Brel

I have admired Jacques Brel for a long time, but I’ve been afraid that maybe it was a passing crush I would be ashamed of later. He seems like the kind of singer only old women would like. (Why should that stop me, I suppose I should ask?) And he was ugly. The perpetual cigarette may have been charming to his misguided contemporaries, but it doesn’t work on me. And besides, his songs are so melodramatic. But still, I persist in my admiration of this monkey-faced, chain-smoking, philandering dead Belgian. I must try to explain why I am certain he is great. I must confess my love.

“As poetic as Bob Dylan, as introspective as John Lennon, as virile as Bruce Springsteen,” said the program for Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, which I dragged my mom to see with me in Fort Worth a couple years ago. Unfortunately, this musical was a false gospel. The English translations of the songs lose all nuance. “If all you have is love” becomes “All it takes is love.” The change of emphasis in the song shocked my tender, Brel-trusting heart when I heard it. Had I misunderstood the song? Had the fact that French is not my first language made the words seem more mysterious and subtle than they were?

Yes, Brel is dramatic. Most of Jacques Brel’s songs drive me crazy, they’re so frantic. Maybe you know his famous song “Madeleine,” which takes you on a riotous ride from hope to obsession to bitterness to despair. You have to give him points for his energy and enthusiasm. But our era is so fond of understatement that he just seems over the top.

By all means, don’t listen to the cheesy “If you only have love.” It talks about healing all our wounds, rebuilding Jerusalem, making the desert bloom, drinking from the Grail, melting all the guns... none of which is in the French. The original song talks about having no other riches than our love and our belief in each other, about offering love in prayer for the evils of the world, simply, like a troubadour. I suppose you have to have a certain tolerance for cheesiness to like it too. But it is still much more subtle.

Let’s leave the humanist manifestos — soit en anglais, soit en français — aside, and analyze one of Brel’s most subdued songs. I’m not sure how legal this is, but it looks like you can download it here.

“Le plat pays” describes a modest subject, Belgium. Its melody is the same three or four notes repeated in a monotonous pattern. Some kind of hokey flute accompanies dear Jacques as he intones his plotless, characterless description of a landscape. He repeats the same word four times in the first three lines, nearly every line begins with “with,” and the second-to-last stanza makes four statements about the sky and even repeats both attributes it is mentioning twice.

In the last stanza, after line by plodding line of landscape features, he begins to show emotion. The volume builds slightly. There is life in his voice, and, finally, a smile breathed into the word “chanter” — singing.

I tried translating it, but am not fully satisfied with my translation. If I manage to make it acceptable, I will share it. The words are simple. Each word is important. And when Brel sings, each word lives. Listen to it even if you don’t know French.

For a fascinating variation (which you don’t have to download), you can listen to him singing the same song in Flemish.

It takes on a different rhythm and color. His love for the words themselves is evident. I don’t care if he is overdramatic. How could you want him not to do what he does?

Kids & Language

A small group from our church spends Monday nights with a Musketian (I probably spelled that wrong) Turk family (and whoever of their friends happen to be in the apartment at the time) trying, through conversation, to help them learn English. They are ethnic Turks from the former Soviet Union, and they speak Turkish and Russian. The apartment complex is home to several Musketian Turk families, as well as other international people, quite a mini-UN.

At a recent visit, the daughter we know (let's call her S) had a friend over who turned out to be from Egypt (M). I asked M, "What language do you speak?"
"Arabic."
"Does S speak Arabic?"
A shake of the head "Turkish."
"Do you speak Turkish?"
Another head shake "Arabic."

I assume M doesn't speak Russian (maybe I should've asked that too), which means they have no common language, other than a very little English. Yet they're still friends. Kids!

Magical Hands

I just learned that Bunny’s favorite book was mentioned in The Washington Post this May.

The Once and Future King

This book didn’t seem as great the second time I read it. It’s depressing when that happens.

First, I don’t enjoy fiction that tries to teach politics and philosophy.

Second, T. H. White is very good at showing complex motivations. Arthur is no stainless monarch. Lancelot and Guenever are both heroic and annoying. And White is more generous to the medieval Church than most revisionist storytellers today would be. So why couldn’t he make Mordred a full character? I don’t understand how an author who clearly has the skills to resist this kind of thing could fail so badly in creating this character, the purely evil badguy.

Green leafy vegetables that are preferable to lettuce

I have been accused of running a “literary” blog. It’s true that it has veered that direction recently. But is that all we have to offer? In the spirit of my post on March 14, 2004, I offer a decidedly unliterary addition:

Arugula

Don’t ever change

Now I’m thinking those mix-and-match high school yearbook epigrams were wiser than we thought. I recently read Now, Discover Your Strengths and look at my life and my personality differently.

Yes, it’s sort of a cheesy business management book, but it’s very encouraging and freeing. It simply says to concentrate on your strengths and not worry too much about fixing your weaknesses. We seem to go wrong when we dwell on those things, comparing ourselves to others, getting insecure and unhappy. Why not just let everyone admit what they aren’t and be satisfied with what they are?

My signature themes, by the way, are as follows:

Input
Learner
Intellection
Context
Harmony

This confirms that I am the Übergeek, which is sort of liberating. I can’t pretend I am some big social butterfly or motivational speaker or glittering demagogue. It was a strange feeling to read the descriptions and recognize myself. Apparently there are other people like me. Maybe it’s normal and possibly good to be the way I am.

As Elijah said to the Rabbi Jochanan, “Must not the Lord of all the earth do right?”

Bloomsday device

Nerzhin alerted me to the machinations of a certain Irish professor, which came to naught this year. Here’s to streets running with rashers, kidneys, and sausages next June!

(If you’re confused, read my recent post on Bloomsday and my yet earlier one.)

Pepys

If you haven’t had time to look at the links over on the right, I encourage you to visit the diary of Samuel Pepys, a blog that has given me much pleasure lately. I fantasize about reading it every day and gradually getting a sense of life in 17th-century London.

I forget how I found it, but for pride’s sake I would like to point out that I was reading it before the Rabbi mentioned it in the May Books & Culture.

It doesn’t take much time, if you don’t try to figure out who all the people are, which I don’t. It’s kind of boring a lot of the time (not understanding much of it doesn’t help) but sometimes there is fun stuff like this:

...and so home to supper and bed, my head aching all the day from my last night’s bad rest, and yesterday’s distempering myself with over walking, and to-day knocking my head against a low door in Mr. Castle’s house. This day the Parliament kept a fast for the present unseasonable weather.

Housekeeping

(See a post and interesting comments on another book by Marilynne Robinson here.)

When you read delightful writing by a somewhat neglected and very unconventionally-raised child narrator, you wonder if it’s fair to enjoy it. You can’t help feeling guilty as you laugh at the absurdities.

There were now many of these cans on the counters and the windowsill, and they would have covered the table long since if Lucille and I had not removed them now and then. We did not object to them, despite the nuisance, because they looked very bright and sound and orderly, especially since Sylvie arranged them open end down, except for the ones she used to store peach pits and the keys from sardine and coffee cans. Frankly we had come to the point where we could hardly object to order in any form, though we hoped that her interest in bottles was a temporary aberration.

Ruth is a strange narrator. She usually seems unbelievably detached, but sometimes she seems so hopeful it hurts:

There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole....For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?

It’s not exactly a gripping plot, but I found myself reading just to see what she would say next. The book is absolutely beautiful. I would highly recommend it if you can handle such beauty along with some disturbing yuckiness (I don’t mean anything graphic or violent. It’s hard to explain. It’s more of a philosophical uneasiness). But that seems to be the problem with beauty in this world in any case, doesn’t it?

Curse Texas!

Scarcely six weeks after clasping me into her bosom, Texas has spit me out like a piece of gristle.

I used to be pretty gung-ho about running before dawn when it was “cool,” but several times recently I’ve run in the evenings and survived. I thought I had developed tolerance of the heat.

But clearly there is a difference even between 7 in the evening, when I had performed these recent tolerable runs, and 4:30 in the afternoon. Today I was playing the metaphor game to take my mind off the misery. The best comparison I could come up with for my sensations at the moment was the way it feels when you take your bread out of the oven and the hot air comes whooshing up into your face. Unfortunately the whooshing had only occurred when I was running into the wind; on the way back the only movement was life-giving moisture trickling down my body.

Then I saw a happy sight! Ahead there was shade—not tree shade, but cloud shade! A general cloud was providing shelter from the sun just ahead. I thought benevolently of Elijah and his hand-sized cloud. Mine was even bigger and better, befitting this great state.

Then I remembered I was running in the same direction as the wind. The shade was advancing ahead of me! I would never reach it! Curse this abominable state!

I plotted to transfix idle guests at next week’s wedding with my glittering eye, and force upon them my shocking tale.

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could nor laugh nor wail;
Something something something something
and cried, “A sail! A sail!”

Why had I memorized such a boring stanza? I wondered to myself. Yet this was the one that kept coming to me.

There was no one to blame for my misery but Texas, who in her laziness chose this angle to sprawl out on the globe, making the entire day inhospitable for humans wishing to take the slightest advantage of their natural mobility.

She has sent me no more glossy water-snakes. The only notable wildlife I saw today was one of those nasty mutant eyeball-looking acorns. Texas, I renounce you!

Catching up too

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman.
Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.

I learned about Philip Pullman while the movie version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was in theaters. He is, according to an article I read somewhere, the atheist answer to C.S. Lewis, a writer of children's books for parents who do not want their children polluted by the lies and hypocrisy of religion. The results are quite good and entertaining; I can recommend The Golden Compass (the first in a trilogy called His Dark Materials) even to those who do not want their childred polluted by the lies and hypocrisy of atheism. The story is well-crafted and suspenseful, the characters are thick and believable, and it is a very fun book to read.

Mountains Beyond Mountains is about the life of Dr. Paul Farmer, a doctor and global health advocate who works ridiculously hard to care for those in the world on the wrong side of "the great epidemiological divide." His story is inspiring and more than a little uncomfortable; Farmer's story has the effect of making you feel guilty, indicted by your wealth and privilege. Reading the book you get the feeling that you aren't doing enough, worse, can never do enough, to earn the medical care and public health you enjoy on your side of the great epi divide. Kidder's prose is not ostentatious but still delightful to read; he draws you in to the true story, reveals not just the actions of his protagonist but also his motivations. The focus is always on Farmer, but Kidder gives you just enough of his own experiences and feelings to put the events and feelings into a friendly human perspective.

A small and fairly contrived connection between the two books: In The Golden Compass, the Church is always evil like Mordor is evil in The Lord of the Rings; there is no moral complexity, no admission that maybe some religious people are pretty okay some of the time. In Mountains Beyond Mountains, though Farmer's work is amazing and is rightly the focus of the book, in his story there are others who are important, in particular an Anglican priest in Haiti and a Catholic priest in Peru, who are not just helpful but completely essential to Farmer's success. So in Pullman's fiction, the Church is always hurting and oppressing; in Kidder's nonfiction, the Church is sometimes working very hard to heal and to save.

Catching up

I.
I read The Remains of the Day a while ago, since I had a copy of it and was compelled by Nerzhin's post about Ishiguro. This is a deeply sad, fascinating book.

When the narrator writes, you get the idea of a detached intelligence maneuvering a separate physical entity. Mr. Stevens doesn't talk about getting out of the way; he speaks of moving his "person" into a more convenient location.

Whenever he comes close to expressing his own real feelings, Mr. Stevens slips into the third person. "Naturally, one disapproved of the dismissals." One cannot underestimate the difficulty some people have admitting they have feelings -- and this is what makes the book's ending so powerful. When Mr. Stevens says a sentence that would be banal and idiotic coming from anyone else, it's devastating. One wonders if the author wrote the whole book to show how much meaning that one trite phrase could have in the right hands.

This book could be read as a condemnation of someone who suppresses their feelings. That seemed to be the impression of my peers when we saw the movie in high school. But I think, in a way, Mr. Stevens's professional convictions are actually very strong feelings that get out of hand. It's not that he's cold and rigid; he just gives his heart away to the wrong thing. He was as irresponsible, in his stodgy loyal way, as every starry-eyed romantic youth.

This butler is not all pitiable. One admires his analysis of his life and his place in the world. He was so painstaking and careful in his expressions, and I thought he was admirable in his beliefs about dignity and greatness. It just all went really wrong.

II.
I recently finished The Great Influenza, recommended by a doctor on my employer's Avian Flu Task Force. It was very interesting, and I brushed up my knowledge about hemagluttinin and neuraminidase, which was getting decidedly rusty (oh, all right, my knowledge of them before this book was null. But I am looking for an excuse to bring them up because they're the H and the N in H5N1, which I think is worth knowing. And they have really cool shapes).

I was sort of disappointed by the framing of the story. I kind of thought it was the story of the disease, and thus at the end we would have some exciting description of how we found out what we know now about the flu. During the entire pandemic of 1918-1919 they never figured out exactly what it was, and that seemed to be one of the elements of suspense. But then when they actually do discover it was a virus it's mentioned almost as an aside in a couple paragraphs with no fanfare and no dramatic descriptions of test tubes or bunsen burners or lab coats or anything.

I could have done with less of the sensational writing about the political atmosphere, although I suppose it's better to get mildly annoyed and keep reading than be bored out of one's skull and never finish the book. The author does well with suspenseful hooks to make you want to read on.

It's weird that such a boring and normal disease could still be such a threat. I'm not living in desperate fear of the avian flu, but it's clear that we really don't have that much control over influenza whenever it may mutate into an especially destructive form, as it does from time to time. But it will still be only one of an endless variety of ways to die. We can be comforted by that.

Gilead

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is literary fiction of the good kind, with little plot to speak of, full of introspection and character study, but masterfully written and ringing true to life. I was reminded of Leif Enger's Peace Like a River, which is also highly recommended. Both books have Christians at or near the center of the plot, and, without hitting the reader over the head with theology or preaching, speak some profound words of truth. I do not know if either author is a Christian, but I would call both Christian works. (Wheaton graduates say together: "All truth is God's truth.")

Gilead takes the form of a journal written by a preacher, John Ames, who has married late in life and fathered a son, whom he knows he will not live to see grow up. So he writes the journal to his son, trying to tell him all at once what most fathers would be able to tell their sons gradually over time. Of course, life does not stop while John writes, and we see him struggle with friendships, forgiveness, jealousy, and worries both weighty and petty as he goes through life. There are many jewels of quotes, which I wish I had written down. As I said before, this is highly recommended, a book to savor.

Bloomsday

My piece on Bloomsday, however obscurely, has been published.

This was really meant to be an introduction to the list of activities and readings I had suggested throughout the day, so it doesn't make quite as much sense as it could have if they had included them, but I'm not complaining. You can also sign up for the re:d Raves eZine, which will allegedly include my contribution this Wednesday, at the site.

Out

"Out" begins in a soulless situation, a lunchbox factory in industrial Tokyo, and it goes downhill from there. Four women who work together at the factory have become friends, partly out of necessity, because it's a grinding environment - men (the men who work in the factory are resident aliens, from Brazil) and women share a changing room where they dress in their work outfits (like scrub suits). Before going on the factory floor they're twice checked for contamination, clean their hands raw with scrub brushes, put their hair in weirdly shaped hats. They stand six hours straight on concrete, working constantly to keep up with the automated assembly line - one job per person: smashing down the cold blob of rice that's plopped out of a tube, over and over; or spreading out the slices of fish, over and over; or whatever. They can't go to the bathroom without first asking for a replacement, and it may be hours before the replacement arrives.

We don't find out until much later, but one of the women had worked in a more upscale place, a savings and loan, until she realized she would never get a higher position, no matter how competent she was, simply because she was a woman. This woman, Masako, becomes the main character in the book, taking charge of the grisly situation the four friends get into.

The book opens with Masako, on her way to work in the factory, thinking, "I want to go home." The thought surprises her, because she doesn't know what home is, let alone where. The things she does in the story ultimately seem like a kind of rebellion - anything, no matter how vile, is better than the hopeless life she leads as a proper woman in Japan. The ending chapter is almost surrealistically violent - but Masako walks away from it free, completely cut off from her past.

I was surprised by this book; it shattered any images I'd had of Japan-as-bonsai, cherry blossoms, silk, politeness. I had lunch with a Japanese friend after I read it - she says it's still true, even in modern Japan, that women are expected to accept situations that are deadening to their hopes. There really are lunchbox factories like that. And it's not just women; evidently Japanese society is undergoing huge changes. "Out" caused a sensation in Japan. It's possible to find an interview online with the author, Natsuo Kirino (accent on the first syllable of each name: NA-tsu-o KI-ri-no) where she talks about Japanese youth using violence as an escape from the traditional societal system.

I'm not recommending this book. It isn't enjoyable to read. But it is thought-provoking, and caused me to reflect on the factors that lead to human choices.