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Literature

Elective Blindness.

“Magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.” – Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (1979)

There I was, making my way through throngs of revelers who had just disembarked the Santa Express, with another queue waiting to get on. Almost none of them wore masks, so I can be forgiven for thinking I had entered a wormhole – the very same thing had happened to me some years back. I was off to walk quietly at Oaks Bottom on a late Friday afternoon, not expecting anyone, and there was the spectacle of the steam engine, the Santas and reindeers climbing on board, the anticipatory joy in children’s faces.

Well, an occasion to photograph something other than herons and eagles and deer, although they did appear later in the afternoon in my field of view as well, with a howling pack of coyotes (heard, not seen) answering the locomotive’s whistle as a bonus.

My sense of duplicate experience was doubtlessly triggered by the book I’d been reading. Notice the past tense – the novel was so gripping that I finished it within a couple of days. The Anomaly by Hervé Le Téllier, translated by Adriana Hunter, winner of the 2020 Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honor, is a novel of dizzying complexity. It is a romp through various genres, sci-fi, mystery thriller, human comedy, romance, philosophical tractate, you name it.

The book also brims with literary allusions, thoughts about religion and politics, skewering with equal measure American and French politicians, the French and American media circus, evangelical crazies, the relentless hunger for fame and riches, the obscene black holes of capitalism, the emptiness of scientific prediction and discourse, the malleability of religious proscriptions, shall I go on?

Importantly, it asks us to think through how we construe reality and what would happen if we find out that we were completely wrong.

The author offers reflections on human psychology in considerable depth, and the possibilities of getting a second chance to do stuff over. None of it, amazingly, overpowers or interferes with the other – you can read this book simply as an amusing exercise in science fiction, or you can see it on par with serious philosophical texts that explore the notion of free will and the origins of consciousness. That in itself is a hard thing to pull off.

It looks like, and I would not be able to judge, that there is also linguistic slight-of-hand embedded in the pages. Le Téllier is part of a group called OULIPO, (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle founded in 1960,) which explores the possibilities of verse written under a system of structural constraints. Founded by mathematicians, they ride on funny mathematics formulas, like “N+7,” in which the writer takes a poem already in existence and substitutes each of the poem’s substantive nouns with the noun appearing seven nouns away in the dictionary.” Lots of smoke and whistles. (Professional NYT review here. )

So what’s the set-up of The Anomaly? (Caution, some spoilers inevitable…)

The book introduces us to a cast of characters seemingly unrelated, ranging from young children to aging Romeos, professional assassins to Ivy League lawyers, some famous, some not, some struggling, some successful, some sympathetic when first encountered, others not. Their various fates converge, in slow rhythm, with a shared airplane ride that turns out to have a true Doppelgänger – an Air France machine lands after experiencing some turbulence in the U.S. twice, about 3 months apart. The very same people, doubles of the earlier arrivals, with just a quarter year-span of life events between them that are not shared, are crammed into a military air base in New Jersey, and later released back into society.

The novel proceeds on two basic levels. One is the overall reaction of governments, countries, the superstructure of science and religion, clambering to make sense of it all and contain the potential revelations or consequences of this inexplicable event (which turns out to be less singular than first assumed.) It is on this level that much sardonic humor occurs, originally overshadowing the more serious question what one would do when encountering possibilities that shatter everything we believed to be true. The number of answers offered, from religious elders to scientists of all kinds, mathematicians, astro-physicist, molecular biologists, computer scientists etc. are mind boggling. The author’s background as a mathematician and science journalists makes it all sound plausible but also graspable for a layperson like me. The work of the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom concerning the dangers of unconstrained Artificial Intelligence and the possibility of virtual reality, living in a simulation, is also making an appearance in moving the plot forward.

The other level is the human interest aspect, in itself enough for a book of its own – how do you react when your double appears? Do you share, do you fight, do you integrate or destroy, do you want to continue as the same or take on a different persona (helpfully offered by authorities who seem to have the endless resources to double pensions, bank accounts, housing, job opportunities etc.)? What if there is one husband and two wives, one child and two mothers, one secret now shared by two with different motivations to reveal it? What if one of you got pregnant in the 3 months interval and the other didn’t? Additionally, how does the public in general react when confronted with the possibility that their entire world view is based on false assumptions? Will humans be violent, will they reform, will they reconnect with others in more humane ways when they are confronted with the explanations for this event?

The Doppelgänger theme is, of course, not entirely new to literature. Think of Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, Dostoevsky’s The Double, Poe’s William Wilson or Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities. They all, though, had a way out, because it was really a different person that impersonated or was created to impersonate one’s own existence, if not an illusion to begin with. Le Guin’s protagonist in Earthsea is able to get rid of his evil double by finding out his name (sort of like Rumpelstiltskin, I thought.) None of this is applies to those who were created in the apparent anomaly during the transatlantic flight of the novel. They are exact copies of each other to the infinitesimal specs of DNA and experience, and here to stay. Moreover, it is not a scenario implicating two people, but one that affects the entire world.

How doubled individuals solve the dilemma is one question, answered by observing them. WHAT or WHO created this dilemma, and WHY, is the larger question and I will refrain from providing clues (assuming I came to the correct conclusion in the first place, which I would LOVE to discuss with anyone who is going to read this book.)

Let me just say that my brain had to digest some amount of moral philosophy and its role in a digital age that worships technology as well as military violence. A brain that was still humming from the shifts in perception when you get closer to the individuals faced with changing fates, a brain that was tickled by a lot of truly funny literary and cultural allusions to science fiction movies that made me laugh along the way.

One of the key figures in The Anomaly, a writer named Victor Miesel, answers the question about what he believes the true explanation of this doubling might be and what will change if an incredible revelation should turn out to be true: “Nothing. Nothing will change. We’ll wake up in the morning, we’ll go to work because we still have to pay the rent, we’ll eat and drink and make love, just like before. We’ll carry on behaving as if we’re real. We’re blind to anything that could prove that we are fooling ourselves. It’s only human. We’re not rational.”

The true naming of a thing, the magic of this book. Le Guin had it right. Again.

Music about our earth (Herbie Hancock) and a parallel universe (Bikram Ghosh.)

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Sauvie Grand Central

It. Was. Insane. On a single early morning walk, less than two hours long, I saw more birds coming and going, resting, feeding, or just passing through, than I would usually photograph in a whole month. It was the first day after a few days of rain, the light ever shifting with clouds still lingering, and the noise in the air was a cacophony.

Canada Geese arriving
Canada Geese

There were geese. Sandhill cranes. Ducks. Pelicans. Red-tailed hawks. Bald eagles. Kestrels. Egrets. Finches, sparrows, jays and red-winged blackbirds. All concentrated in one area where water was to be had – so much of the island’s ponds and canals are still empty elsewhere due to the drought. By the time it was around 10 a.m. lots of other people appeared, often looking from their cars on a one-lane road where I walked, so I was ready to get out. Mixed feelings. I love being alone out there, but I also appreciate when large numbers of people take an interest in nature and enjoy it, however it works for them.

Bald Eagle Pair
Egret
Pelicans

Which brought my thoughts to a somewhat related topic, environmental concerns – you guessed, didn’t you? Oh, to be predictable… A slight variation, though. I came across an insightful and smart essay by an author who specializes in reviewing children’s literature. (Alas, only in German, which is why I’ll summarize in English. For my German readers: Christmas is coming, all the kids need books!) Julia Bousboa has a website with reviews and a fun podcast together with a friend where new children’s literature leads to sometimes surprising discussions.

Back to nature, or more precisely the environment under climate threat, or the real topic: the way children are encouraged to be our saviors. Bousboa lists a plethora of Children’s books starting at age three that try to persuade kids to be climate heroes and save the world. There are scores of biographic books about Greta Thunberg, there are non-fiction books about climate change and sustainability, and there are books that ask kids to become involved in protecting our planet, and doing the right thing.

Red Tailed Hawk
Ducks

The advice given has not changed much since the 1980s – save electricity, avoid flying or vacations abroad, bike to school, take short showers, wear sweaters instead of overheating the house, and buy local food, preferably organic and avoid meat. Bousboa notes correctly that these admonitions really fall within a decision-making pattern for the middle- and upper classes, who can decide where to spend a vacation, who have cars that could be used less and who have the economic means to buy more expensive food. A convincing observation that was new to me also argued that the appeals will only convince those who have learned since early childhood “that their voice counts and that they will be heard. For a lot of kids (and their parents) that is not true due to their origins.”

Sandhill Cranes

While fully acknowledging that it is a good thing to familiarize children with the climate crisis and instill a love for nature that will eventually make them stewards of our planet, the author wonders about the justice of burdening young individuals with obligations that are really those of politics and international corporations, the real culprits when it comes to earth’s destruction. This parallels the argument made for adults: Individuals can at most be responsible for their own behavior, but governments have the power to implement legislation that compels industries to act sustainably, given the planetary-scale of the threat. But for kids there is an additional reason not to be convenient scapegoats for corporations that deny their own responsibilities:

“Kinder und Jugendliche sollen lesen und lernen und spielen, sich mit ihren Freund*innen treffen, Quatsch machen, sich ausprobieren, groß werden und dabei ganz selbstverständlich ein Gefühl für ihre Umwelt entwickeln, vom Regenwurm bis zu den Mitmenschen. Doch bei all dem müssen sie Kinder sein dürfen und keine Held*innen. Sie sind zu klein, um die Welt zu verändern. Kinder sollen die Erde retten? How dare you? Das müssen doch wirklich wir Erwachsenen übernehmen!”

“Children and youth should read, learn and play, hang out with their friends, clown around, try on new roles, grow up and of course grow awareness of the environment, from earthworm to fellow wo/men. Through it all they should be allowed to be kids, not heroes.They ARE too small to change the world. Children shall save the earth? How dare you? It is truly the responsibility of adults!”

Couldn’t agree more.

Music is a perennial favorite. Here’s the Children’s Corner by Debussy.

House Finches

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Into The Vanishing Point

Van·ish·ing point/noun

1. the point at which receding parallel lines viewed in perspective appear to converge.

2. the point at which something that has been growing smaller or increasingly faint disappears altogether.

– Merriam Webster

Heads up. I’ll be thinking out loud today to formulate why I had such strong, differing reactions to two books I tackled across the last weeks. Hear the brain gears creak….

I picked up Siri Hustvedt‘s Memories of the Future partly because I had adored her previous novel The Blazing World for its wonderfully perceptive and sarcastic skewering of misogyny in the art world. I was also curious how the experiences of the protagonist in the new book, a transplant from rural Minnesota arriving in New York City in 1978, would compare to my own experiences of arrival at the same time and place coming from Germany. A slight nostalgic twinge was soon overshadowed by a growing irritation.

The story moves back and forth between the thoughts and actions of the young protagonists in the late 70s, revealed in diaries recently discovered during a move, and the contemplations of the same person now old and an established author. The reader is invited to share the explorations of selves across time in complicated structure, a piece of auto fiction, given that the protagonist bears the same initials as the author of the novel in hand, S.H., laced with Hustvedt’s usual mediations on what constitutes truth. Eventually the focus on male entitlement emerges, but it is buried in the desperate search for autobiographical as well as fictional selves who are fused to provide meaning for her current existence.

As someone who has spent the bulk of her academic career with research on issues of memory, I am curiously immune to reminiscing. Instead, my days are spent with thoughts about how to make it through the day (on bad days) and how to make a difference (on good days,) anchored in present and future then, rather than the past. Although I understand why reminiscing gives pleasure to people or raises hopes that they might discover unknown patterns, I simply have no interest. Part of that might be the fear that it often veers into navel gazing, defined by Merriam Webster as useless or excessive self-contemplation, for which they helpfully provide tons of synonyms:

egocentricity, egocentrism, egoism, egomania, egotism, narcissism, self-absorption, self-centeredness, self-concern, self-interest, self-involvement, self-preoccupation, self-regard, selfishness, selfness.

Note, these concepts are reserved for excessive contemplation – there is nothing wrong with simple self-reflection if it leads to clarity about purpose or understanding of what needs to be done to shift a burdensome status-quo. To trust memory of younger selves, though, might not be the way to go, given that these are often reconstructions based on our current understanding of world and needs and self. They also are prone to favor psychological interpretations, rather than acknowledge the role that external factors and chance play in one’s development across time. The actual selves across a life time have really disappeared into the vanishing point, no matter how much we long to resurrect them.

Part of my negative reaction to the convoluted focus on self in this novel is likely derived from a different source, though – the sense that the notion of individuality, ones’ role in the world, one’s specific being and accomplishments, feeds into or is exploited by the western ideology of individualism as a higher goal. The notion of being the master of one’s fate has been used – still is, just look at current legislative budget wrangling – to justify a system that favors those who have succeeded, seemingly by their own strength rather than structural factors that empowered them. It is an empty promised designed to maintain a status quo of inequalities.

Which brings me to the other book that has captured my attention, this time with awe. I was alerted to Gayl Jones‘ first novel in 22 years, Palmares, by an exuberant review in the NYT by Imany Perry, (followed by an inane one by Hilton Als in the New Yorker.) The novel is narrated by Almeyda, starting in 1670 when she is an enslaved child in Brazil. The story unfolds like stories of old, linearly through time, laced with magic when suffering becomes unbearable, full of unflinching descriptions of unimaginable brutalities and tales of heroism, cleverness and endurance.

Along the way we get educated about real life history of enclaves that were built by escaped slaves, only to be destroyed again by colonial powers. We learn about a surprising amount of education and knowledge – including the fact how many slaves were multi-lingual, referring to Latin as the language of Horace and Virgil rather than the proselytizing priests – helping the rebelling slaves to build their own communities. We get to know how exposure to scores of traveling explorers, pirates, artists and scientists influenced the growing knowledge of a world beyond the colonial empire. We also are made to understand that Palmares, the free republic, was not an island of the morally intact – human nature in its force to oppress, sanction, or punish driven by inferior motives, rules there as anywhere.

Almeyda bears witness, describes the fates of a people rather than focus on self. We barely know her other than through tangential descriptions with the sole exception of a declaration at the half-point of the novel: Asks what it is she wants she says, “Liberty, safety, solitude.” All withheld by slavery. Even in her unfolding love story there is never a reported communication of her emotions, just the facts of her commitment under the worst of circumstances.

Her name – yes I’m stretching here – struck me as al(l) before me, a soul (alma) that holds collective memory, the sum of all experience, knowledge and feeling, rather than the relentless preoccupation with individual self. It serves the memory of a group that needs the guidance of stories as a repository of its history, given the dispersion into the diaspora through sales and forced relocation, before it disappears into the vanishing point. And rarely has that story been told in more gripping ways than in Palmares.

For those interested in current psychological research on cultural memory, here are two interesting sources:

One talks, among other issues, about how children are taught to remember events with a focus on factors outside of self in different cultures, the other talks about the impact of collective memory compared to individual memory on groups.

Music today by a composer who was born in 1939, the incredible Annea Lockwood. ‘Into The Vanishing Point’ is a piece developed with New York piano and percussion quartet. Its starting point was a text on the collapse of insect populations, and the sound world frequently conjures the clacking of mandibles, the frictions of exoskeletons, the piano a monstrous human imposition upon the brittle percussive sounds. Or, as mentioned before, the likely noise of the gears in my brain….

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Got Wire?

· Woven cultural patterns. ·

The wires in my head got all crossed. So many different associations triggered by the sight of swallows congregating on steel cables, perhaps getting ready to leave for warmer climes.

There was the train of thought associated with one of my favorite childhood fairy tales, Thumbelina by H.C. Andersen, the story of a tiny girl conceived through magic. Many a critter plays a role in this story, toad kidnappers, mouse guardians, mole suitors, and last but not least a swallow, coming to the rescue of our thumb-sized heroine who bravely survives attempts at forced marriage to a furry creature. Eventually, heartlessly, she dumps the infatuated swallow in favor of a flower-fairy prince. Growing wings herself, she happily-ever -after bumbles with him from blossom to blossom.

Oh, being picked up by a swallow and released in Africa – this then imaginative German girl could think of nothing more exciting! (Swallows from Northern Europe did indeed migrate to that continent.) Finding a prince and no longer being an outcast almost felt like an after-thought, but one that raised some pleasant goose bumps nonetheless. It seemed like a story capturing my own sense of being different during childhood, and one of isolation overcome, and also one of agency – the girl did things, however secretly, that suited her, and had the gut to disobey instructions.

Second train of thought fastened on a different tale of surviving isolation, this one decidedly for adults, and literate ones at that, since it revolves around allusions to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and many other literary characters of the Western canon. Jane Gardam (the book blurb correctly proclaims her Britain’s best writer you have never heard of – certainly true for this reader) weaves a spell around another outcast girl raised in rather lonely circumstances, finding an anchor in the willpower of Defoe’s stranded protagonist when she seemingly has none of her own. Crusoe’s Daughter (1985) is a small book, describing nuances of psychological interiors of people caught in or between two world wars in Britain, faith lost and found, and love becoming an afterthought to purpose. It, too, describes the solipsistic power of a woman who defies instructions, social mores and in her case the demands immanent to the last gasps of a struggling empire. An old-fashioned, comforting book, on one level. One that slyly sinks into your brain to make you face some hard truths that you tried to forget and that ultimately shifts to a novel structure of narrative, on another level.

Third train of thought revolved around the fact that age, experience and education really do provide perspectives that were previously missing. Take Anderson’s tale, for example, read for adventure and romance then, and understood now as an attempt of retelling even older tales – Persephone’s travels through the underworld and her reemergence come to mind. There is something of a Christian underpinning as well, the acceptance of the lepers and the grotesque, every outcast being worthy of a happy ending. But his narrative was also a moralistic warning: stick with your own own – hierarchical worlds of upper and lower classes or races (the dark, the brown, stay underground… ) should not mix.

Which brings us to the final train of thought elicited by all those birds on a wire. One of the most exciting discovery of recent months for me was a young South African artist, Igshaan Adams, who is not only a spectacular observer of his environment and a committed bridge-builder between divided groups, but a creative visionary when it comes to weaving wires. His first solo show in the UK, Kicking Dust has recently closed at London’s Hayward Gallery, for me, of course, only digitally available (photos from their website.)

It displayed tapestry and three dimensional installations that allowed you to walk paths between them. The artist was raised in Bonteheuwel, a former segregated township in Cape Town, and his work draws on the country’s history of Apartheid, as well as the behavioral patterns of its inhabitants – whether defined by poverty, customs, segregation or indigenous tradition.

In other words, here is an artist who is willing to witness what defines his environment, able to see the patterns that are laid down, and willing to reach across divides by creating representations full of connections (rather than stay rigidly with one’s own like H.C.Andersen would have us.) He does this with a tool kit of wires, ropes and twine, beads, trinkets and household dyes, all materials easily available at your neighborhood hardware store, with neighbors and family members helping with the weaving process.

The large installation represents the mapped spaces of different townships, connected by “footpaths” that were spontaneously trod by people from diverse, often hostile neighborhoods. The latter were created by an actively segregating government that did not wish to see solidarity between and politically aggregated power among the different ethnic groups – the Khoikhoi, Basters, Xhosa, Tswana, Cape Malays and Indian South Africans. Above the lines of these paths are representations of dust clouds – configurations that pick up the forms of clouds that are made when people performing indigenous dances kick sand.

“One of the oldest indigenous dancing styles in southern Africa, the Riel is traditionally performed by the San (also known as Bushmen), Nama and Khoi people of South Africa. Adams’ grandparents are Nama and as a child he would often join them to see young people dance the Rieldans in rural villages in the Northern Cape. Described as ‘dancing in the dust’, the dance is a courtship ritual where clouds of dust erupt from the ground as performers energetically kick the dry ground.”

You can see the dance and the artist’s explanation here. It’s short and worthwhile!

A state-bound exhibition of his tapestries,Veld Ven, depicting the selectively worn-out linoleum of his township neighbors’ floors, just closed at New York City’s Casey Caplan Gallery.

Here is a good visual overview of the individual tapestries and arrangements, photographed by Jason Wyche. Looking at the photographs, I found the patterns reminiscent of good translation, with all the hard work to capture the essentials in both content and form barely visible beneath the impression of likeness and flow. Then again, he could also be called a kind of cartographer, mapping movement onto two-dimensional patterns, serenely sharing presence and absence of design. Below are samples of the work.

AANKOMS (arrival), 2021
KOPPELVLAK (interface), 2021

NAGTREIS OP N VLIENDE PERD (a night journey on a winged horse), 2021

Maybe migration paths of swallows next? Connecting continents without a speck of xenophobia?

Music today is a bit on the romantic side – so be it.

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Giant Troubles

Some nights ago at the dinner table we once again joked about how utterly different we are from each other (you can do that safely after some 40 years of marriage.) These differences are nowhere more pronounced than in our approach to dealing with lurking disaster. Where my beloved tries to keep it out of mind until it HAS to be tackled, I like to stare the dragon in the eye well in advance, if only to communicate that he’s found a foe at eye-level… but really to prepare myself for all that might be in the wings. This attitude – rather than morbidity – is the reason why I read everything about cancer that I can get my hands on, curious about both the nature of the beast, and the nature of the medical system bent on fighting the scourge. (I’ve previously written about it from a cancer patient’s perspective here.)

Some of the most interesting writing comes from scientists who work in the field and share both of these questions; some comes from perceptive novelists who cloak their knowledge in tapestries of stories easier to comprehend. I’ve come across both types recently and thought I’d offer a summary of what I’ve learned.

Here is the good news: People live longer. Here is the bad news: geriatric populations are increasingly susceptible to cancer, and are often only diagnosed when the cancer has spread (metastatic cancer.)

Here is the good news: cancer research is laser-like focused on developing drugs that deal with this problem. Here is the bad news: we will have a market demand to the tune of 111.16 billion dollars by 2027 to treat global metastatic cancer, because the incidence of cancer, particularly breast cancer, is generally on the rise, independent of an aging population.

Here is the good news: there are more and more specialized tools aimed at spread and/or recurrence of cancer. In addition to traditional chemotherapy we have targeted chemo therapy with far fewer side effects, hormone therapy and immunotherapy. Here is the bad news: almost all of these new approaches cannot cure metastatic disease and extend life expectancy by, if you are lucky, a few years, but usually more in the ball park of months. We have not been able to eradicate the disease any more than we did over the last century, with minor exceptions, facing 10 million cancer deaths around the world each year.

It is, of course, nothing to scoff at to have more time to live – I am the last person to be casual about that. And maybe the advances in metastatic cancer research will lead to the realization of permanent remissions or even prevention, eventually. It is also understandable that a for-profit industry focusses on where the demand lies: in desperate patients’ plea for help, to the tune of $ 10.000 a month which these medications now cost in the majority of targeted approaches. Why explore ways to prevent cancer in the first place when that will affect the bottomline of an industry treating it? I guess, theoretically, you could make a fortune on selling preventative medications as well, should you be able to develop them, – never mind the favor to mankind to eradicate the scourge – but then again, people might have very different thresholds to spend money on a potential threat compared to spending money when the threat is actually consuming their bodies.

The good news: some determined scientists are nonetheless pursuing the holy grail: understanding the history of the first cell that eventually morphs into the disease. Here is a thought-provoking compilation of essays that help laypeople like me understand how the science proceeds. Azra Raza, the Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine and Director of the MDS Center at Columbia University in New York, lays out what we know about carcinogenesis, and reports on the obstacles faced by research into the way cancer comes into existence.

She describes in clear language (and delightfully poignant literary references) what cognitive biases drive medical research (independent of potent economic forces like grant money or market demands.) She explains why we are seemingly stuck in a rut, continuing to look for answers in places where we have not found them, late in the game of spreading cells. (I have been told that big pharma is now on to this, pouring a lot of money into curative or pre-causative research, contrary to her claims.)

Her suggestion is to focus instead on the pathways that first cells take before they morph into the beast that precedes the body’s breakdown, describing an “organized decay, consecutive and slow, sometimes taking years, slipping—slipping, until the crash comes,” located in one of the body’s immune cells.

“Cancer can be perceived as an independent life-form. It is not a parasite because it originates in the host tissue. It is not a “normal” tissue culture cell line that has been induced to grow in vitro, already half-way to transformation. And it is not like jellyfish and other lower order species that can revert to an earlier stage of their lifecycle under stress and restart as newborns. It behaves like a new animal that arises within an animal...I propose that the fertilization step involves the fusion of a blood cell with a stressed tissue cell that initiates the murderous journey. A Giant cell is born containing opposing, conflicting, paradoxical “multitudes” within it.“

Researchers who look into these cells found that they unexpectedly appeared when cells are under stress, for cancer cells brought on by chemotherapy, for example. More precisely, these giant cells are a state of cancer cell, one where cell division is paused during external attack; instead, the cell doubles or fuses its genome, protecting its DNA. When the stressor is gone, the cell reignites division and sends now more resilient progeny on their way to distant sites, more aggressively growing and invasive cancer cells – treatment-resistant metastases.

These giant cells happen under normal circumstances to protect us in times of stress and are benign. So what turns them into a malignant state? That is where research must be done – and incentivized – exploring that moment of transition and the causes that come before. (Or so it is suggested – I am not trained in oncology, so can just report what I read. )

I am not trained as a scholar of literature, either, but I do know what I like to read. And Margaret Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rising is among the best recent books capturing aging, disease and dying in not at all morose ways. In fact, it is witty, as is her wont, but also genuinely humane, and precisely observed. It had me laugh and cry in alternation. It also had me grateful for making me think about cancer not as some dire, biologically hard to understand, scientifically mysterious thing (as the medical literature does) but as a condition that requires an appropriate human response, be that determination, or patience, or courage, or humor, or tears, or …. I’ll won’t be able to list the whole repertoire. The point is, there are humanistic aspects of dealing with or learning to deal with illness that go beyond the understanding that would allow us to synthesize some miracle medication. These aspects are somewhat in our control which is the most comforting thought of all.

Photographs of jellyfish today, reminding me of giant cells, emphasize that blobs can contain beauty, too, not just destructive potential.

Music today is derived from a literature overview of how music affects cell growth, cell migration, proliferation, colony formation, and differentiation ability or death of cancer cells. Folks, I have no clue if these experiments are viable (although they are published in respectable medical journals.) It was just strange to read that different music has different effects. Note, these are done with cell cultures in the lab, under carefully controlled conditions, not in humans who listen to music, so it is unclear how much we can transfer anything of this to actually listening to music.

The first movement from Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, KV. 488 seems not to affect some type of human breast cancer cells (MCF-7) but caused cell death (apoptosis) in another one (MDA-MD-231.)

Ligeti’s first movement of Atmospheres, on the other hand, caused significant cell death in MCF-7 cells that had ignored Mozart….

Riddle me that.

PS: Just so you know how things work around here – this is the response I got across the breakfast table to today’s musings:

So here’s part of my view of upcoming disasters or threats….

You’ve heard this stanza from me before.

From Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
 And having once turned round walks on,
 And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

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Satire and Drama

In lieu of actual travel I have lately been gorging on foreign films set in different continents. A slice of Africa, bits and pieces of Europe, a view of New Zealand and Korea, all available at the push of a button (Netflix and Amazon Prime, alas.)

I might have picked them for their differences in locale, but ended up contemplating them for their similarities along other dimensions, family ties being one of them. So here is my best shot at comparative movie reviews, with two discussed today, the other two in the next installment. (And if you want to watch true travel movies, here is a list.)

Let’s begin with two films from England and New Zealand, that treat the relationships between cousins and the effects of parental abandonment in very different ways while simultaneously acknowledging the lasting damage done to children’s souls.

The Pursuit of Love is a 3-part BBC adaptation of a 1945 novel by Nancy Mitford, which skewered the foibles of English gentry, a barbed satire of class and gender relations, xenophobia, and a paean to english fortitude against German War aggression. (“Utter, utter bliss,” was the book’s reception by the Daily Mail at the time.) Written and directed by Emily Mortimer, the film is visually slick time travel, surely appealing to fans of Howard’s End, or Bridgerton, or any other BBC production that revels in period costumes and an excess of upper-class decoration, even if the acting here is quite over the top. It has some tricks up its sleeves, though, one of them the incorporation of modern (pop/rock/country)music that hits the spot and another the interspersing of historical footage showing war-time conditions.

The storyline in the film focusses on two cousins who grow up together, one abandoned by her mother early in life, the other caught in an aristocratic household where education is anathema and male dominance rules. Their friendship sustains them but is also a cause for bitterness and competition since each sees in the other what they themselves lack. Clinging to fairy tale beliefs that love will rescue them – love and marriage being the only escape routes open in any case – they throw themselves blindly into fraught relationships and pay the price in respective ways. Sins of the older generation – parental abandonment among them – are reenacted by the next, and in the end women and daughters, struggling for freedom or caught in convention, all loose.

The film tries to draw attention to Mitford’s early descriptions of women’s fates in a society that punished female independence by dividing women into madonna and whores. Some insightful observations on how their wings are clipped from the start are, unfortunately, later superseded by a pat on the back to the faithful wives and mothers who stick to their lot after all. Here and here are two different mainstream reviews.

It’s eye candy for the highbrow set and was, admittedly, a pleasant diversion for this middlebrow viewer even though it lacked the biting quality of the novel. A bit of melodrama goes a long way on nights too hot to fall asleep…

Instead of binge-watching, one might as well use the time to read a biography of the Mitford sisters, since the adapted novel was a roman-à-clef, loosely based on the Mitford family constellations. There are (too) many books to choose from, depicting the choices these sisters from a minor aristocratic British family made, from going full fascist, with Hitler as wedding guest, joining communist movements, becoming novelists and journalists, running an enterprising country estate as a business that catered to historical nostalgia. I recommend Laura Thompson’s The Six – The Lives of the Mitford Sisters. It describes in detail how of the six sisters three became Nazis, one a socialist journalist after a bout with the Communist Party, one a liberal satirical novelist who informed on her Nazi sisters, and one a duchess. The psychological role played by sibling rivalry is cleverly explored in this biography.

In contrast, Cousins, a film from New Zealand directed by Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace Smith (who wrote the underlying novel) is one that I cannot recommend highly enough. It follows the intertwined fates of three cousins from a Maori background whose lives are upended by racism, colonialism, greed and just tragic blows of fate. “Who needs another dark story?”, you might be thinking right now, but let me assure you the darkness is balanced by light and there is a peacefulness that descends from true emotional attachment and love that buoys your belief in humankind. Well, it did for mine. It is also cinematically as lush as they come, with landscape and interiors greatly impacting the mood of the film, with none of the staged feeling that you got when contemplating yet another flower-laden British dining room, 800-thread count linen closet or fox hunt from Pursuit of Love.

The three cousins are represented by three actresses for childhood, young adulthood and older age each, and it is often hard to decide which one of the nine makes the strongest impression, they are all so glorious in how they convey their character. One of the cousins, Mata, product of a mixed marriage, is forcibly taken away from her Maori mother and deposited in an orphanage by her disappearing White father. “Adopted” by an exploitative woman, she spends her life unable to overcome her losses, eventually descending into mental illness and homelessness. She is allowed one summer away from the orphanage as a child with her extended indigenous family, bonding with two cousins who try to find her for the rest of their lives after she is forced to return to slave-like conditions. The two cousins have diverging paths as well – one escapes an arranged marriage and becomes a lawyer fighting for Maori rights and treaties, estranged from her family because of her insistence on making personal choices. The other steps into that marriage contract and ends up being the happy mother of a growing brood of children in a good relationship with her husband, preserving the land of her ancestors against multinational corporations, and eventually welcoming the abandoned cousin home when they locate her by chance.

The topic of stolen children, exploited and forced into a White culture, is, of course, timely. The issue of loss of family and loss of culture creating such pain that it leads to loss of self, as evinced in the inability of Mata to connect to reality in later life, is also a contemporary topic when you look at forced migrations and the plight of all those displaced by circumstances. The problem with stolen land and treaties is one all too familiar to American viewers as well, or should be.

But the real force in this film comes from the sources of love and caring that stretch across generations. For every brutal encounter there is an act of kindness, by strangers and family alike, for every inch of distance to the past created by Mata’s fall through time there is an act of determination to fulfill the promise once made to her: we are coming for you to bring you home. For every competitive streak between the other two cousins, there is an act of solidarity when it comes to prop up a united front against evil. You leave with a vision of healing, not literally displayed but offered as a possible act of imagination. It will stay with me for a long time.

Music today is from NZ composer/singer Warren Maxwell who wrote the score for the film.

Photographs hark back to the satire’s style of “more is more” when it comes to flowers (as well as acting.) Some pretty English roses among them, photographed in years before the drought descended.

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Where next?

This week I reported on the willingness of large swaths of the population to blind themselves against the facts of science for reasons of tribal loyalty. I am afraid I have to add to that report describing the willingness of many other people to remain blind to the futility of voting rights legislation. Democrats assume that if the voting rights bills in question are thoughtful and fair (and miraculously passed, a whole other story,) they will not be rejected by the Supreme Court. This, of course, is a belief born out of despair over how far we’ve sunk, and in no ways supported by anything we know to be true of this Court – read the not-so-fine print of the decisions of the last years. A concise and non-technical analysis of the status quo of voting rights and the future of the American experiment can be found here. The essay is a short, worthwhile read, ending with the observation that nothing but an expansion of the Supreme Court is potentially going to rescue our democracy.

I am bringing all this up because I have had churning reactions to two books I read this week, one that came highly recommended and that I intensely disliked (why, so often?) and another that I chanced upon and devoured. They both made me think about what affects change and the scale of personal involvement, from ethereal withdrawal into a universe of feeling (if that) to the justification of taking personal action, violence included.

What are you going Through by Sigrid Nunez and White Tears by Hari Kunzru have one thing in common: they both integrate a systemic conflict, the climate crisis for the former, racism and exploitation of Blacks for the latter, into the narrative.

Nunez uses it as a cardboard foil for her larger subject of presence or absence of hope and empathic attachment. Her story is told by a woman who is asked by a distant friend facing terminal cancer to accompany her on her last weeks before actively ending her life with pills. The narrator is all over the map, in a dithery fashion mostly describing other women, from close friends and relatives to mere acquaintances or public figures in faintly, irritatingly misogynistic ways. She herself remains a stick figure, not imbued with any reason for us to root for her, least of all a deplorable tendency to name drop literary greats, with paragraphs of precise quotations.The only names, by the way, offered at all. The story’s inhabitants are all nameless, a successful distancing device. Well, that’s how I reacted. Others disagree (the linked review is typical of the praise the novel received.) In fact, Nunez conveys less a woman racked by feelings – the break-up with an ex-husband, a life without children, the newly blossoming attachment to her friend overshadowed by the impending suicide – than a woman trying on those feelings for size to see how they can be told as stories. An eternal distancing, from the fragility of close human interactions to the large scale one of the intensity of the climate threat. Drifting with willful oblivion along in the wake of death.

Kunzru’s novel is the polar opposite. The characters are so vividly drawn you might as well have met them in real life, even though for most of us they live in a realm somewhat outside our comfortable White middle-class existence. Two young people embark on a search for musical authenticity that leads one of them from New York City to the South, get into huge problems along the way, drawn into events of the past that reverberate into the present and future. The story evolves in ways that manage to surprise and shock, and hook you onto empathizing with the narrator(s) in a way that lures you into a complete understanding of their decisions even thought these eventually include unjustifiable acts.

Bits of magic realism seamlessly fold into a contemporary setting. The deeper issue, the systemic exploitation of Blacks through slavery, prison labor and a music industry commodifying traditional Black music, emerge as a core challenge to our thinking, rather than a foil. It is a novel that explores the toxicity of White appropriation, of the systemic degradation of anything Black – which is of course why it links back to my musings at the beginning of this blog on the chances of a voting right act to come into existence as one of the many ways needed to change race relations. Every page contains complex psychological material, an invitation to think difficult things through while simultaneously offering a grand mystery and real action, compared to the flat vignettes of observed fates in the first book. Here is an insightful review that provides you with details of the narrative.

Neither protagonist, the passive narrator of Nunez’ novel, suffused by diffuse reactions to the world around her, floating in a private universe of sadness, or the active protagonist of Kunzru’s tale, driven into mad acts by a revenge fantasy fed by assumed guilt and responsibility, can be our role models. The question of personal agency and efficacy towards bringing about change, if “only” to the size of the Supreme Court, remains unresolved. More books to read. And this.

Music today is the Blues, given its huge role it plays in White Tears. Photographs from South Carolina, providing a glimpse of the South now.

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See to it!

“Ach Gottchen,”(Ohhhh, little God) my mother would cry when I’d appear tear-streaked in the door. Not clear if the diminutive name of a power she steadfastly believed to be almighty was meant to appease that power, or if it implied a call for mercy. “Ach Kindchen,” (Ohhhh, little child) my atheist father would sigh with quivering helplessness before turning away. Both tender utterings, pointing to a higher agent or infantilizing, respectively, did, of course, nothing to combat my sense of powerlessness.

I could almost hear their voices saying these words this week when I felt overwhelmed by the climate news, starting with the fires here, the drought, the floods in Germany with scores dead and many more missing, the seemingly futile resistance in the struggles against pipe lines, and so much more. What do you do when climate crisis depression hits, or any other kind of upset over the world’s fate?

Someone mentioned Octavia Butler‘s work as an anti-dote. The African-American author (1947 – 2006) was groundbreaking in many ways, not least that she was the first Back woman to succeed in the male-dominated field of Science Fiction. Recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant and the PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award, among others, she wrote prescient novels about global warming, Black injustice and misogyny before her untimely death from a fall in 2006.

I must confess that I had trouble warming up to her tales, the Parable of the Sower and the Parable of the Talents in the early 1990s, trying to juggle small children, teaching undergraduates, doing research, and translating a book. There was something too close for comfort, with its setting in a drought-stricken Los Angeles, CA, the advent of authoritarian rulers, the victimization of non-Whites, and the expressed belief that some sort of religion – Earthseed, which held many a Christian tenet – could be of help to the resistance. I liked my science fiction then in the worlds of Gene Wolf and, as you all know, Ursula LeGuin, worlds that were sufficiently removed (if also true mirrors) that they gave my high anxiety some breathing space.

Butler’s parabels’ current resurgence is driven, however, not just by her prescient description of our country’s developments and challenges. Her protagonist is a young woman who believes in change, believes that G-d is change, and that we can shape and influence pragmatically what is around us, be agents of change ourselves. There is a sense of “outsized resolve,” as an essay in the New Yorker put it, a belief in pragmatic solutions and the will to bring them about that works like an anti-depressant.

The heroine’s resolve echoes that of the author, who grew up in poverty, worked multiple low-level jobs during her decades of writing, and who chose a field, Afrofuturism, that had its own obvious challenges.

Over the decades, as she was writing her most popular novel, “Kindred,” and two highly regarded series—her five-part Patternist books and her Xenogenesis trilogy—Butler was filling personal journals with affirming mantras. “I am a bestselling writer,” one entry, dated 1975, reads. “I write bestselling books.” She closes: “So be it! See to it!” 

A short autobiographical essay that describes her way of looking at and fighting for things, a wonderful, moving read about positive obsession, can be found here.

For those who want a perceptive and humorous miniature version, read this poem by another successful Sci-Fi writer, Patrick O’Leary.

Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia E. Butler and I are sitting on a bench.

Gene is to my right fiddling around with his cane.

Ursula — or “Ullyses Kingfisher” as I like to call her, is smoking a pipe. (We’ve never met.)

Ms Butler is sitting way down at the end.

I realize that they are dead and this is a dream.

But I seize the moment.

I can now ask them the one question I’ve wondered about for years.

“Gene?”

He raises an unruly eyebrow at me, his handlebar droops, unimpressed.

“When you were alive who did you think was the best writer in the world?”

Gene full-faces me and raises the other eyebrow.

I have never been so insulted in my life.

A waft of cannabis pulls me to my left. “How about you, UK?”

“Don’t call me U U!”

“I did not call you: you you!”

“You did it again!”

“Come on! Who was the best?”

“Who gives a fuck?” She points. “Look at that hawk!”

I look. Perfectly flat slate of water to the horizon. Total Bergman.

When I turn back, Ursula is gone.

I look to my right. Gene left his cane. It makes that face at me.

I turn to Octavia who is sitting like a blue rock in a river.

“Estelle?”

“Me,” she says.

Which brings us back to the beginning. The best way to fight the climate- or other blues is by clinging to, or if need be conjuring up, a sense of agency. By forcing ourselves to be engaged as agents of change in whatever way we do it best, writing blogs included…, or calling politicians, or donating money, or all the other things you people excel in. See to it.

And if that doesn’t work, there is always ice cream.

Photographs are of meadow patterns from this week.

Music (Lemonade by Beyonce) is influenced by Octavia Butler as well, covering her other great topic, the Black female body.

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Intersections

During the days of apocalyptic heat I vegetated on the sofa in the basement, reading books on my Kindle. Nothing too demanding, given the melting brain. One was A.S. Byatt’s elegant, lyrical re-telling of Nordic myths of the past, Ragnarok – The End of the Gods, set in Great Britain during the second world war. The other was fantasy writer Elizabeth Knox’s passionate weaving of an alternate reality, The Absolute Book, centered around the preservation of language, books and libraries as a tool for knowledge acquisition. Both melded history with reality, envisioned futuristic possibilities within or outside of reality.

Both have found high acclaim (Byatt here, Knox here) which is why they landed on my lap in the first place. I have, as my regular readers know, a soft spot for A.S. Byatt, given her lasting passion to weave every botanical name there ever was into her writing, and her willingness to tolerate shades of grey when it comes to people’s characters, refraining from black an white, either good or bad, judgements. I have only recently discovered Elizabeth Knox, impressed by her political engagement clothed in smart, imaginative story telling, although frequently heavy on the gore, be warned.

At times, when I opened the Kindle, it took me multiple sentences to figure out which of the two I had landed on. They both meandered between literary materials and reality, a topic that has drawn my attention in other contexts as well.

For one, there are new attempts to teach history by combining literary efforts – in this particular case a comic book about a slave turned superhero – with augmented reality, in form of archival photographs. Jupiter Invincible was a joint project by filmmaker and publisher Ram Devineni who had the idea to use a modern form of story telling to teach about the history of slavery in this country, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa who was roped in as a writer, and Ashley A. Woods who was the artist providing the drawings. A powerhouse, this trio. The reader can constantly switch between the artwork and the reality-based counterparts in form of the historic photographs made available by the Library of Congress. During a time where multiple states consider prohibiting the teaching of our history as was in our schools, comic books might come to the rescue – although one wonders when book banning reaches those as well…

Secondly, I came across this mind-boggling story of Project Cassandra. German university researchers were asked to use their expertise to help the German defense ministry predict future conflicts by analyzing – yes, novels. Academia and military cooperation is something known from the sciences (researcher studying visual perception, for example, are regularly funded by the military in this country,) but literary analysis executed by profs of comparative literature? Public reaction ran from disbelief to scorn, something familiar to all Cassandras across history, of course.

Prof. Juergen Wertheimer and his team believe that novelists are modern-day Cassandras, operating with heightened sensitivity to environmental and social contextual cues “on a plane that is both objective and subjective.” Of interest for the project are not the kind of technological predictions that are often found in science fiction, from weapons to telemetric search tools, like facial recognition soft ware. Instead the focus is on novels that act as seismographs for societal tensions, describing thinly veiled conflicts that could explode in real life, using as an analytic tool, among others, contemporary reactions to those novels (awards, intentional distribution, but also book banning or authors sent packing to exile.) As a test of the viability of the approach, the military asked the team to demonstrate how the war in Kosovo and the rise of Boko Haram could have been predicted through the study of literary texts, which they successfully did.

Spoiler alert – the project has been canceled by the German military, despite successful predictions of a future conflict at the time of their research – the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave of Azerbaijan populated by ethnic Armenians (a war that served geo-political interests of both Turkey and Russia.) However, “the German interior ministry has commissioned the team to investigate the hidden scars of the country’s reunification process. There have been talks with the EU representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Josep Borrell, about docking Cassandra in Brussels. Wertheimer says he is interested in applying his method to analyze geopolitical tensions in Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus.” So we might hear more of them, after all.

I guess I’ll refrain from re-reading a HandMaid’s Tale and go directly to a documentary about reality unfolding along the lines of the novel’s visions: Welcome to Chechnya.

Or I go and water what remains of the garden after the sun torched it, trying to forget the novels I have already read about the consequences of climate change…. here is the list.

And here is Jessye Norman as Cassandra in Les Troyens.

Photographs are obviously showing the harm done last week. Welcome back to the realms of pessimistic blogging…..

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The Beauty of Resonance

I know it’s not fair to sing the praises of a new book non-German speakers won’t yet have access to. Helga Schubert‘s Vom Aufstehen (On Getting up) has been consuming my thoughts, eliciting memories that I had not held in consciousness for maybe half a century. We can share, though, the general considerations of what makes some books resonate, while others don’t.

The collection of stories tells the story of the author’s life in Germany after the war. Schubert was born in 1940, shortly before her father was killed in action, in his 20s. Her mother, herself probably traumatized by all that war, flight, poverty and widowhood imposed, was not the ideal mother, distant and punitive in alternation. A childhood was spent moving, from town to town, school to school, until they settled in Berlin, eventually imprisoned in its Eastern part behind the wall. The author was a practicing psychotherapist for many years before her writing career took off, despite GDR restrictions.

I grew up in West Germany, a decade or so later, but many of the details the author describes rang absolutely true for my own childhood, the constant geographic displacement included, as well as the reliably offered baked treats from grandparents in times when sweet stuff was still rare. She had me with the sentence: “I saw too many tears as a child.” The crying adults were really a hallmark of post-war childhood, decades before the term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was conceived, much less popularized. As was the unwillingness or inability to explain the cause for the emotional distress and/or emotional distance, a silence that left children forever searching in themselves for possible transgressions.

I dissolved when I read her repeated assertions: “Alles gut.”(All good.) It was an eternal mantra in my own life, uttered by comforting adults, probably in the hopes that if said out loud often enough, it would come true. As a stand-in for “calm down,” “don’t worry,” ” all is well,” “nothing to be done,” or “not your problem,” it was the underlying melody I had hummed to me when faced with misery or fear, my own and others’.

Reading about something that you are quite familiar with can resonate in one of two ways – if it’s depicted badly you feel particular scorn, if it is represented well your brain and heart react with waves of recognition, you are moved as a reader, and quite literally transported back as an experiencer. It is a different feeling or cognition from when you read – equally important – about things/places/times that you know nothing about but are now invited and exposed to, learning along the way.

It is all the more effective if the language contains no pathos, no flowery formulations, but consists instead of Sachlichkeit, a kind of dispassionate objectivity, or, as someone said when Schubert received last year’s Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, one of the highest literary honors for works written in German, when the writing is done with gentle insistence. Getting up is not just the theme of this story collection, the willingness to leave the realms of sleep to face the difficulties of the day. It is also an attitude towards life in general, quietly described, to get back on your feet when you’ve been thrown down, loss after loss or deprivation, for many of the post-war generation.

— Alles gut. —

And speaking of language and resonance – the other stimulating thing I read this week might be of interest to you as well, and is certainly accessible in English. Francine Prose has another thought-provoking essay on the difference between men and women writers, their language, their acceptance into the canon of literature, their (dis)proportional selection for awards, and the gendered differences among their readers. How can you not delve into Scent of a woman’s Ink – Are women writers really inferior? with urgent prayers that she comes down on the right answer after such a nasty title? (Spoiler alert, she does. See below.)

“In the end, of course, it’s pointless to characterize, categorize, and value writing according to its author’s gender, or to claim that women writers fixate on everything that irritates gynophobes about our sex. The best writing has as little to do with gender as it does with nationality or with the circumscriptions of time…… there is no male or female language, only the truthful or fake, the precise or vague, the inspired or the pedestrian…..The only distinction that will matter will be between good and bad writing.“

Now, that resonates!

As does this quintessential German symphony by Schumann.

Photographs are from the German state Mecklenburg-Pommern some 15 years ago, where Schubert lives in an artist colony close to Schwerin.

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