get into something

Then there was the changing of the seasons. “This is also a journey,” M. said, “and they can’t take it away from us.” With his infinite love of life he was able to draw strength from things which other people, including me, only found oppressive: the autumn slush, for instance, or the bitter cold of winter. These were things that could not be “taken away”—the word he used to describe how his enforced residence in Voronezh had deprived him of all that he felt had formerly belonged to him: the south, journeys, trains, steamships…

Nadezdha Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope

We were in the study—Father, Mother and I. Father and I played a few games of chess, we talked, listened to the radio cabaret, whiled away the time till midnight. The saw-blade clock, balanced on the head of the baroque clown figurine, showed that midnight was only a few minutes away. Father opened the window to Nussdorferstrasse. We stood by it and waited for the sound of Vienna’s many church bells, ringing out the Old and ringing in the New. When their booms and chimes broke the stillness of the night, we raised our glasses, drank to each other and kissed.

George Clare, Last Waltz in Vienna

Sophie Scholl would have been 86 today. It’s probably worth take a moment to think about her.

“It was weird and primal and breathtakingly good, and I don’t want to do it again.”

The sorts of subjects Liebling and Joseph Mitchell wrote about have indeed disappeared, and the number of suspects in the case are almost too many to enumerate—not just gentrification, but also population growth, the rise of electronic media, the disappearance of whole categories of occupation and trade, etc. At the same time, though, there are many tribes, castes, and languages out there. There are societies of Chinese fishmongers, Jamaican croupiers, Romany auto-body repairmen, Filipina nurses, and so on, that are every bit as complex as those of Mitchell’s oystermen and fortune-tellers, and there are criminal strata of all sorts and all backgrounds in the five boroughs of New York City alone, and who knows what their lore may consist of or what their slang means? For all I know there are just as many eccentric public characters on the street as there were in the 1930s, only they are little-known outside their own neighborhood or ethnic group. But it is so much more difficult now to live reasonably well on little money, so eccentrics either lose their color under the pressure of trying to stay alive, or bug out completely and wind up in the bin.

From an interview with Luc Sante in The Believer.

I finally got my copy of Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts from Amazon the other day (I’d followed along for a while with the excerpts published on Slate, which I’ve mentioned here before). It is a big heavy beautiful book, and I’ve been looking forward to reading it for a long time. It reminds me a lot of David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film,* in that it’s an alphabetically-organized anthology (although that’s not quite the right word—it’s more of a single work than that implies) of biographical sketches and essays of figures mostly from the 20th century.  Some in James’s book are well-known (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hitler), some not so much (Peter Altenberg) and some surprising (Dick Cavett, Michael Mann).

Like Thomson’s book it is highly personal and idiosyncratic. Noting that it was dedicated, in part, to the memory of Sophie Scholl, the young member of the German “White Rose” anti-Nazi resistance movement who was executed in 1943 along with her brother Hans and their friend Christoph Probst, and who I think was a pretty wonderful example of a good human being, I skipped ahead to that chapter, which starts very moving before going off an a bizarre tangent about Natalie Portman and specifically the movies The Professional and Beautiful Girls that is nothing if not Thomson-esque.

This book is sure to hold further surprises. More reports to come soon.

*For an amusing account of several hours I and some friends spent in Thomson’s company see here and then here.

Sorry I haven’t posted anything substantial in a while. Been busy and away. To tide you over until I can write something longer, here’s a picture of Borges, or rather a picture of a sculpture of Borges, which I took in the Gran Café Tortoni in Buenos Aires where he used to roll.

It was a limpid black night, hung as in a basket from a single dull star.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

I am finally reading this after years, years of saving it. I think I decided to over 10 years ago, actually, and I was waiting for the perfect time. This was before I realized there was no such thing as the perfect time. I will probably have a lot to say about it when I’m done.

You probably won’t believe this but today I  was listening to Harry Belafonte’s live album Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall (listen to the vinyl version if you can ‘cuz the CD is crazy abridged) and I had the feeling it was H.B.’s birthday. So I looked it up, and as it turns out my strange and mystical Belafonte hunch was correct. I could explain why he’s one of my favourite people in my own words but I wouldn’t do a good job as Bob Dylan does in Chronicles. Check it:

Harry was the best balladeer in the land and everybody knew it. He was a fantastic artist, sang about lovers and slaves — chain gang workers, saints and sinners and children. His repertoire was full of old folk songs . . . all arranged in a way that appealed to a wide audience, much wider than the Kingston Trio. Harry had learned songs directly from LEADBELLY and WOODY GUTHRIE . . . one of his records, Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean, had even sold a million copies. He was a movie star, too . . . an authentic tough guy. . . dramatic and intense on the screen. . . . In the movie Odds Against Tomorrow, you forget he’s an actor, you forget he’s Harry Belafonte. His presence and magnitude was so wide. . . . As a performer, he broke all attendance records. He could play to a packed house at Carnegie Hall and then the next day he might appear at a garment center union rally. To Harry, it didn’t make any difference. People were people. He had ideals and made you feel you’re a part of the human race. There never was a performer who crossed so many lines as Harry. He appealed to everybody, whether they were steelworkers or symphony patrons or bobby-soxers, even children—everybody. He had that rare ability. Somewhere he had said that he didn’t like to go on television, because he didn’t think his music could be represented well on a small screen, and he was probably right. Everything about him was gigantic. The folk purists had a problem with him, but Harry — who could have kicked the shit out of all of them—couldn’t be bothered, said that all folksingers were interpreters, said it in a public way as if someone had summoned him to set the record straight. . . . I could identify with Harry in all kinds of ways. Sometime in the past, he had been barred from the door of the world famous nightclub the Copacabana because of his color, and then later he’d be headlining the joint. You’ve got to wonder how that would make somebody feel emotionally. Astoundingly . . . I’d be making my professional recording debut with Harry, playing harmonica on one of his albums. . . . With Belafonte I felt like I’d become anointed in some kind of way. . . Harry was that rare type of character that radiates greatness, and you hope that some of it rubs off on you. The man commands respect. You know he never took the easy path, though he could have.

At 80 he’s still kicking ass. Give it up for Belafonte!