Dreamers Rise

Martin, Bogan & Armstrong

This record was issued as an LP in 1974 by Flying Fish and is long out-of-print in its original form, although nine of the eleven tracks are included in an expanded CD re-issue of the same group's That Old Gang of Mine. The CD packaging uses the original cover art from the latter, painted by band member Howard Armstrong, but I have a sentimental fondness for this photo, which is reproduced inside, and so I keep the insert folded so that it faces out instead. Carl Martin is the man with the the mandolin, Howard Armstrong holds the bow of the fiddle, and Ted Bogan kneels behind the guitar; the younger man on the left is Howard's son, Tom, who plays bass.

The undoing

He caught sight of the girl on his way out, in the late afternoon heat and haze. For a hour or so, after the last bell, he had marked up a week's worth of essays -- never an edifying task, these days -- and when he was finished he had packed up his briefcase, cleaned the dust off his desk the best he could, sipped the last lukewarm coffee in the office pot, and started out across the nearly deserted parking lot to his car. She was sitting by herself on the stone wall that marked the limits of the school grounds, just a few yards in from the road to town. Dressed in a faded lime-green T-shirt and jeans, with her backback on the wall beside her, she sat dangling her knees, head bent down, apparently deep in thought but more likely, he suspected, just lost in space.

Incidents of travel (I)

In June 1980 a friend and I spent three weeks driving through Mexico. I kept no journal, and time has long since erased landscapes, encounters, and whole cities from my memory and reduced thousands of road miles to a blur. But I still have my marked-up 1979-80 edition of Mexico and Guatemala on $10 and $15 a Day, an album of photos taken by my friend, and the detailed comb-bound custom itinerary prepared for us by Sanborn's Mexican Insurance Company in Brownsville, Texas, where we stopped shortly before crossing the border.

The following represents not an attempt to reconstruct those weeks -- which would be impossible -- but rather a way to organize in time and in geographical space both the shards of memory that I still retain and the absences left by that which is forever irretrievable.

Incidents of travel (II)

Shortly after we left Ciudad Victoria the next morning we passed a roadside monument indicating that we had crossed the Tropic of Cancer. Sanborn's itinerary advised us to "stop and take pictures if you like," but we didn't. Our immediate destination was Ciudad Valles, 148 miles to the south, a forgettable agricultural town at the intersection of the main road between Tampico on the Gulf Coast and San Luis Potosí in central Mexico. My friend had relatives who owned a ranch in the vicinity, and the plan was to meet up with a family friend -- he may have been called don Tomás -- who would give us detailed directions. But don Tomás wasn't in at the restaurant he owned in Valles, and after some phone calls and a couple of bottles of sidral we discovered that due to ongoing unrest in the area relating to land reform my friend's family were staying elsewhere.

Incidents of travel (III)

After a couple of days of this we were sufficiently recovered to think about getting back in the car and driving down to the capital, though speaking for myself it would be some time before I was back to normal. There was an superhighway most of the way; my map says it was a toll road which I don't remember, but then I've no recollection of paying tolls anywhere in Mexico, although we must have. I have a hazy memory that we stopped briefly at the Toltec ruins of Tula, which were only a few miles off our route. If so, that would have been, I think, my first encounter with Pre-Columbian ruins of any significance, but I don't think we were in the mood to linger.

Incidents of travel (IV)

From Mexico City we drove south to Cuernavaca, a town said to have been a popular getaway for Mexico City residents, at least for those with a little money. According to my Sanborn's log the high point in altitude on the road south was just under 10,000 feet. Somewhere along this road, if the weather was favorable, the twin volcanoes bearing the garish Nahuatl names of Popocateptl and Ixtaccihuatl would have been visible, but I have only a vague recollection of having seen one or both.

Once in Cuernavaca we probably stayed in the Hotel Del Parque, which overlooked the main plaza. We ate dinner at an Italian restaurant on the same block, spaghetti being my idea of comfort food after a week of digestive distress. Just a couple of blocks away was the Cortés Palace, at one time the residence of Mexico's conqueror, Hernán Cortés. It is one of the few visible public monuments to the conquistador, who is almost universally reviled by the Mexicans. I don't remember whether he shared his time in Cuernavaca with his Aztec translator and mistress, Doña Marina, known to history as la Malinche or, less charitably, la Chingada.

A village in the distance

Here are the opening paragraphs of the first chapter of Three Dollars a Year (Delphic Studios, New York, 1935) by G. Russell Steininger and Paul Van de Velde:

San Pablo Cuatro Venados, a small and somewhat inaccessible Mexican village, hangs on a slope of the high western Sierras. It is a curious and primitive community the inhabitants of which are Zapotecan Indians. Life offers them little. Their lot is both meagre and hard -- a situation that seems not to distress them in the least.

The natural setting of San Pablo is one of majestic but tortuous grandeur. Mountains overlap and tower above mountains. Their sides drop precipitously into deep barrancas only to rise again, sheerly and suddenly, into more formidable and gigantic ranges. The tremendous scale of this scenic background is intensified by the almost dwarf-like stature of the natives -- a physical characteristic reflected in the low doorways of their houses.

San Pablo sprawls over the mountain side and in appearance is merely a collection of thatched-roofed huts tucked here and there on an occasional patch of level ground. The whole is dominated by a twin-towered church of little merit. Throughout the five or six hundred years of the pueblo's existence comparatively few foreigners have trod the steep winding trails which serve as village streets.

Incidents of travel (V)

We had originally planned to continue on to San Cristóbal de las Casas in the highlands of Chiapas, and then perhaps cross the border into Guatemala, but there were reports of unrest in the vicinity of San Cristóbal (later become a focal point of the Zapatista uprising) and, in retrospect, travelling to Guatemala, in the midst of guerrilla war and a particularly vicious counterinsurgency campaign, probably wasn't a great idea either. Instead we elected to make for the greater stability of the Yucatán.

Incidents of travel (VI)

Our first stop in our circuit of the Yucatán Peninsula was Campeche, a Gulf Coast city I only vaguely remember. I know there was a seawall and fortifications along the waterfront, and behind them what I recall as a tidy and somewhat reserved town -- the last part may be pure fantasy. We may have stayed in the Hotel Baluartes, or perhaps in the Hotel Lopez, about which my Frommer's guide says that "the lobby is warmed by bright paint and strawberry-patterned tiles," exactly the kind of detail that would likely have slipped my mind. I do remember eating a meal in a restaurant that claimed to serve Mayan cuisine; this may have been the Restaurant Miramar at the corner of Calles 8 and 61, but then again maybe it wasn't.

Incidents of travel (VII)

From Cancún we drove south and overnighted near the ruins of Tulum, a small post-Classic Maya ruin notable for its well-preserved murals and its scenic location on the Caribbean. It must have been an off-season for tourism, because in spite of Tulum's proximity to major resort areas there was hardly anyone at the site. We ate lunch in a little place nearby, where the daily specials included tortuga -- presumably some kind of sea tortoise, whether legally obtained or not I can't say. I took a pass on the tortuga, opting instead for venison, which I probably have not eaten since.

Incidents of travel (VIII)

On the subject of Highway 186, which heads more or less due west across the Yucatán from Chetumal, my memory is in agreement with my map and guidebooks: there was nothing much there. The Sanborn's log advised us that there was only one town on the route -- Xpujil -- that had a gas station, and that there were no accommodations until Escarcega, 154 miles along. In between was a stretch of nearly uninterrupted forest, with a few partially excavated ruins here and there which we probably didn't bother to check out, being a bit ruined out at that point in our travels.

Incidents of travel (conclusion)

With the aid of a road map I tried to identify a detour that would get us onto the highway heading north from Mexico City without actually requiring us to drive through the city itself again, which I wasn't particularly eager to do. On the map -- which I still have -- a faint circle in ink has been traced around an unmarked divided road that appears to connect a place called Reyes, on Route 150, with Texcoco on Route 136 to the northeast of the capital. (At least it looks like it would connect up; it's a little hard to tell because the words MEXICO CITY blot out most of that part of the map.) I think we must have missed the turnoff, however, because getting to Texcoco -- or wherever it was we emerged when we finally found ourself on a major highway again -- proved to be a bit of a nightmare. We quickly found ourselves lost and in heavy traffic, in the midst of some outlier of the capital, and only narrowly avoided a head-on collision when we found ourselves stranded in the middle of yet another labyrinthine, hell-for-leather intersection as the lights changed. Somehow we made it through.

Husks (Winter's end)

Last year's stalks and brambles are still standing, brown and dry, even as buds swell and the first shoots, tentative and pale, begin to emerge from the earth, brushing off the ruins of last fall's leaves. There are little knotted clusters of seed casks on the Rose-of-Sharon in the yard next door, and beneath the trees in the park acorn hulls, segments of hickory nut rind, and sycamore balls have been ground together underfoot by the passage of winter travellers.

Hopscotch cover art

The first edition of Julio Cortázar's novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) was published by Editorial Sudamericana in Buenos Aires in June 1963. During the planning of the book the author and his publisher, Francisco Porrúa, had extensive discussions about the cover art, documented in a series of letters that are reproduced in the first volume of the Alfaguara edition of Cortázar's letters.

2:32

The first recording of "All Along the Watchtower" appeared on John Wesley Harding, Bob Dylan's 1967 album, his first to be released in the wake of a motorcycle accident the year before. According to Wikipedia, Dylan has performed the song live at least 1,747 times. I'm not sure whether the size of that number is more disturbing than the fact that someone has taken the trouble of tabulating it. It has also been covered by numerous other musicians, notably by Jimi Hendrix in a version that Dylan has said influenced his own subsequent renditions.

Notebook

Last night I drove with my daughter to a club to hear an Irish musician and singer whom I've long admired and whose visits to this country are few and far between. Though it was a bit of a drive -- about an hour north -- I had never seen perform him live and didn't want to pass up the chance, not knowing whether the opportunity would be repeated since neither of us is getting any younger.

Young Perceval

One day when I was in my late teens, while wandering in my local library I found a copy of Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz's The Grail Legend, which had been published (in a translation by Andrea Dykes) by G.P. Putnams's Sons in 1970. I had no particular familiarity with or interest in Jungian psychology (and still don't, really), nor, as far as I can remember, did I have any previous exposure to the medieval romances of Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and the other Grail chroniclers. I don't think I had even heard yet of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the priceless travesty of Arthurianism that I would eventually heartily enjoy but which hadn't at the time been released. The words "holy grail" were just a cliché one heard; that there were actual literary works of merit concerned with the Grail was not something I had been taught in high school.

Once (film by John Carney)

Spoilers here, so be advised. I had a feeling I would like John Carney's low-budget feature, and I did; in fact I enjoyed it more unreservedly than I suspected I would. Shot in Ireland, Once opens with a thirty-something busker (played by Glen Hansard) strumming Van Morrison's "When the Healing Has Begun" on a Dublin sidewalk. It's one of the last pieces of music you'll hear in the film that's not written by Hansard and his co-star, Markéta Irglová. The latter, who looks to be about twenty (in fact she was still in her teens when the film was shot), turns up a couple of scenes later, in the evening of the same day or maybe another day, to find Hansard still strumming, this time an original song that, like much of the music in the film, starts out calmly and rises to a soaring stridency. Accosted by Irglová, who speaks English in a fetchingly Czech-flavored Irish accent (or Irish-flavored Czech accent, if you like), he reluctantly confesses that the song was prompted by his recent breakup with a longtime girlfriend who had cheated on him but for whom he still pines.

Die Schiffahrt und Flosserei im Raume der oberen Donau

I don't have sufficient German to be able to decipher the above title without assistance, let alone to actually read the three volumes of Ernst Neweklowsky's hydrological classic, which would -- I'm told -- translate as Navigation and Rafting on the Upper Danube if anyone had a mind to produce an English-language edition, which apparently no one does. Though once you find out what it means the German is actually fairly transparent: schiff = ship (see also "skiff"), schiffahrt, shipping; flossv = raft (think "float"); in Raumev = (I think) in the region of, etc.

I owe my knowledge of the existence of Die Schiffahrt entirely to Claudio Magris, who devotes a chapter of his book Danube to Neweklowsky. Here's part of what he had to say about it (and the entire chapter is well worth reading, even if I never got much beyond it into the rest of the book):

Las fases de Severo
The following discussion of a Julio Cortázar short story was written in 1980 as part of a longer project. At some point in the future I may post other sections as well, but this one seemed, with a little re-working, to be self-contained enough. Were I writing this now I might choose to explore additional avenues, including the symbolic employment of moths in Cortázar's work and elsewhere. The translations were almost certainly my own, as they don't exactly match the official version by Gregory Rabassa, which was published that same year in the collection A Change of Light. The complete Spanish-language text of the story can be found at the Cortázar website El Perseguidor.

Beach read
I picked up this thin volume of stories, the cover of which is now rather yellowed and soiled, in the Strand Bookstore sometime in 1976 or 1977, after hearing the author read selections on WBAI radio. All I knew about the author (until recently, when I read that she had died about a year ago) was what it said in the author bio on the back cover, that she was born in Sydney, Australia in 1939, was the Associate Director of something called Teachers and Writers Collaborative, and that she lived in New York City with her daughter. Adams went on to publish several other works of fiction, one of which, Dancing on Coral, won the Miles Franklin Award in 1987, but I've never happened across any of them.

MS. Found Scrawled on the Endpapers of a Copy of Luc Sante's Low Life
In January 1976, having reached a temporary impasse in my college career, I headed for Manhattan to try and sort things out. I was nineteen years old and as green as they come.

New York was hitting bottom; it was the era of Abe Beame, the Municipal Assistance Corporation, and, shortly, the Son of Sam. In the as yet ungentrified East Village where I landed, students, musicians, druggies, bikers, and waifs shared the streets with the older, largely Ukrainian permanent residents of the neighborhood.

New Directions in the 1940s
James Laughlin started his career as publisher in 1936 with the first New Directions in Prose and Poetry, but in addition to the flagship anthology he soon branched out into other projects, some small-scale, others remarkably ambitious for a small press (the family's steel fortune came in handy, and was well-spent). By 1941 the New Directions annual was well over 700 pages and encompassed writing by Bertolt Brecht, Delmore Schwartz, Julien Gracq, Franz Kafka, John Berryman, Ezra Pound, and many others.

The tenant: untelling a story (I)
1. A few nights ago I began reading a brief volume by Alberto Manguel entitled With Borges. In it, Manguel relates how, as a teenager working in a bookstore in Buenos Aires in the 1960s, he became one of the many people who at one time or another were recruited to read to Jorge Luis Borges, who was by then almost entirely blind. From that starting point he sketches, in a mere seventy-odd pages, a genial portrait of Borges and his circle, touching on the great man's friendships, his character, his political opinions, and his reading habits, the latter being, to Borges, most important of all, much more so even than his own writing.

The Dreamer's Rise interview
Good evening. First of all, to start with, what is Dreamer's Rise? Is it a blog?

It is not meant to be, and I have been told that it is not. In fact, some months ago, when I submitted the URL to a blog-indexing service, I received after a day or so an emailed notification that what I do is Not a Blog. I regard it instead as a broadside, which according to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary is "a sizable sheet of paper printed on one side," or "a sheet printed on one or both sides and folded," or "something (as a ballad) printed on a broadside." Except that no paper is involved and folding your computer monitor is not recommended by the manufacturer.

The tenant (conclusion)
11. I had begun cobbling together a story from raw materials that originally had nothing to do with other. On the one hand were impressions of Borges and his circle derived from a slender memoir by Alberto Manguel; on the other was the vaguely remembered dream from which I had awakened the morning after reading the memoir.

Dread
I will indulge in one bout of pontification about the 2008 presidential election, and then shut up about it, at least until it's over.

In one sense it could be said that I do not "follow politics." It's true that I know who my senators and congressman are -- not everyone does, strangely enough -- although I'm not sure at this hour of the day that I can name my current state senator or member of the assembly. I can tick off the names of most if not all of the justices of the US Supreme Court (and tell you which ones, in my opinion, have no business being there), identify Duke Cunningham and Bernie Sanders and Barry Goldwater's running mate in the 1964 election (which I'm old enough to remember, vaguely). Still, I don't know who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, I haven't a clue who's chairing Barack Obama's campaign, or John McCain's, and I couldn't really tell you what the difference is between the responsibilities of the Secretary of the Treasury and those of the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.

How Our Society Was Organized
"Our society had seemed to be organized as a factory and market, in which the majority of ultimate consumers worked hard and accumulated nothing but years, but a small number of enterprisers protected what they had and accumulated more and more money. So it had seemed to any quick, frank inspection; and in fact it was so. There was, of course, much that was done for other interests, interests of nature and friendship and even deep concern; but these interests were more or less influenced by the market, especially if they became social institutions. And of course happiness, if not misery, was always independent of the organization of society (except as it could organize its own little bands). Yet the most personal institutions, such as home and school, were likewise organized as we have said."

-- Paul Goodman, The State of Nature (1946)

After lunch (Julio Cortázar)
After lunch I would have preferred to stay in my room reading, but almost immediately Papa and Mama came to tell me that I had to take him for a walk that afternoon.

At first I said no, let someone else take him, please let me study in my room. I would have said more, would have explained why I didn't like having to take him out, but Papa took a step forward and started looking at me in that way I just can't resist, fixing his eyes on me so that I can feel them penetrating deeper and deeper into my face, until I'm ready to scream and I have to turn around and say yes, of course, right away. At such times Mama doesn't say anything and doesn't even look at me. She just stands back a little bit with her hands clasped together, and when I see her gray hair falling over her forehead I have to turn around and say yes, of course, right away. So then they went away without another word and I started getting dressed, my only consolation being that I could break in a pair of yellow shoes that shined and shined.