A Note from Wisława Szymborska

 

A Note

Life is the only way

to get covered in leaves,

catch your breath on the sand,

rise on wings;

 

to be a dog,

or stroke its warm fur;

 

to tell pain

from everything it's not;

 

to squeeze inside events,

dawdle in views,

to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

 

An extraordinary chance

to remember for a moment

a conversation held

with the lamp switched off;

 

and if only once

to stumble on a stone,

end up drenched in one downpour or another;

 

mislay your keys in the grass,

and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;

 

and to keep on not knowing

something important.

 

-Wisława Szymborska

(tr. Claire Cavanagh and Stanisław Baranczak)

 

This is from Wisława Szymborska's book Moment of 2002. Szymborska was born in 1923, died in 2012, and won the Nobel Prize in 1996. It's not her only poem titled simply, 'A Note'. She's an old favorite of mine--sharp observers might notice I've used the photo before--and I didn't search that hard. But I got both my Covid booster and flu shot this morning and I'm feeling a bit done in. 

 

 

A Charlie Chan Pairup (#NonFicNov)

 

Week 3 (10-16 November) Book Pairings: This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or maybe it’s just two books you feel have a link, whatever they might be. You can be as creative as you like! Hosted by Liz.

I reread the first Charlie Chan mystery The House Without a Key a couple of weeks ago for the #1925Club. It reminded me there was a book I had wanted to read since I first heard of it:

 

It was really good! 

Huang first tells the story of Chang Apana, the Honolulu detective, who inspired the character of Charlie Chan. Apana was born in Hawaii to Chinese immigrant parents who went back to China when he was young. But Apana returned to Hawaii with an uncle, and then stayed. He worked as a cowboy, a house servant, the enforcer for the newly enacted statute against animal cruelty; then when the Honolulu police force was officially constituted, he became the only Chinese detective on the force. He seemed to have been good at all his jobs.

Huang then tells the story of Earl Derr Biggers. Biggers had grown up in Ohio to a middle class family. He worked as a journalist and had already become a successful author. But when in 1925 he published the first Charlie Chan novel, those earlier successes could no longer compare. Biggers wrote six Charlie Chan mysteries but died young of a heart attack.

Then there were the movies: there were three early movies, which went nowhere. In all of them Chan was played by a Japanese actor; it was only when Warner Oland (a Swede!) took on the role, they became a success. That's his picture on the cover lower right. (And Chang Apana in the upper left.) Oland's Chan was a huge success even in China, where he was mobbed when he made a publicity trip. And the Chinese were perfectly capable of scorning series they didn't like, such as those around Fu Manchu.

And Huang goes on to talk about the reception of the Charlie Chan character, and that was in some ways the most fascinating. Biggers admired the actual Chang Apana; they met a few times and their respect was mutual, and he intended Charlie Chan to be an antidote to all the Yellow Peril arguments of the time. But Chan talks in that pidgin: how can he be an admirable figure? Well, Huang demonstrates how it could be a whole lot worse. And Chan in the novels is competent and willing to stand up to prejudice when he sees it. Still in the 80s and 90s Chan was viewed as a stereotyped Asian whiz kid, or worse a yellow Uncle Tom, and nothing but cultural appropriation to boot.

Is that all he is? Of course, he is, partly. But Huang reminds us that much of American art comes about from a collision with somebody else's half-understood culture. This is perhaps most obvious in music (though not Huang's topic) and he rightly notes we'd have to give up a lot to achieve that sort of purity of the past.

Huang's includes a little of his own biography, which is fascinating. He was a student, majoring in English, at Peking University in 1989, and went to camp out in Tiananmen Square. But before the tanks rolled in, his parents lured him home by sending a telegram that his mother was dying. (She wasn't.)  Nevertheless he decided to emigrate, worked in lowly jobs in the US, until he decided to go back to school where he got a Ph.D. in English. As of the writing of the book (2010), he was teaching at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Huang clearly enjoys the Chan mystery series himself; he ends the book with a two page list of Charlie Chan aphorisms. Can't resist a few:

Hasty deduction, like ancient egg, look good from the outside. 

Man who flirt with dynamite sometime fly with angels.

Murder like potato chip--cannot stop at just one.

Some heads, like hard nuts, much better if well cracked.

Mind, like parachute, only function when open. 

I felt like it really added something to my earlier reread of the first Charlie Chan mystery. Does that mean I'm about to go reread them all? Careful examination reveal clue: bookmark in second volume of series!

If you have access to the New York Review of Books, the original review which caught my attention is here. 

 

A Displaced Person's Song

 

Chuck says, I just love the names in this: Pointsman, Slothrop, Borgesius

If you see a train this evening,

Far away against the sky,

Lay down in your wooden blanket, (*)

Sleep, and let the train go by.

 

Trains have called us, every midnight,

From a thousand miles away,

Trains that pass through empty cities,

Trains that have no place to stay.

 

No one drives the locomotive,

No one tends the staring light,

Trains have never needed riders,

Trains belong to bitter night.

 

Railway stations stand deserted,

Rights-of-way lie clear and cold,

What we left them, trains inherit,

Trains go on, and we grow old.

 

Let them cry like cheated lovers,

Let their cries find only wind.

Trains are meant for night and ruin

We are meant for song, and sin.

 

-Thomas Pynchon

 

Another song from Gravity's Rainbow. In the novel, it's the time after V-E Day, but before the zones decided on at the Potsdam Conference (17 July - 2 August) have been implemented, and there's just one Zone. (Though for Tyrone Slothrop there's really only ever just one Zone.) People are trying to get home--either their old home, or whatever the new one they might be forced to will be.

"It is a Displaced Person's song, and Slothrop will hear it often around the Zone, in the encampments, out on the road, in a dozen variations." (p. 283)

I finished my rereading a couple of days ago. I won't actually try to say anything about the novel, I guess, but I did think about the poetry in the book a bit more this time.

 

(*) My edition, the second printing of the original paperback edition, really does say wooden, but woolen seems more likely...though maybe it's wood from the sides of the boxcars? But the observer is presumably not in a boxcar. A 'wooden blanket' also suggests a coffin, but maybe that's just me?

 

Patricia Moyes' Death on the Agenda

"Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett of Scotland Yard, to give him his full title. A deceptively insignificant man in early middle age, with sandy hair and a mild manner, with a flair for intuitive deduction which he described, with some embarrassment, as 'my nose.'"

Henry is in Geneva at the Palais des Nations for a conference of police officers of different countries dealing with international drug smuggling. His wife Emmy has come along for a bit of vacation. It looks like a simple junket at first, but then the American delegate tells Henry there's a leak from their committee, and what are they going to do? It has to come from one of the committee members or staff.

Then John Trapp, one of the simultaneous translators, is killed in the committee rooms. Because the work of the committee is about secret countermeasures to the drug trade, there's a door warden who takes names and notes the time when everyone comes in. The only possible suspects are the six police officers on the committee, the two other simultaneous translators, and the verbatim reporter. And, of course, one of those possible suspects is Henry Tibbett himself, for quite a while the primary suspect. The murder weapon, a knife, comes from the Geneva home of a rich American.

Was Trapp the leaker? Or did he know who the leaker was? Or was he killed for some entirely different reason? (His romantic life is pretty complicated.) All three possibilities are given a reasonable airing.

Of course, Henry figures it out in the end, less as a result of his nose then from sensible insights. (How many words a minute can a good typist manage?) I thought it was a good enough entry in the Henry Tibbett series, but not my favorite. Henry behaves in a way that might be OK in a different kind of mystery series, but seemed inappropriate here.

One of the those sad little Parisian-sounding tunes

Love never goes away,

Never completely dies,

Always some souvenir

Takes us by sad surprise.

 

You went away from me,

One rose was left behind--

Pressed in my Book of Hours,

That is the rose I find....

 

Though it's another year,

Though it's another me,

Under the rose is a drying tear,

Under my linden tree....

 

Love never goes away,

Not if it's really true,

It can return, by night, by day,

Tender and green and new

As the leaves from the linden tree, love,

  That I left with you.

 

-Thomas Pynchon

 

Pynchon is famous for the songs he embeds in his novels. Like a stage musical, people break into song at all times, sometimes motivated, but not always. Here apprentice witch Geli Tripping is accompanying herself on a balalaika when our hero (?) Tyrone Slothrop first meets her. (p.289 in my edition.) A lot of the poems/songs are contextual--whenever Major Marvy's Mothers, an American military detachment chasing Slothrop appears, they approach singing obscene limericks--but this one felt like it could stand on its own. It reminds me a bit of Heine.

 

Pynchon's a bit in the air these days and I'm rereading Gravity's Rainbow. I saw One Battle After Another, the new film by Paul Thomas Anderson, last night--quite good, I thought--based on Pynchon's novel Vineland. And the old wizard has a new novel out this fall, Shadow Ticket, but I haven't read it yet. How much of the old Pynchon am I going to reread before I get that? I'm not sure, but clearly some.

 

The post title comes from the introduction of the poem: "...Slothrop heard a girl singing. Accompanying herself on a balalaika. One of those sad little Parisian-sounding tunes in 3/4..."