Book Report: The Lost Words

13. Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, The Lost Words (2017) (6/28/18)

This book arrived today. I bought it because I enjoy Macfarlane's writing—for example in this article from the Guardian, "The Word-Hoard: On Rewilding Our Language of Landscape"—and I figured that, even though I have another couple of books of his that I (ahem) haven't yet read (The Old Ways and Landmarks), well, you just can't have too much Macfarlane. Especially when I saw how highly recommended The Lost Words was.

Little did I know it was a book of spells. For children. In oversized format and exquisitely illustrated by Morris in amazing watercolors. (Yes, I can be a rather impulsive book buyer . . . —and in this case, I am very glad I am.)

Here's the introduction:

Once upon a time, words began to vanish from the language of children. They disappeared so quietly that at first almost no one noticed—fading away like water on stone. The words were those that children used to name the natural world around them: acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, conker—gone! Fern, heather, kingfisher, otter, raven, willow, wren . . . all of them gone! The words were becoming lost: no longer vivid in children's voices, no longer alive in their stories.
 You hold in your hands a spellbook for conjuring back these lost words. To read it you will need to seek, find and speak. It deals in things that are missing and things that are hidden, in absences and in appearances. It is told in gold—the gold of the goldfinches that flit through its pages in charms—and it holds not poems but spells of many kinds that might just, by the old, strong magic of being spoken aloud, unfold dreams and songs, and summon lost words back into the mouth and the mind's eye.

The spells are presented in triplet: an introductory page of jumbled letters and pencil sketch, in which the creature or plant to come is spelled out, as here (can you see it? d a n d e l i o n?) (click on the images to see them larger)

Then the spell, with its illustration (each poem also spells out the word in the initial letters of the stanzas):

And finally a full-spread illustration:

The spells are incantatory, absolutely demanding to be read out loud. And the illustrations are lushly, gorgeously alive.

I follow Macfarlane on Twitter (to the extent that I "follow" anyone on Twitter . . .) and was delighted to see this exchange between him and a primary school teacher who was having his students use the spells to make their own poems. His response underscores what a generous soul he is. Having his druidic spirit in the world gives me hope.

And now that I've been reminded of his word-of-the-day practice on Twitter (amid much other tweeting), I might actually start to follow him without the quotation marks. Oh, and pick up one of those two books that sit unread on my shelves . . .

Book Report: Tribe

12. Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (2016) (6/23/18)

In Tribe, Junger explores, in four chapters, ways in which societies both exclude and embrace. It's a rather rambling journey, combining personal anecdote, journalism, interview, and secondary sources. Its scope is broad, touching on various Indian tribes—such as the Iroquois Nation with its alternating peacetime leaders called sachems, whose job was to enforce civil affairs, including justice and harmony, and its warrior leaders, whose sole concern was physical survival of the tribe; the war in Bosnia and the London Blitz and the ways they brought people together in common cause; the Righteous Among the Nations roll, which recognizes individuals who saved Jews during WWII; PTSD and victimhood; rates of suicide in various cultures; the financial crisis of 2008; fraud by defense contractors or Medicaid recipients; a 1958 mining disaster; and so forth. The alienating effects of wealth and modernity are one major theme, coupled with the unifying impacts of adversity.

Junger presents his ideas straightforwardly (if rather incoherently—that rambling thing) as if they were fact—or, perhaps better, the only fact. He frequently relates a story, whether from his own experience or research, then extrapolates it into a universal value. The apparent simplicity and obviousness—not to mention gloomy, and occasionally sentimental, self-righteousness—of his arguments are deceiving. He wants, in the end, to find tribe chiefly in a dark place, that of warfare and hardship that draws people together through urgency. But doesn't tribe exist in light as well? Sure it does. That said, he does provide plenty to ponder, especially in terms of where and how we, as individuals, families, and communities, find our own tribes.

Here's a longish passage from near the end to give an idea of his thinking and mode of argument:

I know what coming back to America from a war zone is like because I've done it so many times. First there is a kind of shock at the level of comfort and affluence that we enjoy, but that is followed by the dismal realization that we live in a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about—depending on their views—the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign-born, the president, or the entire US government. It's a level of contempt that is usually reserved for enemies in wartime, except that now it's applied to our fellow citizens. Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker. Contempt is often directed at people who have been excluded from a group or declared unworthy of its benefits. Contempt is often used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for torture or abuse. Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples. People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long.
 The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it's a dangerous waste of time because they're both right. The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a nonworking "underclass" has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group. But by the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared for the ill, the elderly, the wounded, and the unlucky. In today's terms, that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account. Those two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs—and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought—will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.
 . . . The United States is so powerful that the only country capable of destroying her might be the United States herself, which means that the ultimate terrorist strategy would be to just leave the country alone. That way, America's ugliest partisan tendencies could emerge unimpeded by the unifying effects of war. The ultimate betrayal of tribe isn't acting competitively—that should be encouraged—but predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group. That is exactly what politicians of both parties try to do when they spew venomous rhetoric about their rivals. That is exactly what media figures do when they go beyond criticism of their fellow citizens and openly revile them. Reviling people you share a combat outpost with is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and public figures who imagine their nation isn't, potentially, one huge combat outpost are deluding themselves.

Book Report: Citizen 13660

11. Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (1946/1983) (6/21/18)

This book, a "graphic memoir," chronicles two years during World War II, when people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Okubo was an artist, and her account features 200 pen-and-ink drawings—she was never without her sketchbook—of daily life in the camps (first Tanforan, south of San Francisco—a racetrack; then Topaz in northern Utah), accompanied by usually spare, matter-of-fact captions. The book's title comes from the number she and her brother, Benji—her family unit—were assigned.

In this book we learn about the removal of Japanese Americans on the West Coast into "protective custody" after Pearl Harbor; the conditions in the camps; how people made do, such as making furniture out of scrap wood and planting "victory gardens" in the dry desert of Utah; daily activities and hardships (there was a lot of standing in line, and always dust blowing). Okubo expresses no bitterness in these vignettes, but focuses on objective observation. Interestingly, she includes herself in each frame, underscoring her role as a participant narrator. Despite the unjustness of the incarceration, what shines through in her drawings and text is the indomitability of the human spirit.

Our friends came to take us to the Civil Control Station.
We took one last look at our happy home.

[First meal at Tanforan:]
At the dishware and silverware counter I picked up a plate,
a knife, and a fork. I wiped my plate clean with my handkerchief
and held it out to the first of the cooks, who was serving boiled
potatoes with his hands. The second cook had just dished out the last
of the canned Vienna sausages, the main part of the dinner, so I
passed by him and received two slices of bread from a girl at
the end of the food counter.
We were pushed into the mess hall, where the entire space was
filled with long tables and backless benches. Each table was
supposed to accommodate eight persons but right now each
was a bedlam of hungry people. We looked for an empty place
but could find none. The air was stuffy and, having temporarily
lost our appetite, we decided to forget about eating.

"Line-ups here and line-ups there" describes our daily life.
We lined up for mail, for checks, for meals, for showers, for
washrooms, for laundry tubs, for toilets, for clinic service,
for movies. We lined up for everything.

[In January 1944 Okubo was preparing to leave camp for New York]
After plowing through the red tape, through the madness of
packing again, I attended forums on "How to Make Friends" and
"How to Behave in the Outside World."
I was photographed.

Poetry: Czesław Miłosz

I am trying to read a short story or poem every day. Poems sure are a lot easier—or at least, less time consuming, though "easy" not necessarily, if they go deep enough.

Today I bumped into these beauties, by the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004):

Incantation

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.

Berkeley, 1968
Translated by Czesław Miłosz and Robert Pinsky

Campo dei Fiori

In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori
baskets of olives and lemons,
cobbles spattered with wine
and the wreckage of flowers.
Vendors cover the trestles
with rose-pink fish;
armfuls of dark grapes
heaped on peach-down.

On this same square
they burned Giordano Bruno.
Henchmen kindled the pyre
close-pressed by the mob.
Before the flames had died
the taverns were full again,
baskets of olives and lemons
again on the vendors' shoulders.

I thought of the Campo dei Fiori
in Warsaw by the sky-carousel
one clear spring evening
to the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
and couples were flying
high in the cloudless sky.

At times wind from the burning
would drift dark kites along
and riders on the carousel
caught petals in midair.
That same hot wind
blew open the skirts of the girls
and the crowds were laughing
on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

Someone will read as moral
that the people of Rome or Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make love
as they pass by the martyrs' pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of things human,
of the oblivion
born before the flames have died.

But that day I thought only
of the loneliness of the dying,
of how, when Giordano
climbed to his burning
he could not find
in any human tongue
words for mankind,
mankind who live on.

Already they were back at their wine
or peddled their white starfish,
baskets of olives and lemons
they had shouldered to the fair,
and he already distanced
as if centuries had passed
while they paused just a moment
for his flying in the fire.

Those dying here, the lonely
forgotten by the world,
our tongue becomes for them
the language of an ancient planet.
Until, when all is legend
and many years have passed,
on a new Campo dei Fiori
rage will kindle at a poet's word.

Warsaw, 1943
Translated by David Brooks and Louis Iribarne

Anthony Bourdain

I was not a follower of Anthony Bourdain, but when I woke up on the 8th and saw the news that he was dead, by suicide, I was stunned. It wasn't just that it was another celebrity suicide—his death but a few days after Kate Spade's. Even though I didn't follow Bourdain, I somehow knew him to be a life force. (Spade may have been too, in other circles—but not in mine. Which is not to say I'm not sad about her death too.)

David pointed out that Netflix has been carrying Bourdain's Parts Unknown TV show, about food and culture worldwide. And they were about to stop airing it. That prompted us to watch a couple of episodes: season 4, episode 4, on Hue, Vietnam; and 8.1, about Hanoi—simply because I was just in Vietnam and wanted to see his take on the place. Those two shows made me wish I'd gone on a culinary tour, and not a birding one. (Sorry, birds.) And that I'd known Anthony Bourdain in real life.

Today I spotted an article outlining the five not-to-be-missed episodes of the show. One was the Hanoi one I'd already seen. When David and I were considering what to watch this evening, I couldn't remember any other but the Bronx, and one in season 4. Turned out, they were one and the same: The Bronx, season 4, episode 2.

And there I learned a few things. First: hip-hop. Of course, I know that hip-hop exists, but I've never been quite clear on just what it is. Turns out (you probably know this), it's a culture, comprising four streams: rapping, DJing, graffiti, and breakdancing. The fact that I didn't know it can be so neatly defined just goes to show how very white, not to mention old, I am. (Though so was Bourdain, so really, what's my excuse?) But now I know what hip-hop is. My world is a little larger. I always like it when my world gets a little larger.

Second, just the other day I saw a reference to something that I was similarly unfamiliar with, when my niece's husband wrote on Facebook, "RIP Juicebox - I'll seriously miss the news/social commentary of Desus & Mero on vice, props/kudos for moving on up to Showtime." I had no clue what that meant. (I still don't, to some degree.) And then, because I subscribe to Vanity Fair, I saw a reference to an article, "Desus and Mero Take Their Show on the Road." I took note because of the nephew's comment.

And then, tonight—or rather, four years ago—Anthony Bourdain had a nice sit-down meal with Desus ("Gotta hear both sides") Nice.

Seriously? Three times in one week, to run into a reference to Desus and Mero? I think I need to check these guys out.

Third: I want to keep following Anthony Bourdain around the globe. I love his mix of food love and cultural delving and passionate lust for life.  Thank you, Netflix, for not canceling his show but rather for keeping it going, for however long. I wish he could have visited more and more and more places, and told us about them and their special pleasures.

I'm so so very sorry the lust for life didn't buoy him through, that a darkness caught him and caused him to drown.... I'm so so sad about that, and about all the other suicides that happen every day.

The national suicide hotline number is 1-800-273-8255, available 24/7; for crisis support in Spanish, the number is 1-888-628-9454. For the TrevorLifeline, a suicide prevention counseling service for the LGBTQ community, call 1-866-488-7386.
Here's a good guide to how to cope with a potentially suicidal friend or family member.

Oh, and by the way: the other three "must see" episodes are  Beirut (5.8), Sicily (2.5), and South Korea (5.1).

Book Report: The Violet Hour

10. Katie Roiphe, The Violet Hour (2016) (6/15/18)

In this elegant exploration of death and dying—and, inevitably, about lives fully lived—Katie Roiphe focuses on five writers/artists, about whom there is copious documentation about the end of their lives: Susan Sontag, who lived in denial of death and continued to work fiercely until the end; Sigmund Freud, who declared himself “sensibly resigned” to death; John Updike, who, through his writing (and affairs), sought to cheat death; the wildly self-destructive Dylan Thomas; Maurice Sendak, who wrote and drew his hyper-imaginative children’s books to keep the darkness from pressing in and annihilating him. And, in an epilogue (fully alive, he and Roiphe had a conversation on the subject), James Salter, who didn’t really find death to be a problem at all: just don’t think about it, he counseled.

Roiphe suffered a near-death experience when she was a girl, and has always had a fearful fascination with the end of life as a result. To investigate that feeling, she delved into the writings—journals, letters, essays, fiction, poetry—of these people to find out what they thought, believed, hoped, and feared about death. She talked with their children, their caretakers, their friends, those who clustered around as life seeped away. She explored their biographies for clues. "I've picked people who are madly articulate, who have abundant and extraordinary imaginations or intellectual fierceness, who can put the confrontation with mortality into words—and in one case images—in a way that most of us can't or won't."

And she interrogates what she finds. With Freud, for example, she quotes him as writing to a friend, shortly before turning 68, that "though apparently on the way to recovery, there is deep inside me a pessimistic conviction of the closeness of the end of my life, nourished by the never-ceasing petty torments of the scar, a kind of senile depression centered around the conflict between irrational pleasure in life and sensible resignation."

Why is resignation sensible? [she asks.] Why is pleasure in life irrational? Freud is so eager to rise above, to conspicuously see and take in the facts of mortality, that he can only classify an ebullient attachment to life as "irrational." Rationality seems to be an expansive, overarching code word here for something altogether stranger and more rare: moderation in one's attachment to life. As if one is supposed to be only a little bit attached to life.

Contrast Freud's sensibility with Thomas's lack thereof.

The true mystery of Thomas's last days . . . is not the precise medical cause of his coma; it is how the unnatural fear and apprehension of death melts into a craving for it. His long preoccupation with the end, with all the celebrating and singing one can do on the way to that end, his overdeveloped, painful consciousness, always, of that end, is transformed into something almost beautiful. It seems if you are afraid or preoccupied with something for long enough, you begin to develop a feeling toward it not dissimilar to love. This is not a trick of the mind that most healthy people can understand. David Foster Wallace once wrote, in a Harper's piece about a cruise ship, a decade before his own suicide: "The word 'despair' is overused and banalized now, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. It's close to what people call dread or angst, but it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable sadness of knowing I'm small and weak and selfish and going, without doubt, to die. It's wanting to jump overboard." 

In her conclusion Roiphe writes,

I am coming to see that the real thing I am afraid of is not death itself but the fear of death. This fear is not abstract to me. The knowing you are about to die. The panic of its approach. That is what seems unbearable to me. That’s what I’ve been trying to write my way through.

But here’s what I learned from the deaths in this book: You work. You don’t work. You resist. You don’t resist. You exert the consummate control. You surrender. You deny. You accept. You pray. You don’t pray. You read. You work. You take as many painkillers as you can. You refuse painkillers. You rage against death. You run headlong toward it.

In the end the deaths are the same. They all die. The world releases them.