Apr
22
I Scream for Ice Cream!
Filed Under Red Sox | 5 Comments
Apparently, they removed the ice cream box from the Red Sox clubhouse and the players are pretty pissed off about it, according to this article, albeit tongue-in-cheek. Josh Beckett demanded a trade if it’s not returned. Mike Lowell expressed his frustration about why they couldn’t have the ice cream box back, saying “we won the World Series with it there.” I guess the Yankees are in a similar frosty situation: the manager Joe Girardi has requested the ice cream box to be removed from the players’ clubhouse, and people are pissed, except for A-Rod, I bet, who probably prefers gelatos. And strippers.
Alice McDermott, who was probably my favorite writing teacher amongst many, wrote a story in The New Yorker years ago, called “Enough.” It was about a woman who loved eating, especially ice cream -
If you want to begin with the ice-cream dishes licked clean by a girl who is now the old woman past all usefulness, closing her eyes at the first taste. If you want to make a metaphor out of her lifelong cravings, something she is not inclined to do. Pleasure is pleasure….If you have an appetite for it, you’ll find there’s plenty. Plenty to satisfy you—lick the back of the spoon. Take another, and another. Plenty. Never enough.
(Tipped hat to Joy of Sox)
Apr
18
Ishiguro & Cross-eyed Romance
Filed Under Fiction | 8 Comments
In the current Spring ‘08 issue of The Paris Review, Kaz Ishiguro is interviewed. My favorite Ishiguro novel, by the way, is The Unconsoled, but it might pale in comparison to the radio play he submitted to BBC right after he graduated from college (it was politely rejected). The play was called “Potatoes and Lovers,” and Ishiguro says that in the manuscript, he spelled potatoes as “potatos.” Ishiguro seems strangely proud of it, and mentions that he wouldn’t mind other people seeing it now -
It was about two young people who work in a fish-and-chips cafe. They are both severely cross-eyed, and they fall in love with each other, but they never acknowledge the fact that they’re cross-eyed. It’s the unspoken thing between them. At the end of the story, they decide not to marry, after the narrator has a strange dream where he sees a family coming toward him on the seaside pier. The parents are cross-eyed, the children are cross-eyed, the dog is cross-eyed, and he says, All right, we’re not going to marry.
Apr
10
Patagonia
Filed Under Nonfiction | 2 Comments
In Chapter 6 of In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin is in Bahia Blanca, located to the south-west of Buenos Aires, the last place before the Patagonian desert. He drives through the desert, sleepily watching
the rags of silver cloud spinning across the sky, and the sea of grey-green thornscrub lying off in sweeps and rising in terraces and the white dust streaming off the saltpans, and, on the horizon, land and sky dissolving into an absence of color.
He then notices the Indian shacks and briefly muses about the native Araucanian Indians, how they were so fierce that they flayed their enemies alive and sucked at the hearts of the dead, how they scared the Spaniards out of their wits. “Their boys’ education,” Chatwin writes, “consisted of hockey, horsemanship, liquor, insolence and sexual athletics.” There is a mention of a book called Araucana written by a certain Alonso de Ercilla in honor of the Indians, which Voltaire purportedly read, using the Araucanian Indians as models for the Noble Savage.
After describing the desolate landscape of the Patagonian desert, Chatwin muses why Charles Darwin was so singularly attracted to the Patagonian desert -
In summing up The Voyage of the Beagle, he tried, unsuccessfully, to explain why, more than any of the wonders he had seen, these ‘arid wastes’ had taken such firm possession of his mind.
Perhaps to encapsulate his own speculation on the matter, Chatwin alludes to a book called Idle Days in Patagonia, written by W. H. Hudson in 1860, in which Hudson devotes a chapter to answering Darwin’s question. Hudson’s conclusion is that as one wanders through the Patagonian desert, “a primaeval calmness (known also to the simplest savage)” becomes instilled in the wanderer, which is perhaps “the same as the Peace of God.”
It’s a fine thought by Hudson (or Chatwin), but one that I have my doubts about. There might be a reason for Darwin’s uncommon attachment to Patagonia that is far more restive and disturbing. In Chapter 5 of The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin writes about arriving in Bahia Blanca on September 7, 1832. After speculating that there must be no animals in the Patagonian desert, Darwin writes about digging into the ground and finding various lizards, insects and animals in a “half-torpid” state, and remembers a passage from Alexander von Humboldt’s writing which mentioned native Indians finding boas and crocodiles half-buried in the mud in their lethargic state, and how they sprinkled water on these creatures to animate them.
Then Darwin’s diary account takes a strange detour from his usual naturalist concerns. (I’m almost tempted to say “Sebaldian” in describing Darwin’s detour for more than one reason, but especially as Darwin’s digressive thoughts seem to have been prompted by Humboldt’s mention of the Indian practice of reanimating the buried animals: Alexander von Humboldt was one of Sebald’s favorite writers.) Darwin writes about the bloody battle waged by General Juan Manuel de Rosas’ troops against the native Indians. He writes with unqualified horror about the soldiers’ practice of murdering, in cold blood, all Indian women above 20 years of age. When he approaches a soldier to question him about this inhuman practice, the soldier replies: “Why What can be done They breed so!” There is also a mention of three Indian spies who are captured and summarily executed, after steadfastly refusing to give up information. The third Indian, Darwin notes, follows his perfunctory denial of “No se” with a statement, “Fire, I am a man, and can die!”
Although Darwin is stirred by these accounts, he is, after all, a dutiful Christian westerner (okay, please refrain from sending me philosophical emails about why Darwin is not a Christian. Because I don’t care. I’ll print the email out, and wipe my ass with it, thanks.) He believes that the Indian children who are captured and sold as slaves must be treated fairly by the captors, that there is little to complain of. But it is clear that the plight of this civilization of Indians is close to Darwin’s heart. He writes about an Indian escaping the pursuit of the troops, by riding on his horse by straddling only one leg on the animal’s body, hanging by the its neck to avoid the bullets. “Thus hanging on one side,” Darwin notes with wonderment, “he was seen patting the horse’s head, talking to him.”
It seems to me that Darwin felt very uneasy about this conquest of the Indians by Rosas’ troops, to say the least, and of the possible extinction of this “other” civilization & their way of life. Chapter 5 ends with a remarkable paragraph that is at once an archaeological observation and a quiet reflection on one civilization’s passing by the usurpation of another. There is no judgment in it, just the notice. As in the rest of The Voyage of the Beagle, the prose is restrained, each sentence tessellating beautifully upon the other with immaculate poise, forming the whole picture. On the surface, this moment described is only about the soldier using an Indian arrow as flint. But in Darwin’s notice, isn’t there a nostalgia for the demise of the civilization which he knows too little of, which will be forgotten too soon?
I saw one day a soldier striking fire with a piece of flint, which I immediately recognised as having been a part of the head of an arrow. He told me it was found near the island of Cholechel, and that they are frequently picked up there. It was between two and three inches long, and therefore twice as large as those now used in Tierra del Fuego: it was made of opaque cream-coloured flint, but the point and barbs had been intentionally broken off. It is well known that no Pampas Indians now use bows and arrows. I believe a small tribe in Banda Oriental must be excepted; but they are widely separated from the Pampas Indians, and border close on those tribes that inhabit the forest, and live on foot. It appears, therefore, that these arrow-heads are antiquarian relics of the Indians, before the great change in habits consequent on the introduction of the horse into South America.