Harold Brodkey on Spring

... from "The World is the Home of Love and Death"

Some prose written after the third kiss from her (and after the doctor took three stitches in my thumb).

I sit at her desk in her office looking out her large window: Give me the huge actual clouds of the Republic and not the meagre udders of water vapor painted on the old backdrops the Republic Studio used in John Wayne's day. We like the actual big baggy clouds of a New York spring. One doesn't want to flog a transiting cloud to death, but if we are to have sentimental light, let us have it at least in its obvious local form--dry, white, sere, and, I guess, provincial. The spiritual splendor of our drizzly and slaphappy spring weather, our streets jammed with sneezing pedestrians, our skies loony with bluster are our local equivalents of lilac hedges and meadows.

Blustery, raw and rare--and more wind-of-the-sea-scoured than half-melted St. Petersburg. Yuck to cities that have an immersed-in-swamp-and-lagoon moist-air light. They are for watercolorists. Where water laps at the edges of the stones and bricks of somewhat wavery real estate is not home. Home is New York, stony and tall: its real estate is real.

So is its spring.

More from Harold Brodkey HERE.

The Golden Ages of Travel Writing

Last week I began to wonder whether we are about to enter another golden age of travel writing, which may be another way of saying that we "live in interesting times." The world is in turmoil, in fact we may be at a major inflection point. There is upheaval in the Middle East, changes that once looked promising and now look like a long, grim road to an uncertain future. This week upheaval in Russia as well, and possibly in the near future in China too. There are a number of a small wars on the verge of commencing (here's hoping they don't). Some smaller, long-running conflicts continue. Travel is cheap and, for better or worse, where it once took Patrick Leigh Fermor a year to walk from the hook of Holland to Istanbul, one can now fly there from London in a few hours for a few quid... though perhaps something may be lost in that translation of time and space. For one thing, where we come from life is not cheap, though it is in some other parts of the world. For all of us, wherever we are, it is however short, as I was reminded by a friend just today. I now recall another time when this was brought home so sharply to me, when I was traveling in La Mancha, on a plain southwest of the town of Soria. The woman I was traveling with told me to stop the car and led me on a hike up the single hill on a wide plane... a mountain it began to seem, after a half hour of walking. Atop it was a castle fortress that had crumbled half to the ground and from which one could see on that clear summer day a score of miles across the plain.

"This must be what... five hundred years old?" I'd guessed that it had been destroyed during the reconquista.

She laughed, laughed knowingly, since she'd grown up near here and had gone to university in Valladolid.

"A thousand?!" Something shifted underfoot.

She shook her head. "Older."

"Whose was it?" She shrugged her shoulders.

That was a lesson, but the real lesson she offered there I missed and did not figure for some years.

Aside from cheap airfare, travel now is however wholly different in that with smart phones and email and globalization one never wholly leaves the known world behind. That's too bad, but you can always turn it all off and tell your loved ones the reception was bad.

This month in preparation for my own travels in the new year, to Mexico and Rome and elsewhere, I've been reading "Paddy" Fermor, Robert Byron (not the lord and poet, but the writer and traveler whose rucksack Fermor borrowed when he set off on his own tramp in 1933), along with Norman Lewis and other British travel writers.

One editor, Lorin Stein, recently noted that the English tend to be good at this genre, and its true that late Victorian British travel literature, and the work of those British writers mentioned above is superb, but in fact Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi," a best-seller in its time and a work to put alongside his classic "Huck Finn," is a kind of travel book, and I've just downloaded to kindle Twain's "Innocents Abroad." Hemingway's short stories and novels, though fictional, could be considered travel literature. A few years after he published the Knickerbocker Tales, his quintessential New York work, Washington Irving lived in Granada, Spain, working in the consulate there and residing in one of the apartments carved out of the ruins of the Alhambra. His account, "Tales of the Alhambra" (1832), is essential reading before visiting. Through Irving one can see that, the most beautiful palace in the world, not as it stands today, wonderfully restored, but instead lit up at night, spectral, illumined by the dozens of open-air fires that gypsies and other neighbors made and huddled around in the ruined palace's crumbling rooms left open to the sky. Oh, and then of course there is Paul Theroux, author of the classic about train travel through China is still at work today.

In future posts I'll be writing about Camilo Jose Cela, the early twentieth-century Spanish novelist and travel writer, and Cees Nooteboom, the contemporary Dutch novelist and travel writer, but for now here is a wonderful reminiscence by Josh Lieberman, from the Paris Review Daily, about a great American magazine, Holiday, that once published travel literature for a wide audience.

Here’s how it begins. You are in a bookstore on the main drag of a small town. You walk along the mystery and western paperback sections, and then you see a wicker basket overflowing with Life magazines. You idly flip through the stack because you know Life was once an important cultural force but have never seen the magazine in person. The copies of Life are musty and torn, and in the middle of the heap you come across something called Holiday. It has the same heft as Life, more than a foot tall and surprisingly heavy, but in place of a black-and-white photograph on the cover there is a colorful swirling yellow illustration of the sun and the words “California Without Cliches.” The magazine is from 1965 and you think it would look good on your coffee table. Also the ads are campy and fun (“San Diego Is a See-Do Vacationland!”), so you buy the magazine—why not, it’s only a few bucks—and take it home. You turn on the TV and half watch Seinfeld as you flip through for the ads. Then you come upon “Notes from a Native Daughter,” the Joan Didion essay you read in college but don’t really remember. You read how California is only five hours from New York by jet but really that is just a delusion: “California is somewhere else.” Now you are somewhere else. Seinfeld ends and another Seinfeld begins and you read the entire essay and then discover a piece by Ray Bradbury, your old pal from high school English. You read his rhapsodic paean to Disneyland (“No beatniks here. No Cool people with Cool faces pretending not to care, thus swindling themselves out of life or any chance for life”), and you think that’s pretty good, too. You head back to the bookstore to see if they have any more issues of Holiday.

Whenever I mention to someone that I’ve started collecting old issues of Holiday, the excellent yet forgotten monthly travel magazine that was born after World War II and lived until the late seventies, the response generally falls between bafflement and irritation. “Why would you do that?” people ask, as though I’ve just admitted to hoarding old shoehorns or something truly sinister.

Holiday was composed of almost all long-form travel essays—it was not, like many modern travel magazines, list after list of where to eat, shop, and sleep. (There would be little point or pleasure in reading a 1957 Holiday if it were just about where to get the best goulash.) A handful of the pieces are dated, but, like the greatest travel writing, many are timeless. After all, plenty of people still read The Great Railway Bazaar and Travels with Charley, not to mention the roughly 150-year-old Innocents Abroad.

The most puzzling thing about the lost history of Holiday is that the magazine published so many famous writers: Joseph Heller, Irwin Shaw, Arthur C. Clarke, E. B. White, Arthur Miller, Gay Talese, Paul Bowles, Steinbeck, Saroyan, Kerouac, Cheever, O’Hara, Bellow, Thurber, Faulkner.

But more than the essays by major writers, what I find most fascinating about Holiday is the articles by little-known, or totally unknown, authors. In my first issue of Holiday... I came upon an essay by Romain Gary.

Gary’s essay, published in 1967, is a relatively straightforward travelogue about Guadeloupe, the southernmost archipelago in the Caribbean, but it ends with one of those anecdotes you find yourself recalling at odd intervals in the following days and weeks. As part of Gary’s trip he plans to visit an old Royal Air Force buddy from whom he hasn’t heard in twenty years...

Read the rest of that tale, and the whole of Lieberman's wonderful piece HERE.

And see Paris Review editor Lorin Stein's indefensible characterization of travel writing as an English genre HERE. I encourage you to give him a piece of your mind on that score. Their comment section is open, his email address is available.

Some hot-links to the books mentioned here:

Mark Twain's LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI, and INNOCENTS ABROAD.

Ernest Hemingway's Short Stories, THE SUN ALSO RISES, A MOVEABLE FEAST, and ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES.

Washington Irving's TALES OF THE ALHAMBRA.

Paul Theroux's THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR.

Camilo Jose Cela's JOURNEYS IN THE ALCARRIA.

Cees Nooteboom's ROADS TO SANTIAGO.

Elizabeth Bishop's Vision

"Off and on I have written out a poem called 'Grandmother's Glass Eye' which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of the poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye."

... thanks to the heroic Jeannie Vanasco for sending this.

Unacknowledged Legislators

I'll soon again begin posting admired poems and thoughts about poetry at Unacknowledged Legislators. A hat-tip here to the heroic Jeannie Vanasco, who sends me most of the best that will be appearing.

A further thought on the subject from Charles Borgen:

"Literature, at its best, bridges gaps of experience and culture. It helps you stand in another’s shoes. If one of the things we, as international lawyers, care about is a just world then fostering an understanding of each other’s views is an important step in that direction, regardless as to whether we actually agree with those views. You cannot let rhetoric bury nuance, anger bury analysis. Anger can spur great literature and righteous anger can be the seed of political reform, but great literature and just policies are more than angry reactions. Writers (and international lawyers) are fortunately not the world’s legislators. But both can have a profound influence in how we understand and shape our world."

Jeffrey Eugenides - A Very Short Story

Defenestrated baby, methamphetamine, prison, rehab, relapse.

# 30 #

A Look Back at Avenue A

Had coffee on Avenue A in the East Village recently. Saw baby carriages… on Avenue A. All tidier than when years ago I put together a reading series at Limbo Café. I dug out the list of writers… they hold up. Will link to the books from which they read.

Mona Simpson, James Lasdun, Charlie Smith, Dale Peck, Barry Yourgrau, Harold Brodkey, Dan Stern, Jonathan Dee, A.M. Homes, Diane Williams, Fran Lebowitz, Veronica Geng, Susan Minot, Bradford Morrow, Walter Abish, Richard Price, Jeff Eugenides, John Richardson, Marianne Wiggins, Kelvin Christopher James, Thomas Beller, Edwidge Danticat, Michael Cunningham, Darcy Steinke, Iva Pekarkova, Lucy Grealy, Richard Howard, Colm Toibin, Donald Antrim, Stig Larsson , Paul Watkins, Billy Collins, Mary Karr, Robert Antoni, Aga Shahid Ali, William Wadsworth, Garry Indiana, Rick Moody, Helen Shulman, David Foster Wallace, Michael Collins, Mark Leyner, Victor Erofiev, Kathryn Harrison, Mark Richard, Ana Castillo, A Frank O'Hara Tribute , Robert Olen Butler , Patrick McCabe, Michael Drinkard, Sophie Cabot Black, Randall Kenan, Martha McPhee, Glen Savan, Amanda Filipacchi, Jordan Orlando, Walter Mosley , Edward P. Jones, Jim Lewis, Frederic Tuten, Brooks Hansen, Jennifer Egan, George Plimpton , Thomas Bolt, Caleb Carr, Vince Passaro, Douglas Bauer, Patrick McGrath, Maggie Estep, Allen Kurzweil, Ted Mooney, Tibor Fischer , Walter Kirn, Michael Hornburg , Irvine Welsh , Maritza Perez, Amy Hempl, William T. Vollmann, Gordon Lish, Sandra Scofield, Darcy Steinke, Francine Prose, Bev Jafek, Lisa Fugard, Stephen Wright, Susan Power, Anne-Christine D'Adesky, Geoffrey O'Brien, Scott Malcomson, Peter Reading, David Lehman, Brooke Stevens, Todd Komarnicki, Peter Carey, Dani Shapiro, Jacqueline Deval, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Stephen Dixon , Carol Maso, John Ashbery, Brett Easton Ellis , Thom Jones, Stephen Wright, Colm Toibin, Harry Mathews, Noy Holland, David Bowman, Kevin Canty, Andrew Solomon, Don DeLillo, Amy Bloom, Paul Beatty, Peter Eisenman, Tobias Wolff, David Guterson, Junot Diaz

Fiction pod-casts from The New Yorker

... not that they need a plug from me, but The New Yorker are now doing fiction reading podcasts. I love this. You can too, here.

Brooklyn Bridge at 125

Today the Brooklyn Bridge turns 125 years old. And it looks so good I'd buy it. As Hart Crane wrote: "O, harp and altar of the fury fused/ How can mere toiling align thy strings?"

Photo courtesy of the G. G. Bain Collection, Library of Congress.

Insta-lanche! For which nod thank you, GHR.

Meant for Each Other, a story by Barry Yourgrau

You make a date through the Internet. You meet the girl for the first time at a sake bar. She gulps down a whole bottle of sake by herself. “Okay,” you think. “I guess we know what sort of problem she has. But man, is she cute.”

After two more bottles, the girl falls asleep on her bar stool. “That’s our sweetheart,” grins the bartender, shaking his head at the girl’s snores.

“You mean you know her?” you inquire, uneasily.

“Sure, she’s here every night, with a different guy,” says the bartender. “Whoopee, whoopee.” He winks.

“Really,” you reply. You eye the unconscious girl slumped headfirst on the bar counter. And you decide no matter how cute she is, this first date will also be the last,thank you very much.

And this is how you two meet, you and the love of your life. Four months later you get married and move into a lovely apartment together, where you start to raise a large and happy family.

How you get from point A to point B is a long, complicated, heart-warming, and in many ways wonderfully unbelievable story. But alas it requires someone with far greater narrative powers than mine to properly relate.

... and NOW more than ever

Before he was a business guru, author, and father of "Envirobabe" Nora M., Michael Maccoby devised and led the #1 college prank of the 20th Century as ranked by Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1953, Maccoby, then President of the Harvard Crimson, with the help of fellow staffers David Halberstam and George Abrams, stole the sacred stone Ibis from atop the building of its rival The Lampoon, the Harvard humor magazine know for ITS pranks. In tit-for-tat retaliation, the Lampoon, led by its then-president John Updike, kidnapped Maccoby. Two days later, at a proposed exchange on a bridge spanning the Charles (it was the height of the Cold war, after all), the Crimsonians did a double-cross and drove off with both Maccoby and the Ibis, heading south, with Updike and company in hot pursuit. Arriving in New York, the Crimson trio quickly organized a press conference and announced that in honor of John Reed, a former Lampoon President turned lefty journalist and the only American buried in Red Square, Harvard was donating the treasured Ibis to the Moscow State University. Newspapers splashed the story next day, with page one of the New York Times proclaiming: "Harvard gives Soviets the Bird.”
Today Maccoby publishes his tenth book, THE LEADERS WE NEED. And now more than ever...

Rugby Widow by Janine di Giovanni

We are now down to the final countdown of the World Cup semifinal. This is good news because I have not seen my husband in ten days, and I no longer have a family life.
He disappeared a few weekends ago to go to Wales for the big France-New Zealand match, and has not been seen since. Nor have I spoke to him, because he no longer has a voice. He screamed so hard when France defeated the All Blacks that he bruised his vocal cords. All that night, someone kept phoning me but I kept hanging up because there was nothing but croaking on the other end.
Then I left for New York and he was meant to come back home and take charge of our child. Instead, my three-year old son was found dancing in a suit and tie at a Filipino wedding on the outskirts of Paris with his nanny, Raquel.
“Where is my husband?” I asked Raquel, when I phoned transatlantic ally.
“He said he went to the rugby,” she said.
He did eventually return home, and his voice has returned, huskier and two octaves lower. Now he is spending his early mornings with the French team who are in training at the Stade de France. And he has gotten himself into a total state over Saturday’s match, so bad that he can’t sleep at night with nervous anticipation, and is smoking even more than usual.
France will win, he predicts: “It’s the revenge of 2003 when the bloody Brits beat us,” he says. “I hope we gonna humiliate them.”
Humiliation is the key here. Like a lot of Frenchmen, England is my husband’s nemesis, “Our best enemy,” as he describes them. While he will admit to liking Monty Python or Sting, he often mocks me for my British passport. If he is really annoyed with me, he calls me a “bloody rosbif” – the worse insult he can come up with. If pressed about why he does not like England, he will say: “They drink beer and eat pudding! And they are vicious players.”
But even he admits a soft spot for Johnny Wilkinson, the team captain. The one match I watched, I said: “He’s cute! Doesn’t he look like Prince Harry?”
My husband looked at me with disdain. “What are you talking about? Cute? This is a man, a real man. He’s a fantastic player, a remarkable player.”
Now Wilkinson is his greatest fear, his bête noir. “He’s the key to the match,” he says miserably. “I hope Chabal is going to crush him.”
Chabal is the hairy yet sexy monster on the French team nicknamed “the anaesthesiologist” because everyone he touches gets put to sleep, permanently.
Being totally outside the frame of rugby, I find it hilarious and ironic that France is playing England. It would have been so much easier if it was Argentina or Fiji. But no, playing England means so much is at stake for the French. Their massive egos, for starters. How can they face themselves if the red-faced “rosbifs” win? Will another Hundred Years war begin?
So many Frenchwomen have lost their husbands over this past month, and this weekend it all ends. There’s something anticlimactic to it. But it all could end horribly wrong. On the Air France flight flying back from New York to Paris on Wednesday night, I noticed that nearly every man was reading L’Equipe, the sports newspaper, and all of them were focused on something to do with England. All of the women looked neglected and bored.
“It will be a terrible thing if they win,” whispered the man next to me. “I think that France will not recover.”
After tomorrow, my life returns. I will have a husband again, and gradually his voice will return to normal.
If France wins, he will be in a great mood and I plan on asking him several delicate requests I had put off during the tense rugby period. But if France loses… well, I’ve got a spare Eurostar ticket tucked in my drawer for emergency purposes.
Posted to TMP with author's permission by JSL

Rugby, Husbands, Paris, etc... by Janine di Giovanni

… a recent missive from TMP's Paris-based friend and correspondent…

A few months ago, my husband came home and calmly announced: "It's the rugby world cup this year so you won't see me for a few months."
Whatever. Rugby, like most sports, means nothing to me. I grew up in a household of four brothers, all athletes, and a father who was a track and field star. I was, and am, a terrible athlete. The worse tennis player, a pathetic ice skater, a mediocre skier, a panting runner.
More important, I hate sports on television. The racket of my brothers crammed in a room watching The Super Bowl left scars. All that testosterone turned me into a bookworm who hid in the kitchen baking cookies with my mother.
There are many reasons men and women are different species, and this is one of them. Why would anyone sit in front of a box watching bulky men kick around a ball when you can read a good book, take a walk or lie in the bath?
And so, it was my karmic fate to marry a man who was the French equivalent of my brothers. There is not an ounce of feminine yin in him, not a touch of metro sexual. And Rugby is the most male of all sports. It is, as one male friend (gay) told me, "American football without padding."
I did not realise how serious my husband was about the rugby until a few weeks after his declaration, when he said he was leaving for New Zealand. He was going to film a mythic group of men called the All Blacks for about three weeks. It had been his dream since he was 12 years old and a budding rugby player in Burgundy. His father took him to Paris to see the All Blacks.
"They are masters," he says in the same reverent voice he talks about the Cohen brother films or the trumpet player Lee Morgan.
We do not have a conventional marriage, or life, for that matter, so I did not complain, and off he went for three weeks. He packed his cameras and left whistling for the airport. I don't think, aside from the day we got married (I like to think) I have ever been so happy.
"Do you understand what this means?" he said. "it's the ALL BLACKS."
What is weird is that my husband is a journalist like me who usually reports foreign affairs and conflicts for a major French television network. He was the Africa correspondent for years and is more at home in a coup d'etat than interviewing rugby stars.
A few months ago, he interviewed Mohammed Ahmedinejad, the Iranian president who is impossible to get an interview with. He called me from Teheran totally blasé.
But the All Blacks, no, that to him was a real score, more important than Iran building a nucelar weapon. Even their name, dark and sinister boggles my mind. My husband shows me a film of them doing something called The Haka. It’s an aggressively fierce dance meant the opposing team. They remind me of the monsters in my son’s book WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE.
It was all so weird that I did not believe Bruno had really gone half way round the world to meet them until he started calling me from Auckland.
When he came back, he had ALL BLACK t-shirts for my son, and him (not for me, I got some kind of Maori necklace) and they sat together like a different breed watching rugby DVDs and hooting. My son is three.
And so, rugby has divided the males and lone female in my household. And I think I am not the only woman experiencing this. The country is engulfed in Rugby fever. At the Galleries Lafayette, the Harrod's of Paris, there is an evening of Rugby dating planned for single fans so no one feels left out.
And every metro stop I passed today had a pink or purple poster with weird 1960s lettering: PARAMOUR DU RUGBY 1987-2007. Paramour du Rugby? For the love of rugby? Where does all this passion come from? WHAT ABOUT ME?
"Rugby," my wise friend Ariane explained to me when I whined. "is the yuppie sport, the more chic sport. Everyone is following it these days because it's cool. Football is for peasants."
My husband confirmed this, sort of. "It is bobo," he said, using the French term for bohemian beaugoise, which I guess is what people in Notting Hill are (and I guess what we are). "but it also has roots in the LAND." He talked about the roots in the Southwest where Basque players are short, dark and bulky. "REAL MEN," he said.
I try to enlighten myself. In bed, I read Suite Francaises, a weepy romantic novel, while he reads the sports pages of Le Journal du Dimanche. He pointed out that there is a new book I might buy, written by a wife of a rugby player called LE PETIT GUIDE DU RUGBY POUR LES FILLES. "It will help you," he said sweetly.
I am not so sure. Still, as each day goes by I watch him transformed by the excitement of the world cup, into a different being. He even told me that Poilane, the famous French bakery on Rue du Cherche Midi, has a bread baked into a rubgy ball and perhaps I should buy one.
Rugby has also brought out a sexist side to him.
"Can I go with you to a rugby match?" I asked when he left to go to meet his film crew for a "rugby meeting."
"No." he said. "it's not a game for little girls."
I would like to point out that I am 5'8", nearly the same size as him. And before we were married, when we were posted on the same reporting assignments, I was always the one who managed to get further to any front line, much to his annoyance. So much for little girls.
But I do have a secret weapon. He's called Sebastian Chabal, aka The Caveman or The Anesthesiologist (because if he touches you, you're down for the count). All over France, neglected World Cup women have fallen in love with him. He plays for the French team and is beautiful, in a scary, Neanderthal kind of way.
"He's a monster," my husband sneered.
Still, I detect jealousy. Perhaps The Caveman has had the desired effect. My husband asked me out on a romantic date tonite, just the two of us, and no rugby in sight.

Janine Di Giovanni is the author of "The Place at the End of the World" and other books. Posted to TMP by JSL

Caleb Carr: "Life in the Double Lightning Bolts"

TMP received this note from occasional contributor Caleb Carr, in response to Gunter Grass’s wartime memoir, excerpted in this week’s “New Yorker” magazine. He writes:

It bears repeating that the unit Grass joined, 10th SS Panzer, was one of the most vicious at that time, responsible for some of the most serious war crimes at the end of the conflict. There's almost no way that he could himself have played no part in those crimes. Important mostly because of what it tells us about so much of the elder German intellectual leadership today, and the underpinnings of its anti-U.S. moral posturing.

First, as to the facts of Grass' case: 10th SS Panzer Division and its sister, the 9th, were called into being toward the end of the war as prime examples of desperation units. The average age of their troops was reportedly eighteen, but it was well-known that many were a good deal younger, and some were quite a bit older. Their first task, significantly, was to try to plug the proliferating leaks on the Eastern front. Now, a word about the Eastern front: Especially toward the end of the war, the German practice of shipping all "undesirables," i.e. nearly all indigenous peoples and certainly all Jews, gypsies, Poles, and anyone displaying personal "imperfections" back to Germany for slave labor was increasingly giving way to the practice of executing such people in larger and larger numbers on the spot. As Anthony Beevor makes irrefutably clear in his masterful study of "Stalingrad," there was NO German soldier -- regular army, SS, Waffen SS, whatever -- who did not or could not know about all these programs, no matter how hard he tried, and no German officer who did not know of the details. Therefore, to assert that Grass could have been involved in action on the Eastern front, especially in a Waffen SS division, yet simply have been a dutiful soldier ignorant of what was going on around him... It doesn't work. You would have a much harder time making that case for someone working in Abu Ghraib and not knowing what Lynndie England and her boyfriend(s) were up to; and, as some of you have so indignantly pointed out, that case can't be made, either.

But let's say that Grass joined 10th SS Panzer later, after it returned to Germany; it was then involved in the follow-up offensive to the Battle of the Bulge, "Nordwind," during which it came under the PERSONAL command of Heinrich Himmler. If anyone is in any doubt as to what that means in practical terms, let's just say that on at least one occasion a surrounded American armored unit was driven to any and every extreme to avoid massacre -- the same kind of massacre that Waffen SS troops had committed at Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge. No one familiar with the Waffen SS will be surprised by any of this; it is only the worst kind of Nazi freaks and biker morons that keep the imagery and "romance" of the fighting arm of Himmler's private army alive; for the rest of us, the mere fact that Grass chose to join ANY unit of the Waffen SS is sufficient to nullify any social commentary he may have chosen to make during the rest of his life, UNLESS he had chosen to admit his past FIRST.

An entire generation of now-senior German intellectuals have, to a very large extent, ignored their own history (whether during the war or after it, when their mistreatment of Muslims created the problems that Europe is now faced with) while focusing on every misdeed of the United. In truth, the German intelligentsia since the war, as Grass has revealed, have practiced the same techniques that their nation perfected before and during the war.

-- C.C.

a peek back at Avenue A

This post has been moved to HERE.

That Sounds like Zombie #1 from THE BRAIN EATERS

Something struck me as eerie about Jonathan Lethem's recent New Yorker short story, "Lucky Alan." The character Sigismund Blondy, when he speaks, sounds an awful lot like Hampton Fancher, the actor ("The Brain Eaters" of 1958, etc...) and screenwriter ("Blade Runner," etc...).

I suspect this is no coincidence.

The shortest stories

Ernest Hemingway once said his best work was a story he wrote in just six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Here, by the likes of DBC Piere and Jeff Eugenides, are some other such flash fictions.

Thanks to the all-knowing Chloe Bass, TMP's L train correspondent, for the referral.

Dalrymple celebrated again

Saturday yet another party for William Dalrymple and his deservedly-lauded "The Last Mughal," a chronicle of the Indian uprising of 1857. Dalrymple admitted lamentingly that he had, perhaps, the highest ratio of parties to reviews of any writer he knew. I'd go on but my companion, the anony-blogger Libertylondongirl, details the evening here, and I put together my blog so slowly that I could be scribbling it in my own blood without hurting myself.

Oh, Orhan Pamuk is taller than I'd imagined.

William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal

Only March but it's like beach season in NYC. If I were headed to the beach this weekend I'd be taking William Dalrymples's "The Last Mughal," the ambitious and definitive account of the 1857 uprising in Dehli. Just begun, the writing brilliant, a volume of great heft. Even more appropriate for a beach in Kerala.

A Bengali friend in Delhi writes me about the response there to the book:

"The big deal in India was that he claimed that he was the first person to look at all the material sitting in the delhi archives and really use them properly in a book - he was right and of course lots and lots of prickly Indian historians were up in arms. Their objection was that you shouldn't touch an archive unless you could read the stuff yourself, and who was will, just an upstart English travel writer who had got himself a translator. But as he said, not being able to read urdu and old urdu, shouldn't stop you from using the most amazing archival material. And that the problem with Indian historians is that many of them are caught up in these finer matters and thus miss out on the gems of material all around them. That it took an upstart foreigner to uncover some of them... Its hit a huge nerve but whats interesting is that the change this book has made here...people are actually beginning to talk about writing narrative history now which they would have scorned for not being serious enough in the past."

Janine DiGiovanni: Paris Notebook

Like all my Parisian friends, I’ve been exhausted for years. Our reasons vary from small children to an abundance of mistresses. Indeed one recent study shows that one third of the French population does not sleep enough. According to one psychiatrist, insomnia is “the language of distress.” And this being France, the government has decided to step in.

Earlier this month, Xavier Bertrand, the Health Minister, launched a seven-million-euro campaign to study the link between chronic fatigue and job performance. People should nap more, he says, even during the work day. His view is backed by the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, which says even three naps a week after lunch reduce the chances of dropping dead from a heart attack.

“Why not nap at work?” Bertrand says. “It can’t be taboo.”

Only in France. This is a country that already has a 35-hour work week and plenty of vacation. The French also have a higher absentee rate at work than the British or Americans. So how will imposing a siesta change their laziness?

In the Mediterranean or parts of Central America, the siesta is the norm. It is proven they have lower rates of heart disease. But these are cultures which don’t multi-task, don’t do Blackberries while walking down the street and eating lunch at the same time, and don’t produce Richard Bransons or Warren Buffets.

Years ago, a senior hack at my Wapping office gve me a tip. The nurse’s office had a couch. You could feign a migraine and go to relieve your hangover for five minutes. I did it once, but felt tremendously guilty.

But the French, as my friend Jean-Jacques often tells me, “suffer no guilt.” It’s not that they are shameless - they just have a different code. The right to sleep is linked to the French culture in the same way that food and good wine, good medical care and good schools are.

Workers would be annoyed if they did not get their employer-provided luncheon vouchers. And now workers will be annoyed if they don’t get their naps.

I will never forget the day my husband, who works for a major television network in Paris, took me to his newsroom. Then he showed me a unmarked door down the hall, which opened on to a double bed made up with paper sheets.

The room was “officially” for exhausted reporters pulling all-night shifts. “But unofficially, come on, you know what it’s used for.” He then recounted two graphic stories about reporters and their trainee journalists. “It’s better than using the loo, isn’t it?” he shrugged.

This, I fear, will be the future if M. Bertrand gets his way: government-approved naps and a new vogue for workplace affairs. It will be quite exhausting.

Professor of Law Chris Borgen on "unacknowledged legislators"

Literature, at its best, bridges gaps of experience and culture. It helps you stand in another’s shoes. If one of the things we, as international lawyers, care about is a just world then fostering an understanding of each other’s views is an important step in that direction, regardless as to whether we actually agree with those views. You cannot let rhetoric bury nuance, anger bury analysis. Anger can spur great literature and righteous anger can be the seed of political reform, but great literature and just policies are more than angry reactions. Writers (and international lawyers) are fortunately not the world’s legislators. But both can have a profound influence in how we understand and shape our world.