Stingy Kids

Travel Guide

On some trips, I am content to be a tourist. I browse numerous travel guides and make long lists of places I usually never get too. I've always been surprised on my travels but I don't shun entirely the comfort of a packaged itinerary. In late April 2002, after two months of traveling in Italy and Spain, I headed to the Alhambra, my last stop before leaving Western Europe. The onset of an illness that would later strike full-force in Lithuania had made me very tired and impatient. I wasn't in the mood for the gradual discovery of a place. For the first time in my traveling life, I rented an audio guide. I'll never regret it. From 1826-29, Washington Irving worked for the U.S. Embassy in Madrid (he would later serve as Ambassador from 1842-45). During this time, he visited the Alhambra repeatedly and kept a thorough record of the stories he was told, which he published in 1832 under the title The Alhambra. The tour consisted almost exclusively of these stories.

I had no such book for Jerusalem (or Israel, for that matter). I read everything from biblical descriptions to a Let's Go guide, but in the end, these texts never conveyed a fraction of what I eventually saw and experienced here. But I also had three years to trace and retrace this city. I had time to learn the city's stories at my own pace. Had I felt that it would be a short trip (I always suspected otherwise), I might have been more willing to travel along well-beaten paths. I certainly would have been a swifter traveler.

But if I did have to recommend a book to a weary tourist, I would suggest Israel, A Traveler's Companion, edited by Michael Gluzman and Naomi Seidman. Unlike Irving's collection, this book will not tell you to look at a crumbling tower and imagine the tragic love story that occurred inside. Instead, it explores different types of Israelis in the spaces of their daily lives: a Druze village, a kibbutz, a motel room, the inside of an apartment. It moves from the general to the particular, like a traveler with a lot of time to explore. In the end, a partial portrait of Israel emerges, both familiar and strange. The best traveling will yield these results.

Derrider

Author's bio found in Omphalos, the literary journal of the Hebrew University's English department (c. 1988):

At present I am working on the second volume of "Truck Drivers' Questions to Jacques Derrida" (tentatively titled: "Yo! Mistuh Derrider"). My future ambition is to put out a Classics comics edition of Hayim Vital's Sefer Etz Chaim."

A Google search tells me that no such works came into existence.

Guantanamera

Poetry has inspired some of my favorite music. Debussy's "Prelude to L'après-midi d'un faune" comes to mind, as does Celia Cruz's version of "Guantanamera," which is based on poems by Cuban poet José Martí. Martí's Versos Sencillos, a collection of 46 poems, begins famously with the line "Yo soy un hombre sincero," as does "Guantanamera." The original "Guantanamera" is actually an amalgamation of three poems from Versos Sencillos: stanzas 1 and 2 of "Yo soy un hombre sincero" (poem 1), the last stanza of "Yo quiero salir del mundo" (poem 23), and the first stanza of "Tiene el leoporda un abrigo" (poem 45). "Guantanamera" was written sometime in 1940 and first recorded in 1941. Since then, it has inspired over 150 versions.

In honor of Cruz, who died this past past Wednesday, I have posted the last four stanzas of Martí's "Yo soy un hombre sincero":

Oculto en mi pecho bravo La pena que me lo hiere: El hijo de un pueblo esclavo Vive por él, calla y muere.

Todo es hermoso y constante,
Todo es música y razón,
Y todo, como el diamante,
Antes que luz es carbón.

Yo sé que el necio se entierra
Con gran lujo y con gran llanto.
Y que no hay fruta en la tierra
Como la del camposanto.

Callo, y entiendo, y me quito
La pompa del rimador:
Cuelgo de un árbol marchito
Mi muceta de doctor.

Links:
*English translation of the four verses
*English translation of Versos Sencillos
*José (Joseito) Fernández Díaz, author of the original "Guantanamera"
*Dean Reed sings "Guantanamera"

Monstrous Others

The inaugural issue of Equinoxes, a graduate journal of French and Francophone studies published by Brown University, is devoted entirely to theme of monstrosity:

Les vrais monstres - les plus affreuses aberrations que la nature ait produites - ne sont ni vrais, ni naturels, mais sont plutôt de pure facture humaine. Ils doivent ainsi leur belle pérennité dans l'imaginaire collectif à une seule caractéristique essentielle : l'absence.

In effect, in classic academic parlance, the conjuring up of Frankensteins, Nessies, Big Foots, and Bartmanns, the projection of the monstrous onto others represents a purging. The monster is a shadowy repository for the unspoken, unspeakable, unthinkable, undoable-our desires, fears, demons. Like the proverbial cat, the monster is out of the bag. Our monsters and we are in fact one.

If you have time to read only one article, Alexa Wright's visual study of the "monstrous" body is a stunning work. Wright's interest in monsters began when she chanced upon an image of the mythic Monstrous Races in a library book. Sightings of these monstrous beings, who were believed to live "beyond the edge of the world," date as far back as the 4th century BCE. Alexander the Great even claimed to have seen them.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, monsters and monstrosities found strange lodgings in the European Wunderkammern, precursors of the modern museum. Tsar Peter I (the Great) of Russia encountered these "cabinets of curiosities" in his first trip through Western Europe and determined to have his own. Inspired by Dutch surgeon and anatomist Fredrick Ruysch, who had one of Western Europe's most impressive collections of anatomical specimens, he returned to Russian and set out in search of monsters. In 1718, he issued a special decree calling for "monstrosities" (e.g., siamese goat feti, etc.) and paid handsomely for these specimens. The remains of his vast collection (which included Ruysch's specimens) can be found today in a special wing of St. Petersburg's Kunstkamera.

With the exception of V, Friday the 13th-The Series was the best show on televsion. The premise was simple but terrifying: an antiques collector strikes a pact with the devil, unwittingly cursing every object in his shop. After his "death," his heirs sell off the items, only to discover that they have unleashed EVIL into the world. Each episode featured a particular object they sought to recover (usually, with great success). This show foreshadowed (and probably inspired) my interest in curious things, or vice-versa. A (desiccated) chicken and an egg would be among the first objects in my "cabinet de curiosités."

Links:
*The New York Academy of Medicine
*Pliny's Historia Naturalis
*NYC's Cabinet of Curiosities (press release for last year's exhibit)
*More!

Q & A

I knew I had the talent. When I was fifteen I was picking out clothes that I would wear when I became a successful writer. I was sure I'd make it, but you have to learn the craft, how to tell the story.—Mary Higgins Clark

Powell's Books—Porland, Oregon's "legendary" independent bookstore—has an excellent series of author interviews up on their website. Anne Patchett, Michael Chabon, and Susan Orlean are among the many writers who have visited Powell's in the past few years and taken a moment to talk to Dave Weich about their particular writing life.

Paul Greenberg's Leaving Katya has encouraged me to read more contemporary fiction, though I'm sceptical that I'll find many books that will match the quality of his debut. But Anne Sebold's The Lovely Bones and Patchett's Bel Canto intrigue me, even more so after reading the interviews.

I just learned that Ethan Hawke published a novel last year (Ash Wednesday). His interview is (predictably) awful. It's not quite his fault, though. One of the first questions tossed his way delineated the strong similarities between his main female protagonist and his wife, actress Uma Thurman. I don't know what's worse: the autobiographical novel or "autobiographical" criticism.

If writers on writing gets tiresome, I recommend Weich's interview with Jacques Pépin, which includes a hilarious repartee between Pépin and his daughter Claudine ("There are two [foods] that I know [my father doesn't like]: cinnamon and coconut. I give him Big Red every once in a while. "No!" he says.). Mary Higgins Clark's interview is also a fun read. I never knew she once worked as a Pan Am international stewardress.