La paura del cielo (1994)

"The village has no name. There's a church, fenced in by the dead, a dozen or so houses, the barns and the Schübeli twins' broken-down cottage. If a traveller should pass by, and it's a rare occurrence, he stops to look at the graves. All stone but one, carved in wood that looks like leather. And how could the traveller know that behind curtained windows hard, sharp eyes are watching him?"
                                                                 -- Fleur Jaeggy, "The Twins"

La paura del cielo. In inglese: fear of the sky. Was it the translator (Tim Parks) who came up with the (English) title -- Last Vanities? Neither feel right to me.

Mona's Tent

Agnes Varda's Sans toi ni loi (1985) translates as "with neither shelter nor law" in English but is called Vagabond for short. The story begins with the death of Mona, a drifter (as we once called them), followed by her ocean re-birth and what might be crudely described as the events leading up to her death.

The picture above is of Mona's tent, which she pitched the night before. A man walks by and asks

"Anyone in there?"

"Yeah, I'm sleeping," replies Mona.

"Know where you are?"

"No, I got here at night."

"It's a graveyard. Can't stay here."

And it's true -- Mona can't stay here, ever. Why? Because her death is forever followed by her re-birth. Is this immortality? No, it is her nature -- to prefer not to, as Melville once wrote (of Bartleby).

But that's not the pattern I am interested in. The pattern I am interested in is the one on Mona's tent. A non-patterned pattern!

Three Poets

In the summer of 1916 Graves (above, bottom) receives a serious lung wound (it was originally reported that he was killed). His friend Siegfried Sassoon (above, top) is wounded in the lung as well. Both are returned to England.

Here is Graves on Page 188 of Goodbye to All That (1929):

"England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language; and it was a newspaper language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible."

The 1929 publication of Goodbye to All That was the end of Graves and Sassoons' friendship. Sassoon felt the book was factually inaccurate; he was bothered also by Graves's 1918 marriage to Nancy Nicholson, and his 1926 affair with the American poet Laura Riding.

Here is a 1925 poem by Laura Riding (Gottschalk):

The Lovers

They come glowing to the gates of the city,
Armed with tenderness,
Resolute to parade
Beneath the windows of the cold women,
With their gifts warm on their shoulders.

The women sit frigidly smiling in their frames,
And their eyes are the eyes of Medusa.
Who but lovers,
Who but unslaked lovers may be starved so?

There is one bird left in the city of the cold women,
Forager of doorsteps,
Cosset of cold women.
It is sweet carrion they scatter to him.

Goodbye to All That (1929)

Found this and a bunch more Graves at one of the newer second-hand stores on East Hastings, between Nanaimo and Slocan.

Here's a passage (p.169) that warms my heart:

I bought a small two-roomed cottage from my mother, who owned considerable house-property at Harlech. This was done in defiance of the war: something to look forward to when the guns stopped. We always thought of the end of the war as 'when the guns stop'. I white-washed the cottage, which stood at some distance from the village, and furnished it with a table, a chair, a bed, a few dishes, and cooking utensils. I had decided to live there one day on bread and butter, bacon and eggs, lettuce in season, cabbage and coffee; and to write poetry. My war bonus would keep me for a year or two at least. Having put in a big window to look out over the wood below and across the broad plain to the sea, I wrote two or three poems here as a foretaste of the good life to come; but have suppressed them all since. 

Brittle Britain

Bernard Nossitor's Britain: A Future That Works (1978) argues that the crisis that characterized the UK in the 1970s was in fact a state of "hypochondria," presumably induced by those eager to crush the welfare state, trade unions and intellectuals disposed to egalitarianism and thus make the world safe for neoliberalism. Are Boris Johnson and his kind employing a similar tactic?

Here is the conclusion of Ian Jack's great long 2009 LRB review of Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies:

In a book entitled Britain: A Future That Works, the Washington Post’s London correspondent, Bernard Nossiter, was by early 1978 able to wonder if the mid-1970s ‘crisis’ had not been ‘a case of hypochondria’. Nossiter felt London to be ‘the last inhabitable great city’, full of relaxed citizens who had discovered what would now be called a happy work-life balance, as opposed to what Nossiter described as the ‘nervous intensity’ of the crowds in Paris and New York. Britons, he suggested, might be ‘the first citizens of the post-industrial age . . . choosing leisure over goods’. As Beckett points out, Nossiter was known to have soppy Anglophile tendencies; still, there was something to what he wrote. If greater equality nourishes happiness and the public good, as many have come to believe, then it should never be forgotten that in the late 1970s Britain became a more equal country than it had probably ever been and certainly than it has been since. Beckett’s book is not all out revisionism; the facts of industrial turmoil can’t be revised away. But that one fact of greater equality suggests that the received wisdom of the 1970s as Britain’s nightmare decade is little more than a politically convenient libel which suits a narrative of redemption. We must never go back to the 1970s? Perhaps we should be lucky. There are worse places, as we may shortly see.

Town Criers

Only one person walking on Main Street in tears today. Not as bad as last week, when I saw three.

Today's crier was a man, mid-thirties, dressed in cycling gear. No sign of cuts or scrapes. Did someone steal his bike? Open their car door without looking? Something he read on FB?

It's getting harder seeing people walking the streets in distress. Had to walk the last blocks in the alley.

Burcu's Angels

For years Burcu's Angels was on Main Street, then off-Main at 16th. A couple years ago I noticed Burcu had moved to East Hastings near Nanaimo, then further east, between Slocan and Kaslo on the north side, were she is today.