Sometimes going through my own bookcases is like browsing a great used bookshop, and a volume pops out that I didn’t even know I’d purchased. Ironically, William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge was a book I was searching for several years ago without knowing it and I had it all along.
When I was a teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools I was imagining a Great Migration unit starting with an image exploration and analysis using Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series as a starter. It was a fave tactic of mine to start units with images and to teach kids how to make inferences, ask deep questions, interpret, connect to previous knowledge, make predictions, etc before even learning about the topic of the unit. I never wrote that unit, however, because the Lewis Museum in Baltimore had a show of Jacob Lawrence which included works featuring Toussaint L’Ouverture and John Brown and Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. After seeing that show, because I already taught units about Brown and Douglass, I took the Jacob Lawrence idea and tacked it onto those units.
Another reason I decided not to create the Great Migration unit was because I didn’t have a meaty novel-length text to use. And yet I did have the perfect one–and didn’t realize it until I lived in rural France in the 2nd year of not being a teacher. Oh well. There is probably a bit too much prostitution in the novel for 8th graders anyhow!
William Attaway is unfortunately not well-known, though he had a profound cultural impact. Until I read his novel and its fine introduction by Darryl Pinckney I was unaware that Attaway wrote the “Banana Boat Song” for his friend Harry Belafonte. He also influenced Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, who both knew him and read this searing white-hot novel. (Side note: Darryl Pinckney has a fine article in the current NYRB about the Harlem Renaissance, and Attaway was apparently an indifferent and bored school student until he read a poem by Langston Hughes and found out that Hughes was Black, at which point he devoted himself to writing).
So, Blood on the Forge–talk about going forth and forging in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race! This is an incredibly vital document of an important era in US history, the great movement of Black laborers from the South to Northern cities as the industrial revolution took off. Attaway, who was a middle-class son of a teacher and doctor who himself migrated as a child from Mississippi to Chicago, weaves in all the complex societal strands into a short elegant and harrowing story. You’ve got urban/rural, White/Black (Slav/Irish), union/scab, capitalist/socialist, agrarian/industrial, modern/traditional. There is enormous violence and powerful interests interfere in everything to protect what they regard as theirs, and the fates of three sharecropper brothers who are recruited and taken north to Pennsylvania to the steel mills herald prophetically the racial and class tensions to come. HIGHLY recommended.
Cliff came ambling down Route de Gueret from the Brasserie, encumbered by three sacks and a backpack. We noticed him first because the dog stood to attention and her hackles rose, but Pat got there in time and the dog rolled over and showed her neck upon noting her lady’s displeasure. Cliff was allowed to approach with no danger to his ankles or eardrums.
As he got closer I realized who it must be. Cliff had contacted me weeks earlier via Google, where he found our website and sent me a message in French. From the grammar I could tell he was a confident speaker with a pretty good knowledge but was certainly not a native speaker, and after seeing his name I thought he must be a Yank or a Brit and I replied in English to the chat.
Cliff had requested lodging for two and a half months, he wasn’t sure when exactly, and he could only pay 25 euros per night because he was retired and on a budget. Of course that’s less than half of what we charge per night for our small studio rental! I told him I would need specific dates and that we already had bookings all over our spring calendar for both apartments, but I would send him some suggestions nearby. After a few back-and-forths via Google he said “well I’ll just come to Treignac around mid-April and we’ll figure it out.” I warned him that Treignac was out of the way and he should reconsider, and he replied that he’d been coming to France for 20 years, often simply showing up and finding a place to stay. His intention was to do so again. “I can camp in your garden if that’s OK.” Then I didn’t hear from him for a while and thought he’d given up.
I was immediately struck by Cliff’s age. I’d assumed he was early to mid 60s, but he’s actually 88 years old. To get to Treignac from his home in Kansas he’d flown to Texas, thence to London, thence to Paris, where he caught a train to Clermont-Ferrand, then a bus to Meymac, and in Meymac he hitch-hiked outside the Renault dealership without luck for several hours. Then he asked the Renault dealership for a piece of cardboard with which he made a sign. Immediately a woman picked him up and drove 26 km out of her way to bring him to town. Unable to find us via GPS she dropped him at the Brasserie next door, where the proprietors directed him to walk across the bridge. I’m almost 55 and that trip would exhaust me! While we had coffee in the kitchen our Frenchie Bou went out on the porch where we’d stowed Cliff’s bags, and a minute later she proudly marched through the kitchen with something in her mouth–an adult undergarment she’d pulled from his backpack pocket. Poor Cliff took this in stride and was more amused than mortified.
We had a bit of a scramble at first. We put Cliff up the first night but had guests checking into both apartments that weekend. So we moved him to a friend’s pilgrim hostile apartment for the following two nights, then back to us for two weeks. Now due to a previous reservation he’ll have to leave again, but we got him situated in a nice studio apartment in a rejuvenated vacation village at the top of town. They can accommodate his budget and host him for the next 2 months. He needed a spot where he could walk to town and to the grocery, and Domaine de Treignac fit the bill.
Cliff says he retired at 39 after making a mound of cash in the PR industry in Pittsburgh and NY and California, but then drank his money away. After sobering up, on $1200 a month social security he managed to save enough to do shoestring world travel a couple months a year by hitching and camping and relying on the kindness of strangers (one time he was adopted by a French actress and stayed at her place in Aix en Provence for two years).
Cliff has been everywhere and remembers dozens of small French villages, including many surrounding us in the Correze and Le Lot and in the Perigord and Dordogne. Of the villages we’ve both visited his memory is far more reliable than my own. He’s a vet who spent a few years in Seoul and when he told me he was an old Boy Scout I told him to help any ladies in town across the street. He said “I surely will, and right into my bed!”
We won’t make much money from Cliff’s stay because it’s been cold and he’s using the electric radiator. Even with the solar panels electric is very expensive. But it’s been amusing to hear his stories and see him each day and help him out with logistics. He’s always asking if he can do odd jobs or work in the garden, and when I say no he takes a stool and his kit into town to sketch and paint old houses and walls. Last night he emailed me a play he wrote about Marx, Carlyle, and Dickens.
A friend kindly leant me this. I often refuse to borrow books because I like to read my own copy and put it on a bookshelf for decades after. But I’d read and really enjoyed Shadow of the Silk Road, and I’m a (very) small business owner trying to live more frugally than when I was a lavishly funded public school teacher in the USA (LOL). So I accepted it (and three other excellent books she kindly offered).
Ostensibly, this is a travel book, and it does indeed recount a truly remarkable voyage to a particularly special and demanding destination. But this is actually a book about grief, and it’s the best book about grief I’ve read since Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Though the family members grieved by Thubron are present for less than 10 pages of the 220 in the book, they haunt its passages about Nepal and Tibet like the dakini spirits he describes.
Of course there is no better country than Tibet in which to devote a mournful pilgrimage and to explore loss and impermanence. Turbron describes the destruction by artillery of several ancient monasteries and the smashing of others by hand during the Cultural Revolution. He meets many people who have their own griefs about family and displacement and the Himalayas become a resonator for sorrow. Many practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism have been displaced by state terror or official exile. And yet the Hindu and Bon and Buddhist pilgrims still come and do their circuits of Mount Kailas. Thurbron does his as well, but finds little comfort in the astonishing myth-enshrouded terrain, birthplace of the Earth and abode of the gods and demons for several religions.
I adore the NYRB re-issues–high quality paperbacks with great cover design and kick-ass introductions
When it comes to fiction genres, I’ve got my faves. As a young dude those were horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. Over the years I drifted away from all of these only to check in now and again on the hot new thang. Occasionally I’ve dabbled in mystery/thriller stuff, but never have I been a reader of Westerns (unless one includes Cormac McCarthy in that category).
I bought a remaindered copy of Warlock probably 20 years back and only just pulled it down off the shelf. Glad I did, because it’s a banger! Like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven it’s a rather sophisticated deconstruction of the myths associated with the American West and gunslingers and cowboys. The hero of the story has a morally ambiguous past and when hired to be Marshall of Warlock struggles with the ethics of his situation. Is he a murderer for hire, or a representative of law and order? What is a government other than an agency dictating behavior via the threat extreme violence? Can citizens have a sense of peace and freedom without a killer to back up those ideals? How is a hired gun who kills to keep the peace different from a blackguard who kills to take money from a stagecoach?
The novel features some historical figures and also transposes mythic characters from the OK Corral into thinly disguised avatars. There are IWW prototypes working the mines and rebelling against brutal treatment, there are cross-border skirmishes between cattle rustlers in the US and Mexico, there are Apaches, there is the US Cavalry and a half-crazed senile general. Whores, saloon keepers, merchants, deputies, judges, and rugged outlaws eek out a living in a land where law is dictated by force and mob rule. There is the outlaw turned deputy who, like the hero, tries to do the right thing but cannot always navigate the complexities of the myriad relationships and power struggles. And there is revenge; a LOT of revenge.
The novel surprised me often by subverting standard genre tropes familiar from TV and film. The writing was elegant and Oakley Hall created engaging and multifaceted characters and situated them in an intricately detailed setting.
My one critique involves a love scene which descends into bodice-ripper cliché. But overall I thought Warlock was excellent and it pulled me inevitably to its satisfying conclusion. Thomas Pynchon called it one of America’s greatest novels–it’s certainly better than anything he wrote (excepting perhaps The Crying of Lot 49).
When Roma came out a few years back a twenty-something colleague said he spent the entire film bored and wondering when something would happen. I had a completely different reaction to that film, and thought it was a miracle how much happened in 2 hours and 15 minutes.
So, take this as a warning. Jeanne Dielman clocks in at over 3 hours, and if you prefer CGI action films or comedies this will absolutely not be the movie for you!
The first hour focuses on Jeanne Dielman in her daily routine. We watch the steps to her day and the way she manages tasks and it is evident from every scene that these are well-rehearsed and routine activities, and Jeanne is a marvel of efficiency. The way she folds, her fussy insistence on maintaining a tidy and immaculate living space for herself and her teenage son, her industrious and thrifty mannerisms–all reveal a woman enmeshed in the oppressive values of “woman’s work” and “mother’s duty.” She has honed and practiced her approach to preparing coffee, making dinner, cleaning, doing laundry, and converting her living room into a bedroom for her son each night, and the camera rarely moves as we watch Jeanne do her chores like an automaton. Which, of course, is what women even in wealthy “advanced” nations have often been reduced to in the past, and sadly movements like MAGA in the USA hope to bring back this state of affairs.
In the afternoons, between starting potatoes for her son’s dinner and awaiting his return from school, Jeanne has a small window of time where she takes clients as a prostitute. As a widow trying to maintain a bougie lifestyle for her son the implication is that she has no choice. Like all her tasks, there is an aloof practiced routine to these interactions. We only see the arrival of her client and his departure, and then the bathing and clean-up process Jeanne goes through after the visit. Then, her earnings are saved in a large soup tourine.
You may get restless watching Jeanne do the dishes for 20 minutes, or watching her bustle from room to room always closing doors and turning off switches and putting everything back where it belongs. But it is important to the film and its themes to see how Jeanne spends her day and how carefully her time is managed because on day 2 if you are watching closely you may notice things going awry very subtly. A dropped polish brush, a dropped spoon, potatoes overcooked and untidy hair. An undone button. These very subtle hints really add up and caused me a creeping anxiety. Jeanne is in absolute control of her activities and her life for a reason–because there is a burbling turmoil inside.
Her interactions with her son are quite frustrating to witness, for reasons you’ll understand if you see the film. Jeanne’s life even as a widow is wrapped up completely in satisfying male needs and making life easier or more pleasant for males. Only rarely do we witness Jeanne enjoying herself or experiencing a rich aesthetic moment–while knitting a sweater for her growing son, she becomes oh so quietly enraptured by a Beethoven piano sonata, and though she continues to work she is expressing some internal state, something trying to burst free.
When the coffee comes out wrong, when a missing button on her son’s coat proves impossible to replace, when a pair of scissors is not returned to its proper place–all these small details lead to an appalling finale full of resonance and open to interpretation. More viewings are required to piece together what actually transpires because though it’s quiet and subtle there are many small things happening in the last 15 minutes and I had oh so many questions.
So I can’t recommend it enough, but to endure it you have to be the sort who enjoys dense, beautifully edited and acted long-ass art films. It’s brilliant and revolutionary and tedious all at once. It jumped two years ago to number 1 on the BFI list of greatest films of all time. I might argue that there are better films, but I certainly see why it’s a powerful contender. I must explore more works by the director Chantal Akerman.
She lives on Quai Du Commerce–the film manages to critique women’s traditional roles as well as the economic system which relies on poorly compensated women’s labor
We moved to France in June 2022. I figured “hey, living in Europe we can really see Europe!” But we’d started a small business. Then, my wife added a non-profit organization. We hired a contractor to do some work, we did some work. The garden in itself is a full-time job.
After a year and half, we hadn’t really seen Europe. We saw some really spectacular France (all within a couple hours’ drive of out place): the Correze of course, Lot, the Dordogne… But we’d had little opportunity to get out and explore new places beyond France. Our three trips since arriving here had been to Tunisia when Patricia got a teaching gig for a week, and two trips back home to the USA.
Then, friends from the International School of Panama got in touch. They were teaching in Croatia and Italy and planned to meet up in Civezzano in the Dolomites. It gave us the excuse we needed to shut down operations for 10 days and hit the road.
First Stop: Turin
Statues of Augustus and his uncle/step dad Julius bookend the Palatine Gate.
I’d heard about Turin as a small child watching the old “In Search of…” TV series with Leonard Nimoy. They did an episode about the Shroud of Turin, and showed monks dutifully tending it in its glass case high up on an altar. There was even a re-enactment of a monk saving it from fire in the 14th century. We went to see the Shroud, but because it is old AF and fragile (and likely also because it has been conclusively proven a fiendishly clever medieval fraud designed to milk cash out of pilgrims and wealthy donors alike), it is not on display any more, but is stored in an enclosed box visible through a glass window with a replica on foam core mounted for the curious. The faithful still come in droves and genuflect, and though I did not actually see the Shroud I did score a truly tacky holographic post card.
Just next to the cathedral housing the Shroud were some fab Roman ruins. Also nearby was an excellent outdoor market and an indoor multi-vendor restaurant space. Turin has many grand plazas and exquisite architecture spanning centuries and styles. It also has one of the greatest Egyptian museums outside Cairo.
We spent four hours exploring the magnificent Egyptian Museum in Turin.
Stop Two: Milan
We headed over to Milan where we were promptly stopped by the local police. They were very polite about detaining us by the side of the road for twenty minutes and carefully checking our French residence visa cards and passports.
Nobody does outdoor public spaces like the Italians, with their marble paving stones and extraordinary buildings. Walking into the Piazzo del Duomo is quite an experience.
Piazza del Duomo, Milano
I’ve been visiting Europe since the early ’90s. Many things about travel there are far superior and more efficient than in the past. But one truly hateful change is the fact that access to these magnificent old structures is often via paid appointment. Gone are the days when tourists could wander into the Duomo and other nearby monuments with a Bedaeker’s in hand. Now you have to wait in a queue to purchase a ticket, or pre-book online, and travel guides have been replaced by Rick Steves videos and TripAdvisor.
But, totally worth it. I’m more of a Romanesque/Gothique guy, and the Duomo has been Baroqued to death. But it is spectacular and overwhelming. And you can ride a lift to the various roofs. Get up close and personal with those gargoyles!
Spectacular views of Milan and every square meter of the exterior of the Duomo is packed with luscious art. What’s not to like?
Milan is a bustling and vibrant modern city with all the restaurants. Because we live in remote rural France we often crave international foods we can no longer order for delivery–Indian, Thai, Mexican, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, etc. But you can get anything in Milan, and often a lot of food for under 12 euros. We had perhaps the best pizzas we ever tasted for lunch our second day and paid less than 23 euros.
Stop Three: Verona
I was a bit suspicious of Verona because of the whole Juliet’s House thing. Tourists waiting in line to touch the breast of a statue of a teenage girl who exists only in literature? Yeah, whatever. But we managed two days here without Romeo or Juliet interfering at all (I was curious about the museum in Juliet’s house–but we saw plenty of remarkable art in the Castelvecchio, the GAM, and at the Maffei Palace).
And, like Milan and Turin, the city Verona is itself a work of art. Every street and plaza in the old city is lovely. Check out the Roman Arena, stroll Piazza Bra, and head off in any direction at random. There are a handful of remarkable churches to see, in particular the Basilica of Zeno with its bronze doors and crypt to the African saint. I was terribly amused by the centuries of graffiti carved into the 13th century murals: “Hugo was here, 1453,” etc.
If you visit Trento, go to the Tourist Office by the Arena and immediately buy the Verona card, it is TOTALLY worth it if you plan to visit more than a couple museums or sites. We paid 35 euros each for the two-day card and it paid for itself and then some.
Ride the funicula up to Castel San Pietro for those money-shot pics. Even on a smoggy hazy global warming 70-degree February day it’s a great view of the city.
Stop Four: Trento/Civezzano
We toured a bit of Trento with friends from ISP in Panama. I said to Chris, who currently lives and teaches in Rome, “no one does public space like the Italians.” He said “it’s true–but good luck finding a park with trees!”
Civezzano, where we met friends and stayed for a couple nights, is a cute little town which functions as a base for skiers, but there was no snow on the surrounding peaks because of draughts and far warmer than typical winters. It has some nice old homes but not much else going on. On our way there we found the MART museum, which is a magnificent facility. And, we had the great luck to see an exhibition centered on melancholy featuring several engravings by Durer and Rembrandt, as well as more modern masters. There was also a massive show of current Chinese painting. The permanent holdings are substantial and definitely worth a stroll, even on aching 20,000 steps a day tourist feet.
Bonus: The MART museum accepts the Verona card for free admission!
Civezzano has a tiny pizza joint which produces gigantic pizzas. Here is Harper wondering what the rest of us would eat.Truly a pleasure to get up close and personal with several Durer etchings at MART outside Trento
Stop 5: Bergamo Alto
Perhaps the most walkable and warmest of the cities we visited. Magnificent shops and restaurants in centuries-old buildings, public art, more museums, more towers and churches.
Every corner of Bergamo Alto is a treat. Catch it in the late afternoon for that remarkable golden light.clever marketing to put the Hello Kitty and other cartoon shaped treats at child’s height
I had this damn spigot attached to my arm for 8 days
I’d never spent the night in a hospital before. I’d had two surgeries over the years, but in each case was ejected callously onto the street after the anaesthetic wore off. This was to be a new experience.
Before I was shuttled upstairs from the ER I was told that the MRI was normal. No sign of stroke, bleeding, or clots in the brain. The EKG was normal and healthy. All my vitals were strong, and were in fact quite good for a man of a certain age.
And yet I was being kept for observation. I asked why this was so if the tests were negative, and was told it was because the doctors believed I might have clots in the veins of my neck.
My wife was informed she could accompany me, and then was told she could not when we got to the fifth floor. My roommate was asleep and they did not want him disturbed, so she was told to go home as it was after 11pm. She did manage to sneak in and make sure I had my phone before she left me there in the dark.
Needless to say I passed a pretty miserable night. I was put on an IV of anticoagulant meds. I was disturbed every two hours by nurses who pricked my fingers for blood sugar tests, who changed my IV bag, who cheerfully asked “are you sleeping well?” before jabbing a syringe into my thigh or giving me a paper cup of pills. I was routinely subjected to blood pressure, temperature, and pulse checks.
a few meals featured wrapped cheese and yogurt. little else was edible.
On top of all this my roommate was an old codger whose breathing was reminiscent of Regan Macneil sorely beset by Pazuzu. Any time I managed to drift off he would explode in a coughing fit, after which he would get out of bed, turn on all the overhead fluorescents, and shuffle around the room banging into things.
At 5am the nurses entered cheerfully chirping good morning and asking if I’d had a good sleep, to which I could only respond with sarcastic laughter. Again with the poking and prodding and the taking of blood vials. “I’m sorry to inform you” the older and more sour nurse said in French, “but you are restricted to bed rest and must remain prone until further notice. You might break off a clot and cause it to travel to brain, head, or heart. This would not be good.” She placed a urinal within reach and left.
So my first stay in hospital was to be the full experience indeed!
Over the next 5 days of strict bed rest I was subjected to all the requisite indignities. The staff were extremely polite and empathetic as they stabbed my fingertips and blasted a fat injection needle into my thigh once day. When I asked about the injection I was told it was another anticoagulant, as were the powder and pills I received with each meal. I was bathed in the bed and changed, and my linens were swapped out by rolling me to one side and then another. From the bed I could see only the sky and the tops of a few trees.
I think 18 vials of blood were drawn over my stay. It got to the point where the nurse could not find a vein which had not been pierced and so she told me with profound pity that she had to reuse a hole and it would hurt a lot. “Je vous pique” was the standard greeting after a while.
I met the attending physician around noon on my first day. His French was accented and I pegged him as North African, which proved true. He asked what I was doing there and I told him my story and what the ER doctors had said. He shook his head, and replied in French “I don’t think you have clots at all. I think you had a brief episode as a result perhaps of a sudden drop in blood sugar, or maybe some sort of migraine. By the way you are in gerontology in the gastro wing because there are no beds upstairs in neurology available, but the neurologist is in charge of you and checking your test results.” He informed me I had further tests coming, and was not scheduled for discharge today or tomorrow.
My roommate was an affable old guy who’d had a stroke and collapsed on the floor of his kitchen. He was a lifelong bachelor and had come to after several hours and called the ambulance. He’d been in the joint 6 days but was scheduled to leave on Monday. We chatted a bit and he was interested to learn that I was American and living in Treignac, as he lived in Madranges a few km away. His French was a bit difficult to follow and it turned out he was Portuguese but had lived in the Correze since 1987. He had a portable radio and liked to blast it all day. His favorite program was a contest during which the announcer would play animal sounds. People would call in to guess the animal. “Nope, sorry, it’s not a dove, it’s a pigeon, you lose!” or “No this is not a pig, it’s a wild boar, better luck next time.”
On day 5 in the hospital I was still on bed rest. My muscles had atrophied and I was having spasms in my back from lying prone so long. I’d sat up to relieve the pain only to be clapped at and scolded by a nurse. When we’d left for the ER I’d brought a magazine in case we’d be there a while, and had read the entire thing the first morning. My wife brought me my tablet and several books to keep me busy, and while laid up I read even more than the typical daily allowance. My roommate had checked out and I’d actually had a couple nights of reasonable sleep. I’d made friends with most of the nurses and staff, and was joking a lot with the doctor who really regretted my situation. He wanted to release me but the neurologist was adamant that I should stay.
I was adjusting to the “food” served in hospital (the most edible thing all week was pureed peas with coriander). On Day 5 two interns arrived and rolled me out and up the elevator to another level. I was given an ultrasound of the neck to check for clots. After I was all lubed up and scanned the tech showed me my veins and arteries and declared me perfectly clear and healthy. “No signs of clots or even of plaque. You have the neck of a 20-year old, with nice flexible vertebrae.” So the anti-coagulants and mandatory bed rest were completely unnecessary! I was allowed to not only sit up, but to get out of bed and move around. I celebrated my new limited freedom by walking slowly and stiffly down the corridor from my room to the Christmas tree at the end of the hall and back. Then I had a sort of potato salad with vienna sausages mixed in for dinner.
Sitting up, and looking out the window–an unimaginable luxury
Friends visited and brought more books. I called my Mom and told her what was up and why I’d not told her days earlier. On day 6 I was walked downstairs by the doctor to another lab for an electroencephalogram. They attached a few dozen electrodes to my scalp and chest and then put on Pink Floyd and made me close my eyes. I had to breathe in different patterns and move my eyes in certain ways as they took readings. For ten minutes they flashed bright light patterns into my closed eyelids. Geometric patterns danced around my skull. I visited the Dark Side of the Moon and returned unscathed.
After the ECG I asked the doctor if I could go home. He gave me a wry smile and patted my shoulder. “The neurologist wants to do some more subtle cardiac assessments first.”
Day 7 and Day 8 were the same old same old, except that I was permitted to use the toilet and walk around on my own. Day 8 was the Friday before Xmas and I was starting to wonder if I’d be in hospital over the holidays. A nurse woke me at 5 am to drain another round of blood vials for further testing. They were looking at causes like epilepsy, migraine, tick-borne illness, MS, diabetes, but had found nothing. I had not been roofied at the bar. My blood pressure and pulse were healthy, my cholesterol was a bit high–but there was no indication as to what had caused my incident.
Around 9 am on Day 8 the doctor arrived and teased me by asking if I was prepared for another week in the hospital. I told him I would throttle the neurologist and he laughed and said many had promised to do so, it was why he stayed upstairs. My ECG results were completely normal, no sign of anything out of the ordinary. The neurologist had finally cleared me to go. They wanted me to consult with a cardiac specialist and a neurologist over the next few months but they’d found nothing to explain what had happened to me. French hospitals are the exact opposite of American hospitals, it turns out. Back home if they find nothing wrong after a superficial exam, they put your ass out on the street; over here they will search thoroughly and do every possible test to make sure there is no problem before sending you home.
I bathed myself, my IV line was removed, I changed into street clothes. I felt like a new man, reborn and full of strength and hope. After 8 days and nights of dismay and fear and uncertainty I was bursting with optimism. I took a last look at my prison cell, and even though it was cold and rainy and my wife would not be there to fetch me for another hour, I went outside and walked around the parking lot gleefully.
I’ve logged onto my national health web account and seen all of my test results. I have a lot of health data indicating that there is nothing wrong with me. As for the strange incident at the cafe last week, it remains a mystery. I did learn a lot of new French vocabulary in hospital, at the least!
On Friday December 15th I was riding high. We’d been to the Prefecture in Tulle the day before in order to retrieve our renewed visas–applying was a somewhat arduous process which took almost six months, and we were quite pleased to find our renewal was not only for one year, but for four.
We’d had a successful year with our gite rental business, and had also expanded to host several successful events including multiple concerts and a huge Christmas Festival. We were considering maybe getting away for a week to explore a new part of Europe to celebrate. All in all, our move to France appeared to be going quite well 1.5 years in.
We went to the Treignac Christmas market and ran into friends outside the Salle de Fete, and after a quick tour of the vendors decided to go to Cafe du Commerce for a quick coffee. As we made our loop around the market I’d had a strange kaleidescopic prism worm its way across the top of my left eye, after which I felt a bit out of sorts–a tad tired and grumpy. I chalked it up to being spent after so many days in a row of work and stress, and continued on my way.
At the Cafe we had a wide-ranging conversation about spirituality and shamanism and drugs and Jesuits and life on an Indian ashram. I’d continued to feel a bit out of sorts and then realized that I was having trouble forming words. I finished my point speaking to the Irishman to my left and remember thinking “well, just stop talking. Be polite and nod and smile, but take a rest from speaking.” I’d only had a coffee to drink, but felt as though I were intoxicated. I could see everyone and was able to follow the social niceties, nodding appropriately, smiling, laughing a few times, but I realized that the conversation had grown beyond my capacities to follow. My awareness, my conscient core, was shrinking rapidly. Everything grew dim, and the people around me were all faceless. I could only recognize their hair, it was too much to decode their faces. A friend across the table was speaking to me directly and I knew I was being addressed but had no idea what he was saying. He handed me his phone to show me something, I took it and mimed looking at it, and nodded, but could see nothing on the screen. I felt like I was becoming smaller and smaller, and yet my main concern was an adamant focus on not alarming anyone or causing some sort of scene.
I took out my own phone to occupy myself and found that I couldn’t read or understand its function. I leaned over to my wife and said something about “all these messages, I don’t understand them, who is messaging me” but I couldn’t hear what she was saying in reply and did not even know for sure if I’d spoken.
Another friend arrived and joined our group. I reached over and shook his hand and smiled but had no idea who he was. At this point I realized there was a dog at the table but I had no idea how it had got there, and then looking around I discovered that I didn’t know anyone’s names. I sat back down and my wife was saying something and clutching my arm and suddenly I snapped back to myself. She was saying “I’m taking you to the emergency room, you’ve had a stroke!”
My full awareness returned so suddenly and all at once that I responded indignantly “what are you talking about, I’m fine!” But as I stood to pay our bill I staggered a bit, and then could not summon the basic French to interact with the bartender. I managed to pay and walk out and the entire time my wife was hammering me about going to the Emergency Room, but I felt completely fine. I drove us home, where she kept telling me names of people I didn’t recognize at the bar, and I kept saying that either I didn’t know such a person or that they hadn’t been there. She got very frustrated with me and called our German friend who drove over to assess me himself. After he left thinking I was OK I drove us back to the friend’s house where we were staying while we babysat their hound dog. I fed the dog, let him out, and played with him, and then the entire episode came back to me. The confusion, the sense of shrinking awareness, the inability to follow or participate in a conversation, not recognizing familiar people.
I agreed to go to the ER in Tulle, and after explaining in French what had happened, was quickly taken in the back, given an EKG and an MRI and told that the results were normal/negative. I thought “Ok, no stroke, no aneurysm, I’ll be on my way!” But no, they took me upstairs, admitted me and kept me 8 days in the hospital.
Typically during a debate or argument I maintain my cool, and rarely get emotional even when provoked by claims I find distasteful or offensive. But last Thursday at dinner with friends I totally went off the rails during a debate about covid and vaccines and mask requirements. Perhaps it was the full Blue Super Moon pulling tides in my brain and causing me to lose it and show my exasperation? Whatever the cause, I regretted my display–which included repeated interruptions and a contemptuous tone and several loud “that’s not true” interjections. This behavior was disrespectful and atypical of how I usually handle such situations: listen quietly, seek to understand, and respond out of interest and love.
I was arguing that mask mandates and stay-at-home orders were perfectly understandable given the circumstances. Even ancient civilizations knew that when the pestilence came around it was best stay indoors until it passed. In retrospect we can see that some covid restrictions were too severe and perhaps even ridiculous (I had to sit behind a thick plexiglass wall at a desk while masked, for example, with a classroom of masked students present and the other half at home on the internet–definitely overkill). As for vaccines, I was all for them, and the idea that vaccines based on more than 40 years of laboratory research were “rushed” and were killing more people than the disease set me off. And when one friend suggested that covid was a hoax and not really serious and that hospitals were never overrun I went into the stratosphere. I heard a lot of “they’re saying” and “they know” arguments to which I kept responding “WHO, WHO says, WHO knows?” The evidence almost always was a slickly produced YouTube video, or a politician referring to one.
A friend said “I’m surprised you of all people would take the side of government agencies and defend Big Pharma.” This was a good angle of attack, and hit hard. But like Noam Chomsky, I see that there is a move underfoot by oligarchs and major corporations to undermine trust in public institutions because these are the only remaining restraint on the power of super-wealthy amoral elites whose avarice and contempt for law and ethics is having profound and perhaps irreversible impacts on not only the social fabric but perhaps the survival of humanity as a species. And like Chomsky, I know that even a long time skeptic and critic of government can realize that public agencies at least somewhat responsive to the will of the masses are the only brake we have on the continued destruction of Earth for profit. Yes, agencies like the FDA and CDC have been corrupted by Big Pharma and Big Insurance, but this is a simple tweak to fix by law. If the corruption comes from corporations, why blame the government agencies? Instead blame those who pull the levers and clean up the agencies with regulations about conflict of interest and ethics requirements.
Do I share skepticism of gigantic corporations like Pfizer and Moderna making billions of dollars from mandated vaccines? Of course I do. I don’t think medicines or health care should be for profit at all. I also respect suspicions that the vaccine was rushed, and particularly understand the reluctance of many people of color to get the vaccine given the long and sordid history of medical “experimentation” and abuse by authorities. But there is a great deal of wholesale quackery disseminated on the internet–remember how vaccines would magnetize your blood and make keys stick to your body? And a lot of the goofiness is given a veneer of scientific respectability by doctors who create videos on YouTube and get click/view money for saying unproven outrageous things to scare people to death (so they rush out and buy herbal supplements to counteract mythical side effects).
But I think a more important and often ignored moral and ethical question is why do these companies get all their R&D and testing paid for by public money and then they get to take government funded drugs and vaccines, patent them, make enormous profits from them while paying executives and stockholders huge dividends, while in turn they don’t even pay taxes. THAT is the real problem, and Big Pharma is certainly content to have people debating whether or not Dr. Fauci is a lizard being from the Pleiades or whether sheep medicine is a valid treatment instead of “why is the system rigged this way?”
All of this is my roundabout introduction to having seen the Oppenheimer film. I thought it was a strong attempt to address a lot of the concerns raised in our discussion last Thursday about science and ethics and who decides what is right or wrong, etc. Should we get vaccines during a raging pandemic because scientists and government officials say so? Or, more in line with the themes of the film: Should we detonate a device which the government wants but which has a close to zero chance of igniting the atmosphere of the entire Earth?
Oppenheimer was of course a brilliant scientist, but he was also steeped in the humanities and was well-aware of the ethical considerations complicating his work on the Manhattan Project. The continual butchery on two fronts during World War II, the likelihood that Nazi scientists were themselves close to the bomb and could give Hitler an unspeakable weapon, the ongoing Holocaust–all of this provided enormous impetus to successfully construct a nuclear bomb and test it first. But Oppenheimer was also a literary-minded guy who’d read his John Donne and Bhagavad Gita. He was also a socialist flirting with communism and had profound doubts about what might become of the United States if it had this ultimate weapon. These doubts were of course later shared by President Eisenhower as he left office. And the film makes it clear that the second use of the bomb in Oppenheimer’s opinion was unnecessary overkill and was even more likely than the first to provoke a disastrous arms race–which proved correct. (Of course Paul Fussell would disagree that the 2nd bomb should not have been dropped on Japan.)
Oppenheimer is a massive film and will sap all your energies, but if you like dense character studies full of moral ambiguity and difficult ethical questions, you will dig it. In its scale and tone it’s reminiscent of Scorsese’s long films with their questions about ethics and violence (think Taxi Driver, or The Silence, or Raging Bull, or even Bringing Out the Dead). I think all the performances were excellent, and appreciated the use of a brief interaction between Einstein and Oppenheimer as a bookend to the plot. This is clearly Christopher Nolan taking his best shot at a Best Picture nod, and he might pull it off. There are of course problems with the film–after the excitement of the bomb build-up, it’s difficult to reset and endure the political persecution of Oppenheimer by right-wingers and professional rivals which goes on for another hour. But this part of the story also must be told. And yes, because everything else is thrown in, Nolan should have at least mentioned or shown what happened to the residents of New Mexico, largely Latino and Native American, before and after the tests, and though the horrors unleashed on Japanese civilians are suggested in a kind of panic attack hallucinatory sequence, I’m not sure it’s an adequate portrayal particularly given the thematic concerns of the film and its focus on the dilemmas navigated by Oppenheimer, et al.
One of my dinner conversation adversaries pointed out that we might not know the answers to many of our questions about covid and vaccines for many years. And, just like the atom bomb, Pandora’s Box has been opened and we live with the consequences.
Side note: nice to see Robert Downey Jr without a goofy super her0 costume!
Another side note:Twin Peaks The Return Episode 8 is still the pre-eminent cinematic exploration of the ethical questions around the explosion of the first bomb. In the Twin Peaks universe the explosion results in the birth of Bob, a demonic character who causes some chaos in the small town. Bob–Robert Oppenheimer? Or Bomb? Or, Bob’s Big Boy?
A further side note: I’ve recently been re-reading books which had a profound impact on me as a young person. One of these is a volume of science fiction stories edited by Harlan Ellison called Again, Dangerous Visions. I’d just read two stories in the volume which were not sci-fi, but rather fiction with science involved. These were by Bernard Wolfe. One was about a woman who takes her poofy expensive pure-bred dog to witness a test of napalm at a local military base. Her dog gets immolated in the test, which is so sad and terrifying for her and the other witnesses who fail to make the leap that this stuff will be dropped on actual human beings elsewhere. The other was about sleep experiments gone awry. But at any rate Wolfe’s accompanying essay excoriates sci-fi authors and the scientists they idolize. Further, he damns US-style hyper- capitalism and its “fawning upon scientists” while exploiting them and “their fake charisma.” He thought scientists exploited by capitalists were set to unleash profound and unforseable horrors on the world, and bemoaned the privileging of science over the humanities. Like Colin Wilson used to say, the “library faeries” will drop the reading material you need in your lap when you need it.
Recently I’ve seen several articles about the dire consequences of continuous and increasing global nocturnal light pollution, not only on the ecology and natural systems and plant and animal species, but also on humans. It has become apparent that artificial light at night disrupts our physical and psychological well being in profound ways.
I’ve known this intuitively since I was a teenager. I grew up in a small town and enjoyed darkness at night. As a child in the yard on Main Street in Stewartstown, Pennsylvania it was possible to see the Milky Way overhead. This changed with the installation of bright mercury street lamps which illumined automatically at dusk and which stayed lit until dawn. After that, I found myself unable to sleep more than an hour or two at a time, and often woke and saw light on the ceiling and walls, an insidious unnatural silvery light which penetrated cracks between curtains and small holes in blinds. This made falling asleep again difficult. When I moved to even more rural Pennsylvania at age 7 we regained the Milky Way, and in the headlights of cars at night it was possible to see an impossible blizzard of flying insects.
As a teenager we lived in a very rural area away from any town, but the local community installed a terrible single sodium street light 20 meters outside my bedroom. Despite being filtered by an acre of woods it substantially affected my sleep patterns despite heavy dark curtains. Fed up, I disabled the lamp by bashing its power cables in with a baseball bat, and did so every time they repaired it.
Then for my entire adult life I lived in cities–Baltimore and its environs for more than 30 years, and Philadelphia for 2 years, and Panama City Panama for 4 years. I had miserable sleep patterns and suffered anxiety and manic depressive episodes. It was virtually impossible to filter out all of the artificial light at night.
My mother still lives in a remote rural corner of Pennsylvania, 30 minutes by car from cities or towns and in a nice wooded lot. And yet when I go outside her house at night the sky is not dark at all–there is murky orange glow all around the horizon from the continuous lighting in New Freedom, Shrewsbury, and York. Only a few very bright stars and planets are visible at all.
When I became a school teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools, the first thing I did to manage behavior in my classroom was to turn off the glaring and merciless fluorescent lighting and to put shaded and colorful and DIM lamps around the room. Other teachers noted how calm and productive my students were, but the administrators would often burst in and shriek at me and turn on the overhead lights. Immediately students would become agitated and go bonkers. Many of those poor kids in Baltimore have NEVER SEEN STARS OR PLANETS. It is impossible in the confines of the city to do so, because the sky is orange with light at night. When there are clouds they are illuminated a dark malevolent reddish hue.
We need darkness. We are designed to experience extended periods of darkness, and it is necessary for our natural rhythms and health, including physical and mental health–and I would add, our spiritual health! Being inside the house with lights off while glaring lights burn all around outside is not being in darkness. Plants, birds, animals, and insects need darkness–not what we’ve come to think of as darkness, but total, immersive night.
One of my favorite things about living in Treignac is that a law was passed here in the Correze last year forbidding the use of public electric lights between the hours of 11 pm and 6am. We now live in an International Dark Sky Reserve, and I love it. When we first purchased our house there was a glaring sodium lamp outside our front door lit all night, which unfortunately lit half our garden and wrecked an astonishing night sky view, and which cast an orange haze into our bedroom despite metal hand-cranked blinds and a curtain. Since the law was passed we have an incredibly clear night sky and the Milky Way is majestic arching directly above our building. For the first time in nearly 40 years I sleep 8 uninterrupted hours almost routinely. It’s delicious. I don’t feel the continuous jangly kind of nervous anxiety I always felt before. (Of course being self-employed and no longer in the USA hypercapitalist rat race might also be responsible for this improvement).
Recently an Englishman and I were discussing our appreciation for the new dark sky initiative, which not only heals and allows an appreciation of the beauties of the night sky, but also saves electricity. A friend chimed in and said she wanted the lights back on until at least midnight or 1 am. “If you were a woman you would understand. I like to walk home safely from the bar at night without fear of rape or other violence. Women and girls who carry torches at night are made into targets that way.”
I would never advocate for anything which might increase the likelihood of violence of any sort, and especially of violence against females. I grew up in a household where my father used violence against my mother, and where as a small child I would get pummeled for attempting to intervene. In fact, the town where I grew up had the attitude that this was OK. If my mother showed up at the grocer’s bruised or with a black eye, the women would say “wonder what she did to deserve that,” or “she must’ve spoke up when she shoulda shut up.” But I don’t think artificial lighting at night protects women and girls at all.
Every major urban area I’ve inhabited or visited worldwide is brightly lit all night every night. In Baltimore, for example, every alley, street, highway, park, garage, parking lot, yard and bridge is completely saturated with yellow, orange, or green light from dusk until dawn. Yet in these places rape and sexual violence have not stopped or been diminished at all. The idea that street lights staying on past 11pm will mitigate rape or sexual violence in a place like Treignac where it does not occur, while it has not done so in every major city globally is simply ludicrous. I’d argue that all this light at night provides a false sense of security, and that a woman or girl walking brightly lit spaces at night is actually more easily targeted than one using her cell phone to light a path. It’s far easier for a stalker to watch and plan an attack or abduction if everything is well-lit, and to find that one wooded area or dark lot where they can drag a victim off the lit street. In fact the area of Baltimore where girls end up abducted into trafficking at the highest rates is incredibly well-lit all night long.
I suggested that the bar should close BEFORE the lights turn off at 11 if you really want to protect girls and women from potential violence. This idea was scoffed at, but think about it. What fuels more violence against women than booze? Women drinking alcohol are more likely to be victimized, and men drinking alcohol are more prone to violence. Turn the damn lights off completely and even earlier I say, so we can all heal and dream. Go to the city to if you’d like to hang out in bars later, or drink in our pub and walk home under the stars. I will gladly escort anyone home who feels unsafe, and would post my phone number to do so, so long as we keep the lights off!
“But someone is going to fall and break a leg!” We don’t need to destroy the environment and our health in order to prevent someone from possibly breaking a leg.
Mysterium Coniunctionis 