

Sweet Potato!

Via The Guardian

Reading: An Episode in the life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira

When the great scientific-minded explorer, Baron Alexander von Humboldt, set out across the globe hoping to discover and understand every last plant, insect and mountain range, his arduous journeys were broken by interludes of genteel luxury. His title and erudition preceded him, and he moved bearing letters of commendation and introduction to the cream of new world society, bedding down in the mansions of the aristocracy of colonialism, rich planters and ranchers pleased to host eminent thinkers from the old world. And eager to hear their news. The combination of adventure and hospitality must have made the early nineteenth century an amazing time to travel. Von Humboldt displayed a fearless and multidisciplinary optimism, examining everything from the geology, botany, topography and astronomy of the places he visited to the agriculture, social structure and psychology characteristic of their inhabitants.

An important part of this immense chronicling, in the age before photography, was visually to represent these distant landscapes and cultures, and von Humboldt traveled to the New World accompanied by a variety of contract painters mandated to capture scenes of nature and life in as faithful a manner as possible. His travels inspired other artists.

One friend and acolyte of von Humboldt's was the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas, who seems to have spent a melancholic and almost loveless life moving steadily through latin America, painting abundantly. When he wasn't, he was pacing, impotent, in Europe, wishing only to cross the Atlantic once more and rejoin his subject matter. My meager research has revealed no biography of Rugendas, but when I discovered a novel based on his travels, blurbed and introduced by Roberto Bolaño and written by an Argentine writer, César Aira, I ordered a copy immediately.

I was shocked when Aira's novella, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, arrived in the mail from Amazon; the paperback was little more than a flimsy pamphlet. Picture the instruction booklet that comes with an electric coffee grinder, or a hair dryer. Reading it took me less than two hours from start to finish. I found it profoundly weird and not only literally thought it lightweight.

Now, some few weeks later, I'm trying to understand why Aira's imagery is so persistent, even in translation. It won't leave my head. I am almost obsessed with the gigantic two wheeled carts, "contraptions of monstrous size, as if built to give the impression that no natural force could make them budge." The shafts by which these could be hitched to a full ten teams of oxen were so long that they "seemed to disappear among the clouds." Their cargo "sometimes comprised all the goods and chattel of a magnate," and they moved at a glacial pace: 200 meters per day. Rugendas, Aira writes, felt that following them "would be like traveling in time: proceeding rapidly on horseback along the same route, they would catch up with carts that had set off in other geological eras...." Philosophically, Rugendas is fixated on the intense flatnesses of the pampas; he seems to think that reaching the flattest place on earth, something like the umbilical of the planet, will help him to reveal great pictorial truths. In retrospect this seems a bizarre metaphorical anticipation of the concerns of modernist painting, the fixation on the flatness of the canvas itself. Are these things and notions Aira's invention, like his recreation of Rugendas' emotional state? This was precisely my problem with the novel; it is such an infuriating, surreal and seamless blend of fact, fancy and imagination that I never once found myself standing on solid ground. The whole tiny book is one quaking, boggy, postmodern uncertainty.

And yet I can't rid myself of vivid visions of Rugendas, trapped in a hellish lightning storm in the pan-flat wastes of the Argentine plains, dragged face down by one stirrup behind his own horse on a black night full of thunder. I can't forget his disfigured retreat back to the comfortable hospitality of Mendoza, and his earnest friend and disciple Krause, who can barely look him in his ruined face. The Indian cattle-rustlers he painted, charging out of the southern mountains, persist in charging through my daydreams. César Aira is a master conjurer, and like a stubborn teenager at a magic show, I won't rest until I have worked out the tricks.

Live Blogging a Slow Roast

11:00 AM
Feeling that in the last two or three days I have been involved in far too little meat eating, I determine to braise. The splendors of having Fairway just down the street here in Red Hook have started to fade, however. It isn't that they don't have perfectly adequate meats, and it is a last-minute gourmet savior, but their tendency to price any vaguely ethnic item at fully double its price elsewhere has grown tiresome, and even insulting. While they stock crucial ingredients like Lebanese pomegranate molasses, Tuscan anchovies, and organic Basmati rice, their prices for these items implicitly recognize that no knowledgeable Lebanese, Tuscan, or Basmatian would actually purchase these items there. The sticker-price tagging guns are permanently dialed to the "hipster" setting.

12:30 PM
I make my way to my newly refavoritized one-stop, the colorful and totally Polish Eagle Provisions, on 5th Avenue and 18th Street. (No, not in Manhattan, silly person.) Here the prices for fresh kielbasa, eight flavors of pierogi and gigantic jars of pickles resemble those one might hope for in Gdansk.

A lonely, and I'm afraid rather ruined, octogenarian woman sits near the potted plant display, outside in the Indian summer sunshine, feverishly scraping away at a square of cardboard with a nickel. I have seen her here on other occasions buying scratch-off lottery tickets, perhaps the closest thing she has to a social life. I hurry in, heading for the artichoke salad in the cold case. A few minutes later, while ordering a sandwich from the stern red-haired matron manning the deli counter, a commotion at the front of the store:

"F@#k you, you a&&H@*e! Don't tell me what to do with my money!"

"What!? You were just thrown out of here last week, young lady, and you talk to me like that? Oh my God, the mouth on you!"

I cringe, although secretly I am glad to be back in the New York of my beloved memories. The place I moved to, years ago. How is it possible to remember fondly the sight of a man deranged by anger, charging shirtless and bloody and barefoot into the middle of Essex Street, wielding a two-by-four studded with nails? What a strange way to relate to such a violent episode. Such moments from the unpublished archives of Joseph Mitchell happen rarely now, and I peer down the dry goods aisle in surprise, just in time to see the back of the alcoholic old crone, fleeing the scene.

1:10 PM
In the meat case, a rack of beef ribs, fatty beyond marbled. Today they are practically giving away a hefty chunk of cow side. Eagle slashes the prices on their meats just before the expiration of the sell-by date. (Rather than mark them down, I suspect Fairway "sells" such meats to their in-house steam table division, where staff cooks decide when they should be turned into tomorrow's fajitas. This is only a theory, however, pure conjecture, as I also suspect they have a libel attorney on retainer.)

At the register, carrying a six-dollar slab of beef hefty enough to work out with, I ask what the hell happened.

"She won a hundred dollars. Scratch-off. You want to buy a ticket? We're hot here, obviously."

"Uh...no. So why the cursing?"

"She has a foul mouth, that one. I asked her if she was going to go over and get a slice at the pizzeria with her winnings, and she said 'I never go in there.' I know why she never goes in there, she borrowed twenty bucks from them and never went there again. So I said 'maybe you should go now, with your hundred, and give them the twenty you owe. She didn't like that one bit."


2:00 PM
These cheap, remnant cuts of meat are every bit as delicious as anything else on the cow, so long as you cook them into submission. I waste no time. Remembering a recipe from Bill Buford's sublime chronicle of cookery, Heat, I lay the ribs at the bottom of my latest eBay score, a voluminous, rectangular turquoise dutch oven. Buford's recipe is medieval, in more ways than one. My gist is likely longer than his original, but the gist is this: put the meat in some kind of pot, pour in a bottle of red wine, cover it up. Cook it overnight, or until your children are fully grown, at 200 degrees. Fine, except I want to eat meat today, not tomorrow or the next. I imagine six hours will do just fine.


2:15 PM
Fancying it up a bit, I salt, pepper and cumin the rack, then bury it underneath some beautiful potatoes and turnips grown just down the street on a former asphalt baseball diamond, by Added Value. In goes a quartered onion, a couple of bay leaves and a full bottle of marginal Carmenere someone brought to a dinner party. I predict the root vegetables will completely disintegrate, but nonetheless add a delicious, rooty flavor to the vinous gravy.


Before putting on the very heavy lid, a layer of foil, to lock in as much of that wine as possible.

2:20 PM
Into the oven, on the lowest setting possible. I love my twenty-inch wide Kenmore gas stove, a spectacular white enamel relic from the 1950s that my friend Dodo discovered in her basement and gifted to me years ago. It does have one drawback, however. The "Robert Shaw" thermostat lacks precision. I don't know how the medievals managed it exactly, but for the ultimate slow braise you should aim for a temperature right around that of boiling water. I can't get the Robert Shaw below 240. On the other hand, I don't think they had oven thermometers in the thirteenth century.

Goodbye, see you in six hours. Note the after-market oven thermometer on the floor of the oven in the lower-right hand corner, a $7 device that has given this fifty-year old stove many years of extra usefulness.

5:00 PM
The temptation to open the oven, lift the lid, and have a peek approaches overwhelming. Despite the foil seal and the closed oven door, the house is filled with the aroma of hot, bubbling beef fat, caramelizing starches and reduced essence of boiling wine. I find it difficult to concentrate on anything, and I leave the house, heading on foot to the Fairway for some Brussels sprouts, which I suddenly feel certain will make a lovely side.

Blanched Brussels sprouts sauteed with shredded zucchini, garlic, and shards of dried hot red pepper, then liberally sprinkled with caraway seeds.


8:00 PM
The moment of truth approaches. My fear with this kind of preparation is that eventually the pot must cook dry, but the aromas, which now permeate the entire house, are divine. Even sniffing around the stove door there are no suggestions of char. Off comes the top. The vegetables, completely undisturbed and cradled in the hollow of the ribs, have survived completely intact. I gently jiggle one rib-bone, and it immediately separates from its meat, coming away clean in my hand. The thickened remains of the wine lie underneath a thick, clear layer of molten beef tallow. I spoon as much of this rendered fat off as possible, but plenty remains to contribute its flavor to the gravy, which will be spooned over the root vegetables.


8:35 PM
Drool and consume. No knife required.

Reading: Long After Midnight at the El Niño Bien by Brian Winter

For some time now the idea has been swirling around in my brain that Argentina is a country poorly served by the travel literature. There are of course the usual plethora of Lonely Planet guides influencing the movements of gringo visitors through the country. That's not what I'm referring to. Such books have become tired caricatures of themselves, and lately I have more than once caught myself using them for guidance on precisely where not to go, in hopes of avoiding the backpacker hordes. No, what I mean is that I've been searching in vain for a travelogue that lays bare the soul of the vast Argentine nation. After all, Chile, a much smaller and narrower strip of land to the west of the Andes, has one in Sarah Wheeler's excellent Travels in a Thin Country. Tales of Argentina do fill most of In Patagonia, indubitably one of the towering skyscrapers of the genre, but Bruce Chatwin's account rarely ranges farther afield than the boggy wastelands of the remote deep south. It is no more a book about Argentina than an account of frontier life in Alaska could encapsulate life in the United States. What's more, as I've already pointed out, there are scarcely any Argentines to be found between its covers.

I'm still looking, even if Brian Winter makes a gaucho's stab in the right direction with his Long After Midnight at the El Niño Bien. This account of learning to dance the tango in the wee hours of the morning is resolutely focused on Buenos Aires, a city that resembles New York in the sense that, as Winter says, it ought really to be a completely separate country from the rest of Argentina. Nonetheless, both the tango and gaucho culture are right up there with Malbec on the list of things most foreigners would identify as essentially Argentine, and Long After Midnight does a decent job with each. The book is less convincing at forging a link between the two. When he asks where the dance comes from, Winter stirs up an ancient, troublesome debate amongst the group of cronies he frequents in the milongas, as tango halls are known. He apparently sides with "El Dandy," who attributes the origins of the tango to the gauchos, but I say apparently only because the opposing theories are never outlined with comparable clarity. (Winter's posse, always happy to be stood a round by the young Reuters Argentina financial correspondent, are referred to throughout by nicknames like El Tigre, El Chino and El Griego, and for me none of them really emerged from behind these masks of anonymity to become individual characters.)

Mi Buenos Aires, Querido

Winter makes a lot of jokes early in the book about learning to tango in order to meet women and relieve his lonely life in a distant city. He then falls in love with his tango teacher, something he cops to as a major cliché, but it is a savagely unrequited love affair that goes nowhere, and it ultimately feels a bit contrived, a convenient bit of plot paste to glue his milonga adventures together. There are lovely moments of self-deprecation here, however, as when Brian believes his foxy instructress has given him a unique whispered invitation to meet up after class for some serious partnering. Arriving at the dance he discovers only a table full of clumsy dweebs from every corner of the planet, a sort of kaffeeklatsch made up from the lovely Mariela's client list. It's my belief that making fun of oneself is the most effective route to humor in travel writing, and Winter comes up with some zingers. I particularly liked the opening to his epilogue: After I left Buenos Aires, I spent a year living in Mexico City, where I was the most grotesque creature imaginable--a Texan with an Argentine accent. I wore too many sweaters, I couldn't hold my tequila, I insisted on saying ciao instead of adios, and I had a strong urge to kiss everyone I met on the cheek, including men.

Winter dips into Argentine history, giving us Perón and populism, but he glances over the dictadura's more recent decades of horror, which he argues were less fertile ground for the tango. This is unfortunately akin to ignoring the holocaust in a consideration of the two Germanies, circa 1960. He argues that "the parallels between the fortunes of the tango and Argentine politics throughout history are truly striking," and goes on to say that the dark and melancholic tango "rose to prominence amid a time of prosperity almost unprecedented in the world; and then it nearly disappeared during the country's darkest hour." It is an elegant thought, but one which Winter promptly contradicts on the very next page, when he notes that between 2000 and 2004, "the worst years of the Argentine crisis...the number of milongas in Buenos Aires doubled."

A poster in front of the Casa Rosada demands justice

It is cruel but irresistible to point out that Winter, the Reuters financial correspondent covering one of the largest economic meltdowns of all time (at least prior to the United States of the last two years), demonstrates his perfect qualifications for a subsequent job as deputy foreign editor at USA Today when he opts to abandon the "astonishing sight" of thousands of demonstrators banging on pots and pans at 4 o'clock in the morning in the grand plaza in front of Argentina's Casa Rosada, the pink white house. Caught up in history, he succumbs to peer pressure and rushes off with his milongüero cohorts to visit a whorehouse.

Demonstration? There's a football game on...

Reading: Just Like Us by Helen Thorpe

About a decade ago my father predicted, in an entirely non-judgmental way, that by the year 2025 the USA would become a bilingual country, and that soon those unable to speak both English and Spanish will find themselves at a severe disadvantage. This demographic transformation began decades ago and shows no signs of slowing. In cities like Los Angeles and Miami bilingualism has been a functional reality for a long while already; the most enormous shift of the last decade has been the spread of the Hispanic immigrant presence from big city enclaves and the labor-intensive segments of the agricultural sector into every corner of the United States, from villages in Oregon to cities in Maine and horse farms in Kentucky. I view this vast hidden and spreading underclass of Mayan and Incan and Olmec descendants as just the latest of the many waves of immigrants to arrive, struggle, be exploited and dismissed, then ultimately integrate and finally be recognized for helping "to make this nation great." However, the reactionary forces today aligned against them suggest that the Ellis Island paradigm has been definitively abandoned. The country is too full, argue our governors and congressional leaders, some only one or two generations removed from Napolitan gardeners, Polish masons and Irish canal-diggers. The Mexicans, Salvadorans and Ecuadorians are not like our parents were, they say, they don't want to learn English, they don't want to integrate.


Current policy amounts to little more than a war on immigration, particularly the illegal kind. What we have now is an expensive disincentive program based on the notion that if we make it sufficiently difficult to cross the border, live, and work here, by building real as well as administrative fences, people will stop coming. At its most extreme this means that as a nation we now seem to be comfortable provoking aspirant immigrants to more and more dangerous crossings, in the asphyxiating bowels of automobiles, locked in shipping containers, or on foot across the most parched and forbidding corners of the desert, where many routinely die of thirst and exposure. But, like the war on drugs, this war on immigration is doomed to fail, and for some of the same reasons. Like cocaine users, we create the demand. Our comfortable cost of living is subsidized at every level by illegal immigrant labor, kept conveniently inexpensive by its very illegality. The undocumented underpaid have little recourse to collective bargaining and impose less of the costs of taxation and compliance with labor law on employers. Any urge to agitate for better pay or an improved situation is overshadowed by the threat of discovery and deportation. In order for our tomatoes and our remodeling projects and our lawn-mowing to cost us so little (so much less than they do in Europe, for instance) requires both the presence of the illegal immigrant and his lack of status. Furthermore, it is in our interest that wages stay low in the home countries, so that the tee-shirts, bananas, and auto-parts we import from down south will remain almost risibly affordable. It may be a Marxist platitude, but NAFTA removed barriers to the free flow of capital at the same time we were clamping down harder and harder on the free flow of labor. Given institutionalized inequalities like those that see garment manufacturers in Central American free trade zones paying their assembly workers as little as twenty cents an hour, labor will continue to take matters into its own hands, or feet.


We need them desperately. Without this army of Tyson chicken parts packers, Le Cirque pot-scrubbers, country club fairway manicurists and warehouse pallet-loaders, many of America's last remnant industries would grind to a halt. But many of us seem to feel we don't want any more of them, and we don't want to legalize the ones who are already here, and our culture is being eroded, and the other day I went into a grocery store and, goddammit, the whole place, from customers to clerks, was full of latinos gabbling away at one another in Spanish. Let's send them all back.

The raging national debate over immigration, and the public policy to match it, is as self-contradictory and bi-polar as that last paragraph.


In Just Like Us, Helen Thorpe has written a deft and compelling investigation of the current, messy, state of affairs. Her account of the trajectories of four inseparable Latina high-school students, two legal and two illegal, quickly leads us into a zone completely alien to that of the typical complacent Anglo citizen. It is a world in which every time a person gets into a car they need to worry what might happen if they should be stopped; one where inter-state travel is forbidding and dangerous, and international travel out of the question; one in which talented students, the country's future engineers, doctors and inventors--the exact same people who are meant to be innovating us right out of our current crisis and into a sustainable green economy--are stopped dead in their educational tracks for want of a social security card. Imagine a life in which any of the countless situations in which we are asked to show identification, from entering large office buildings, to renting apartments and buying used cars, is freighted with anxiety. No wonder the Spanish-speaking immigrant community turns inward and looks to its own for goods, services, and culture. Since I've never met a Latino laborer, legal or illegal, who didn't intuitively grasp that learning to speak better English would immediately translate into higher wages and better opportunities, it seems clear that right-wing complaints about the failure to integrate ignore the perpetual fear and justifiable paranoia that go along with being undocumented in post 9/11 America. I was reminded more than once of my own harrowing bus journeys in third-world countries, of arbitrary roadblocks where a request for papers might easily degrade into unpleasantness. I had thought such things only happened in countries I visited, not the one where I live. Just Like Us exposes a parallel United States many of us willfully ignore.

The clash between the embracing support system of insular immigrant life and a yearning for access to the opportunities outside it is central to the identity crisis faced by Yadira and Marisela, the undocumented duo who are the heroines of the book. Illegal most of their young lives, they are desperate to assimilate and to integrate, if those ideas include having the same possibilities as the fellow college students from whom they must hide their status. Both of them are strivers who ultimately succeed in attending college in their hometown of Denver, albeit as "international students" (an irony indeed) able to pay out-of-state rates only thanks to scholarship support from various sympathizers. They are, in other words, the elite of their particular underclass, fluent in English and willing to explore every avenue and lead that might help them advance. We realize that these are not representative illegal migrants. The fate of those many others in the same situation who might find the obstacles overwhelming is left implicit. While Yadira and Marisela ultimately graduate, this does nothing to change their situation; they consider going on to law school, but Thorpe suggests that, particularly for Yadira, this is simply a way of putting off the unpleasantness of facing the job market without any documents.


Thorpe spent countless hours hanging out with the girls, their associates and their families over five years, a dedicated, long-term journalistic commitment all the more remarkable because she had to sneak out of the side door of the Mayor of Denver's residence every time she wanted to visit the barrio. That may be an exaggeration, but even after writing this book Thorpe remains married to John Hickenlooper, Denver's popular liberal mayor. Despite his popularity he is far from immune to the political mudslinging that spatters the topic of immigration. He may even be particularly vulnerable to it, given that before going into politics he was a restauranteur. His restaurant company, now in a blind trust, apparently owns most of the eateries and venues in which illegal Denverites (once) wash(ed) dishes and legal ones pass their free time. Thorpe struggles to keep her home life of charity galas and formal receptions separate from her inner-city journalistic endeavors, until mid-way through the project. When an off-duty police officer moonlighting as a bouncer at a Latino disco is murdered by an illegal alien once employed in one of the mayor's restaurants, her worlds collide. I cringed to imagine the pillow talk that must have ensued in the mayoral mansion, although Thorpe swears in her acknowledgments that her husband never wavered in his support for her work, striking out only one word in the finished manuscript. If true it would have been as unsporting of her not to comply as it is rude of me to wonder what the word was.

In the context of blogging, the notion of offering "full disclosure" has a ring of pretension to it, but even though we haven't spent much time in the same social circles in the last fifteen years I will nonetheless mention that Ms. Thorpe is a very old friend of mine. When I knew her well there was no doubt as to her liberal political persuasion; nothing in this book suggests that she has altered course. But Helen is the farthest thing imaginable from a knee-jerker, and in search of journalistic balance she spends far more time than I would have hanging out with the sorts of people who want to build a razor-wire fence between Brownsville and San Diego. There are moments when she almost seems to warm to Congressman Tom Tancredo as he drives her around his old neighborhood, cracking mafioso jokes and telling fuzzy stories about North Denver's version of the San Gennaro festival. Meanwhile, he was plotting the closest thing our most recent elections saw to a single-issue presidential campaign. If it did nothing else, Tancredo's short-lived bid for the Republican nomination forced most of the rest of the candidates further to the right on the immigration issue. And even while the Democrats wrinkled up their noses in disgust they were sticking them in the air to gauge which way the wind was blowing.


With official national joblessness hovering somewhere around the ten percent mark you don't have to be an unemployed rocket scientist to figure out that anti-immigrant populism has a bright future. This is one of the grim lessons of Just Like Us, a book that ought to have a happy ending but instead concludes with its protagonists in much the same place they were at its beginning; after five years of senatorial hand-wringing and congressional pussy-footing, Yadira and Marisela haven't come any closer to being welcomed as productive, legal members of our society, despite their hard-won college degrees. The only really good news I have is to tell you what a pleasure it was to read their stories. Like a well-crafted Hollywood blockbuster, this book anticipates, nay, demands a part dos, and I'm eagerly awaiting the sequel, which I hope will be written in Spanish. Or at least available in a bilingual edition.

Haitian Flavor

I'm back in Haiti teaching sound recording to a fresh incoming class of eager film students at the Sine Lekol de Jakmel. Here are a few snaps, most taken out the window on the clogged drive out through the capital.

The "touch me sweetly" breakfast spaghetti cart

Copyright infringement

Rooftops of old Jacmel

The rebar delivery boy

Remember that you are only dust

The other White House

New York is not actually on my route

¿Como se dice "Goth" en Español?

This picture of the Obamas with the first family of Spain has been all over the interwebs. In the darkest corners of the web it is even fueling the assertion that our president is the antichrist, devil-spawn who consorts with demons and devils. (Not to start a new rumor, but I heard the state department suppressed some of the pictures from later on this roll, when this happy group was captured actually stirring a cauldron).

But after my bashing of goth culture about a month ago all such photographs have become vaguely relevant, which of course is all we really need to get us going over here at antarcticiana. Looking at this image, I now regret my cruel dismissal of the black-clothed army of teenagers who favor maroon eyeliner and combat boots. Simultaneously hunchbacked, bashful, excruciatingly awkward, and 100% goth, the Zapatero daughters make adorable poster-children for teen angst. One just wants to give them a big hug and tell them that it is all going to be okay, that it would only take a couple of yoga classes, a popsickle, and a pair of comfortable sneakers to make everything right with the world.

Click the image to enlarge

Via Nina Katchadourian, on her facebook page.

Westward, Ho: The long slide home from Newport

The final, belated third installment of a description of a sail from Newport to Mamaroneck

9/11/09
Somehow a day has gotten lost in the shuffle. It must be that our brief sail on Narraganset Bay was yesterday, the tenth, because the 11th was a drizzly gray day filled only by sitting around doing nothing. I was unmotivated to go ashore in order to walk once again Newport's strip of t-shirt shops and salt-water taffy purveyors, this time in the rain. I've determined that if we don't make a move tomorrow I will abandon Anthony, who is perfectly capable of single-handing Salomé back to Westchester County on his own. This will make for a grim and unfulfilled bus trip back to New York, but I can't devote any more days to hanging about in Newport Harbor. I don't tell Anthony that I am considering bailing out, however, since I don't want to influence his decision about whether the weather is or isn't going to be appropriate tomorrow. We think the winds will have eased off a bit and large swells will continue, but the forecast still calls for possible thunderstorms and a small craft advisory. We pass the day eating most of the rest of the food to be found on board, so if we do sail tomorrow there won't be much to snack on except feta crumbs and cilantro stalks.

"Insert totally fake posed action photograph of the Captain here"

9/12/09
We decide to go for it and are up at 7, removing the sail cover and listening to the weather. The harbor is enveloped in fog. Our radar is not working, but the visibility seems to be about a mile and we conclude that we will probably be able to see any gigantic ships bearing down on us before it is too late. Moments later in Narraganset Bay a monumental Norwegian cruise liner powers its way in from the ocean, emerging out of the fog like a towering white skyscraper, but the image resolves in plenty of time for us to stay clear. Once at sea we are glad to observe a small flotilla of other sailboats heading west for Point Judith, suggesting that we are not the only boat to have decided that today is the day to make a move.

"That's just swell"

Bobbing in the mists, we find a nice breeze and are lifted gently over the rolling swells. These are a good six feet or more from trough to crest, but in no way intimidating. A friend has offered Anthony a free mooring and an evening of grilled vegetables far out on the north fork of Long Island, so we decide to head that way and get the train back into the city in the morning. The breezes are light, but at last we are sailing. After a few hours of slow progress we turn the radio back on and listen to the canned voice of NOAA, which promises steady north winds of ten knots in Long Island sound, blowing right the way through the night. On a sailboat slowly moving through the water there is little to do but endlessly plan and replan the immediate future, and speculate wildly about the more distant future ("My NEXT boat will be..."). If we can make it to "the race," the passage where the tide rips in and out of the sound, in time to catch some assistance from the current, we might just make it back to Mamaroneck, Salomé's home port, by around noon the next day. We determine to sail through the night, taking three hour shifts.

"Checking the trim"

Anthony calls and cancels the barbecue and breaks the grim news that if we are to have any chance of favorable tides we must now motor for a couple of hours. I go below to nap and sulk, refusing to come back above decks until Anthony announces that we are through the race and the engines are going off. The wind immediately picks up, as if to welcome our green initiative. Then it really picks up, just as the sun is going down, and we wonder what we have gotten ourselves in for. The wind is off the rear starboard quarter and we can't seem to find a sail trim that will help Salomé hold her course--sailing her demands constant attention and course correction, and suddenly we are moving quite fast. Soon it is dark. The fog has cleared, but the cloud cover is so low that the towns and villages of Long Island and Connecticut are capped with blurry orange smears. Already visible at the far end of the sound is the biggest orange glow of all, New York City, projecting itself into the sky. Sailing, alone, gripping the wheel in the stiff night breeze while Anthony sleeps down below, I daydream about a reversal of the discovery of the Americas, and imagine Indians arriving in the America of today for the first time. Sailing down the sound as we are, without the experience of electricity, and certainly without a motor, they could only conclude that both shores of the sound are on fire. We are honking, doing between six and a half and seven knots. If the winds hold like we will arrive in Mamaroneck at dawn. I go below at about nine, and when I come back on deck to relieve Anthony we have already reached Middle Shoal. The hours between one and four in the morning are magical. One tugboat passes to the north of us, pushing a barge east, but it is the only other traffic to be found. I do my best to keep the boat in the dead middle of the channel. The temperature is perfect. There is no sound but the wind and the boat carving through the black water. Soon I am able to take my course from the distant beaded pearls of the Throgs Neck Bridge. When Anthony comes on deck shortly after four we are less than two hours from home, already sailing waters he knows well, easily visited on a day trip out of the city. At 5:45 we are high-fiving and, the engine back on, motoring up on Salomé's home mooring.


View Newport to Mamaroneck Sail in a larger map

After squandering vast amounts of time on Google searches and html manipulations, I have finally figured out how to implant a google map from the awesome GPSvisualizer into this blog. Look forward to viewing countless interactive maps of journeys you may never wish to take, plotted in extravagant detail. Note that you may zoom in and out and look at the trip at whatever scale you like. You may also click on any of the points marking the journey to read more of my snarky comments.

9/13/09
"Mamaroneck Dawn"

Most photographs: Anthony Chase

Southbound: Stuck in Newport

A Second installment in the exciting sail south from Cape Cod; see the previous post, first.

09/10/09

Another morning in Newport. We're considering going for a sail in Narragansett Bay, just to relieve the boredom. Conditions on the outside are, to judge by the tyrannical monotone of the National Weather Service's automated voice, still on the edge; a small craft advisory, a gale warning, and seas "4 to 7 feet." The weather is glorious and breezy here on the mooring inside the harbor; the danger in these situations is to let tedium overtake good judgement. The wind here is an ideal ten to fifteen knots, straight out of the east, and if we were to find the same conditions outside it would make for a perfect day of sail, a brisk tailwind skimming us effortlessly towards Long Island Sound and home. Instead we are sitting in the cabin, listening to gentle creakings in the rigging, both of us in desperate need of a shower. Every few hours we listen to a pessimistic weather forecast that in no way seems to reflect our reality.

Captain Chase curled up with a good book
Photo: Evan Eames

I have exhausted my reading material and made it some way through the onboard selections. Now I'm waiting for Anthony to finish reading Richard Price's Lush Life. Sitting around waiting for someone else to finish reading a book, that's what it has come to. This morning, in desperation, I picked up The Decorative Arts of the Mariner. It is not what is known as a page-turner. This large, dull volume compiles the prose of a gaggle of retired British Lieutenants-Commander and nautical museum curators, all experts in their arcane fields of hobby-study. In his enthralling chapter on decorative rope and canvaswork, P.W. Blandford notes that this form's development "was probably due as much to the need for an answer to boredom as to any intention of creating a work of art." Because "periods of intense activity alternated with days when there was little or nothing to do... the worker was looking for something to pass the time and maintain his interest for the longest possible period."

There must be some old twine or cord hidden away somewhere on this boat....

09/11/09

After a brief but exhilarating sail on Narragansett Bay, with strong enough gusts to remind us why we fear the ocean, we head back to our Newport mooring for another dozy afternoon. New topics of conversation are elusive, so we compile a list of the ten worst boat names we have come across. It astonishes me that people will spend tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a yacht just to paint a painfully bad pun on her stern. Don't get me started on tattoos.

Here they are, in no particular order. Should you happen to own a boat with one of these trite, hackneyed or otherwise painful names, apologies in advance for the disrespect.

Risky Business
Carpe Diem
Moonshadow
Sweet Action
Liquid Asset
My Mistress
Wind Dancer
Bad Boys
Time Off
Decisive Moment


The author on the starboard bunk, showing some gut, maintaining some perspective, and trying to remain patient by reading Adlard Coles' Heavy Weather Sailing, several hundred pages of small craft horror stories.
Photo: Anthony Chase

Southbound

The first of a couple, or a few, installments of the chronicle of an ongoing sail from Cape Cod to New York...

09/07/09

The ferry east from Boston to Provincetown today crosses a calm and silvery sea. On the PA system the ship's concierge announces ideal conditions for the crossing, "not like the past couple of days." He means that it is calm and windless. The hapless sailboats we pass in the harbor have given up their hopes for an exciting labor day sail, and they motor, with bare poles. This is as might be expected, since I am en route to meet Captain Anthony Chase and sail his boat, Salomé, back to New York City with him. My visits to that vessel have with extraordinary frequency been plagued by calm. Anthony and I have spent many afternoons together in Long Island Sound staring at a slack sail in dismay and watching bits of seaweed drift beside us, keeping pace as we bob, wakeless, praying for wind. I'm surprised still to be invited along, so consistently have I brought this sailor's curse along with me. Anthony and I both hate to start the engines, but we are usually forced to when the longed for late afternoon breeze invariably fails to materialize. The sheet of glass that is this morning's Bay of Massachusetts, and the immobile cottony balls of cloud pasted against the sky suggest that this trip will be no different.

Salomé on a windy day, on the outbound journey. I was not on board.

Evan and Ant pick me up in Provincetown for the drive down the Cape to Wellfleet, where Salomé sits on a mooring. They made the trip north last week, during which Anthony left me not one but two breathless messages of the "you don't know what you are missing" variety, describing deliciously favorable and constant winds, resulting in entire days spent scooting along on a "broad reach" without even the dimmest memory of even having an engine to turn to ever intruding into their delighted minds.

On board we optimistically remove the sail covers and then fire up the motor. Ostensibly this is to help us navigate the counter-intuitive zig-zag channel out of Wellfleet Harbor, but one glance at the pancake sea and I have no doubt that we will be burning fuel all afternoon. Anthony calls his wife, Nini, who does the majority of the landlubbing in the marriage. "Well," he says, "to be honest, we're motoring." He graciously avoids blaming this unhappy state of affairs on me. "Loooooosers...," replies Nini, and I picture her sitting in the country kitchen of her Catskills farmhouse, gleefully making the "L" sign with thumb and forefinger, and holding it up to her forehead. The afternoon is calm as we diesel across the placid pond of the Bay of Massachusetts. The water is flat. How flat? The stunningly round tomato I will soon chop into the the codfish ceviche rests solidly on the cockpit table, tremorless.

09/08/09

Yesterday ended with a long, slow slog through the Cape Cod canal, which connects the Bay of Massachusetts with Buzzard's Bay and points south, saving mariners the danger and distance of going all the way around the outside of Cape Cod over treacherous and shifting banks. Arriving at the canal's northern mouth just at slack tide, we opted to press through and find a harbor for the night. It is an impressive feat of labor intensive engineering, but the canal also serves as a pressure valve of sorts for the tides flooding in and out of Buzzard's Bay. Soon we were motoring against the flood, four knots of current charging straight at us down the narrow channel. We slowed to a crawl.

The sun went down, and it was dusk. The pedestrians out for an evening constitutional on the canal towpaths at first kept pace with us, and then began to overtake us. Not a few glanced over at us in puzzlement, perhaps wondering why we were sitting still in an active shipping channel. Then it got dark, and they could no longer see us.

Finally through, we found a mooring at Onset harbor. We enjoyed ceviche, and miso-marinated grilled cod, enjoying the culinary aspect of the sailing lifestyle, even if we had yet to do any actual sailing. In the morning a dead calm, much like the day before. Rather than subject you to more of the same, here is a short poem I've written to sum up the continuation of our journey:

DIESEL

Oh, glassy tedium

Oh, unwrinkled sheet

Of gently undulating mercury,

Stretched out beneath the leaden skies

The flaccid canvas hanging

Limply from the poles

Implies a long dull day

Of gentle chugging

A sailor's ambivalence

Drowned out by the steady throb

09/09/09

Our excitement at finally watching the sails fill with wind yesterday afternoon--a lazy five to ten knot breeze that gave us just enough of a torpid push to justify turning off the engine--was tempered with anxiety at the weather forecast. Since we were barely moving along through the gentle ripples on the surface, the prospect that today would see fifteen to twenty knot winds, gusting up to thirty, five foot seas, and a "small craft advisory," seemed unlikely, almost absurd, but the sailor who ignores the weather forecast is a fool, and we headed into Newport to sit it out. It is sunny and breezy. No boats are moving in and out of the harbor, and the advertised gusts have us rolling and swinging in the mooring field. There is little to do but organize the tool boxes, eat granola and imagine that outside the harbor it would be just about sailable, but risky, the kind of conditions in which a minor mishap or problem might easily spiral out of control. The wind whistles through the rigging, and the sound of slapping halyards on boats moored upwind carries far over the water. I fantasize about being out at sea, and wonder when it will be time for the next snack.

A breezy day on board Salomé, when I wasn't there.

Photos: Evan Eames

Reading: Havana Fever by Leonardo Padura Fuentes

It's 2005, and Havana's greatest detective, Lieutenant Mario Conde, has long ago left the police force, having resigned in protest when his incorruptible mentor, Major Antonio Rangel, was made a target by the Department of Internal Affairs. In the Cuban context this means that the fictional Conde (the Count) has joined the great swirling, crowded whirlpool of the internal brain drain. The premature retirement of innumerable professors, teachers, doctors and professionals to become tour guides, translators, taxi drivers and waiters has been devastating to the Cuban state and the revolution. The abandonment of public service, and, often, the life of the mind, for the service industry and a chance to access the all-important tourist dollar has, fifteen years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and world Communism, sapped the revolutionary potential of an entire generation of Cubans. That Conde's creator, the Havana writer Leonardo Padura Fuentes, has seen fit to send his ace detective into "retirement" and out into the wilds of the dollar economy has weighty metaphorical significance.

Mario's disaffection for the police force and his perennially postponed aspirations to become a writer of "squalid and moving" tales leads him inexorably into a new career as a used book dealer. It is a brilliant choice of destiny on the part of Padura Fuentes, whose detective novels always transcend their genre. For the used book-seller in Cuba is not the enthusiastic recycler of ideas and the noble guardian of our literary heritage that we sometimes imagine him to be here. (Yes, we are also familiar with the drooling ambulance chaser, picking through the estate like a crow nibbling at fresh roadkill). In Cuba, to be a used book dealer means that one is an active participant in the exportation of the country's culture, history, and patrimony. A looter, a defiler. No Cuban wanders the bookstalls of the Plaza de Armas in Havana with the wads of dollars needed to take home a musty, leather-bound tome. The client, everyone knows, is an extranjero, a visitor who will put that priceless volume in a suitcase and spirit it away, out of the country, forever.

Padura Fuentes, whose work I've written about before, is only getting better at stacking multiple layers of meaning within the basic structure of the noir crime novel. Havana Fever, as the UK-based Bitter Lemon Press regrettably insists on calling their translation of La Neblina de Ayer (the mists of yesterday), presents, like all of its precedents, at least one robust mystery to be solved, but the novel manages all at the same time to be a look back at the evolution and devolution of the revolution; an ode to books both as objects imbued with aura and repositories of wisdom, history, and inspiration; a chronicle of a ruined family and its satellite members; and a revelation of contemporary Cuban life.


It is tempting, although perhaps excessive, to see in the vicissitudes of Mario Conde's progress a metaphor for the revolution itself. He is getting old, and is not as indestructible as he once was. The hangovers once cured with a shower and some thick, cheap home-brewed coffee now linger long into the grim day. He has grown skinny from scarcity and may be willing to do things he shouldn't, and once wouldn't have, to ensure his own survival. In Havana Fever even his trust in his own atheism has grown shaky:

Conde had come to suspect that the blend of aging and disillusion overwhelming his heart might finally cast him back, or just return him, to the fold of those who find consolation in faith. But the mere thought of that possibility irked him: the Count was a fundamentalist in his loyalties, and converts might be contemptible renegades and traitors, but re-conversion verged on the abominable.

In this novel he is battered, beaten to a pulp and left almost for dead, but he refuses to throw in the towel. Once, he was the most incorruptible of police officers, and then the most honest and plain-talking of book dealers, but the end of this thriller will find him stashing away a cache of Cuba's most prized publications on his modest personal shelf. And weeping.

I'm going to leave many of Padura Fuentes' plot threads unpicked, in that hopes that you will seize the moment and read Havana Fever for yourself. I'll reveal nothing of the elusive bolero-singing seductress who disappeared from the nightclub stage just as the revolution was dawning, nor of the wealthy, handsome Batista-hating Meyer Lansky crony who flew off to Miami, leaving behind a spectacular library but no forwarding address. Once one really starts to appreciate what Padura Fuentes is up to, the lurid details of the actual plot are merely a fine veneer on the surface of dense layers of allegory.

Let's concentrate on the library, and the books. The logical extension of Mario's career is that he quests after libraries; his livelihood depends on those same skills with which he once solved crimes, except that now he concentrates on locating fresh supplies of ancient texts. It is a difficult task. When I was in Cuba in 2001, walking through the island, I had the impression that already every last stick of antique furniture, every jeweled brooch, every Tiffany lamp and every mahogany mantelpiece had already been removed from the country. The woman at whose bed and breakfast I lodged in Havana had a regular client from Italy who specialized in buying diamonds passed down through the generations, stepping in whenever necessity overwhelmed nostalgia. He did not visit while I was there, but nonetheless a neighbor came around once, in the hopes that someone, anyone, might purchase her mother's wedding ring. It was a squalid and moving moment. Padura Fuentes conveys the dismal dynamics of this Havana used trade with pathos and economy: Conde, standing before a grand but tattered mansion he somehow has never noticed before, imagines that "someone must have already beaten him to it, because that style of edifice was usually profitable; past grandeurs might include a library of leather-bound volumes; present penury would include hunger and despair, and that formula tended to be a winner for a buyer of second hand goods."


The brother and sister who inhabit this house, in which Mario Conde discovers the ultimate library, have already sold off “the noble bone china dinner services, repoussé silver, chandeliers...,” and it is only because of a solemn, fifty-year old pledge that the books still exist. But there they are, untouched except for their ritual biannual dusting.

The reverence with which Padura Fuentes has Mario Conde enter that chapel of reading and savor the spines of those all-but mythical volumes rivals the bibliomaniacal inventions of Jorge Luis Borges. Not since the Argentine master has a library been this breathtaking, important, and charged. Naturally, it is in this place that the clues to two murders await revelation. But here also is inscribed the entirety of Cuba and, perhaps, much of the author’s personal cosmogeny. Mario immediately spots the Alphabetic Index of Demises in the Cuban Liberation Army “from its rare 1901 single printing in Havana,” and The Coffee Plantation, which “Conde’s fingers caressed even more lingeringly.” These are apparently real, rare, books, but their titles alone illuminate the march of Cuban literature and history, from sugar and coffee to slavery and rebellion. Here, too, is a first edition of “El Negrero,” (The Slave Trader), by Lino Novas Calvo, which I bought a couple of months ago in a painfully crumbly acidic paperback edition from an online bookseller in Venezuela, because Padura Fuentes recommended it in a 2004 "ten best" novels list. This is not the only cross-reference to the Cuban writer's other work: The previous Mario Conde novel, Havana Black, opens with two quotes. The first, from J. D. Salinger, reveals the forgotten (by me, at least) template for Conde's now five-novel predilection for all that is "esqualido y conmovedora." "I'm extremely interested in squalor," Esme tells Salinger's narrator. Now, in Havana Fever, the battered Conde, during a semi-conscious reverie as close as Padura Fuentes has yet veered towards the postmodern, encounters Salinger in an orange jumpsuit, and castigates him for no longer writing. The second quote is from José María Heredia and relates to that feeling of grim but almost sexual anticipation for the onslaught of an impending hurricane, a theme Padura Fuentes has repeatedly made his own, but which also constitutes a pivotal moment in Alejo Carpentier's Explosion in a Cathedral, suggesting that the tense and frantic waiting for a deadly but purifying cyclone constitutes an essential aspect of the Cuban character. On the last page of Fever, it is a thin but priceless volume of Heredia's poetry that Conde gives to his beloved. As usual, it's all about the reading.

Arthur M. Schack for Mayor!

This guy is our kind of public servant.


...

It's been out for almost three weeks...

If you haven't read my father's new book yet, GET WITH IT!



I know, you thought he was a medievalist, but John V. Fleming steadfastly refuses to be pigeon-holed, and in about the time it takes me to put together a decent blog entry he wrote a fascinating analysis of four books very much of and about their time: those grisly years of intrigue between the wars and after, when our necessary alliance with the Soviet Union morphed into the cold war. You might call it a literary procedural; he follows the evolution of four writers who, although initially captivated by Communism, turned away from Stalin and survived to tell the tale. Ultimately each wrote a book condemning the Soviet incarnation of their once-beloved ideology, and these books are the heroes in my father's account; the authors range from the shady and frustrated one-hit wonder "Jan Valtin" to the tortured genius Arthur Koestler. That their motivations and aspirations are often unclear makes this an all the more fascinating read. I highly recommend it.