J'ai lu Une Si Longue Lettre dans ma troisième classe à Virginia Tech. Ce n'était pas facile pour moi. (Évidemment, mon français est encore rudimentaire, mais je l'améliore lentement.) L'histoire lui-même est l'historie d'une femme sénégalaise qui habite avec son mari et leurs enfants. Le mari se décide à prendre une deuxième marie, malgré les sentiments de la narratrice. C'est une histoire des droits des femmes africaines et une histoire des politiques coloniales.

Pour moi, l'histoire ne m'intéresse pas beaucoup. Les événements de la roman ses passent lentement, avec beaucoup des pensées de la narratrice. Le pensées sont peut-être important pour le commentaire sur la politique d'Afrique, et je suspecte que la langue est belle. Mais malheureusement, je ne suis pas compétent pour juger la langue, parce que mon compréhension des subtilités ne suffise pas. Donc, le roman est perdu à moi. Ce n'est pas la faute du roman; c'est la faute de moi, je suis sûr.

Donc, je vais retourner à France pour pratiquer mon compréhension. Je pourrais suivre un autre cours, mais je suis limitée par les accents de mes camarades de classe; lesquels ne sont pas meilleure que le mien. Je fais des projets de passer un mois en France cet automne. Je vais voyager et pratiquer. Si je suis de la chance, je peut apprendre plus en un mois en France que trois mois en classe.

Bon courage à moi...

List of gifts, as I remember them: 1 Leonard Nimoy record, 1 Josh Hernandez CD with tote bag, 1 jar of corn liquor, 1 tablet of erectile medication, 3 packages of revitalizing eye patches, 1 Charles Bukowski pin, 1 diner-style spatula, 1 fig tree, 1 hibiscus. And probably some other stuff I just can't recall due to item #3 in the aforementioned list.

For everyone who's been wondering; dem bees are doing just great. The ladies of Troy had started to build comb out the top of the inner hive cover, so we added another set of deep frames and gave them plenty of new space. They've been reproducing, and there are a lot of them in there now. Ithaca will get their chance for a second story tomorrow. Many thanks to the Apostate Appalachian for her photographic assistance.

And for the attentive -- yes, I cut my hair. It's shorter than the day I was born. And feels good.

Luther Wright and the Wrongs don't so much much walk that line as teeter drunkenly down it. Rebuild the Wall is a start-to-finish cover of Pink Floyd's The Wall, done in a bluegrass/country style. Like Hayseed Dixie, they've taken a simple gag and stretched it out beyond all reason and sense. If nothing else, you have to admire the attention to detail. Not only have they covered every song on the original album, but they've faithfully spliced in appropriate sound effects to retell the story in a country-western vein. Buzz bombs have been replaced by galloping hooves; distressed moans have become distressed moos.

Does it hang together? Yes -- Rebuild the Wall is relentlessly coherent. Does it have listening longevity? Not really. It's a fine joke, but once you've got the punchline, there's not much to bring you back for more. Because, like other parodies, it just can't transcend the source material, and ultimately it can't be more than a footnote -- which may be all it was intended to be in the first place.

I guess when I was a teenager, I had a taste for melodrama. I guess I figured that if I made myself suffer enough, I would just *have* to make good art out of it. And from that angle, "Life After God" might have appealed to me. Now it just seems self-indulgent. God is dead. Fine. Your neighbors aren't. Go give 'em a hand with something, and get over yourself.

I'll check back with the girls in about a week to see if they're still shitting the hive and to see how they're getting on with their new queens. With any luck, I'll be able to post photos of healthy brood in a couple of weeks. Anyway, the full photo spread is here.

But it's also a reconstruction of modern Italian history, particularly that of the second world war and the rise and fall of Italian fascism. My primary and secondary education were sorely lacking on the subject. I was taught WWII as the war against the Germans in Europe and against the Japanese in the Pacific. Italy was part of the Axis, but always as a footnote. We learned the name of Benito Mussolini, but not what he stood for. We learned the term 'fascism', but not why it appealed to the Italians. We only knew that the trains ran on time.

Eco's story is particularly poignant as it portrays Yambo's primary school education in fascist Italy -- the rampant patriotism, the grave directives to serve one's country, the drive to convert boys into proud soldiers. Like so many American children mindlessly mouthing the pledge of allegiance every morning, Yambo writes patriotic essays to please his schoolteachers, but which nonetheless constitute a portion of his sense of self. His story about his childhood service to the socialist resistance sounds almost like a justification; not just of Yambo, but of the Italian people. Not all of the Italians were fascists; the fascists were the villains, the anarchists and the socialists the heroes. In reconstructing one's personal history in light of the fascists' defeat, how could the narrative be otherwise?

Where The Mysterious Flame comes unglued is when Yambo suffers his second stroke and his personal history comes back to him in an ever-accelerating collage of images. Sadly, this is also where Eco's storytelling comes unglued. While masterful with bibliographic storytelling, Eco falls a bit short while working with image association. So the grand finale falls a bit flat; a disappointing cap to an otherwise delicious novel.

Because there's nothing to love. We're told that Florentino is love with Fermina; we're shown the lengths and depths to which he will go to win her. But we never see why. For her part, Fermina is cold, hard, unwinnable. But also entirely unlovable, even unlikable. It makes it difficult to root for the protagonist, because I really don't want him to win. His perpetual string of casual lovers seems vastly preferable to his object of desire, even on those rare occasions when she finally does acknowledge his existence. I just can't read it as a love story. It's more like a story of pathological obsession and eventual concession, but with no real emotional investment in the plight of any of the characters. So the novel becomes to me only a linguistic exercise -- a string of well-turned phrases instead of a story, or maybe a story that serves as a frame on which to hang the well-turned phrases.

It's not that I'm a cynic about love. I may be, but I don't think so. I am a cynic about the tendency to hammer love into a particular shape. Spending time with my family over Christmas, there was much speculation about when my now-married sister would breed, much speculation about who would marry next. Why? Nobody seems to know. Because that's the next thing that you do. The protagonist gets the girl, so we call it love. Because that's the way that the story goes, even if she's entirely unlikable. It's lazy storytelling, and that much worse when we live the story. Once you've got the kids, you wait for the grandkids. Because that's the next thing that you do.

Love in the Time of Cholera has some nicely-turned phrases, and in that sense it lives more richly than most of us. But the frame is rickety, and the happy ending not actually that happy. Like far too many other stories, that makes it difficult to admire.

And so I was proud of my family for finally (mostly) kicking the stuff-giving habit. A few things here and there, but mostly just charitable contributions and a shared meal. I think we're learning. Sadly, my west-coast brother wasn't there, so an appropriately-noduled snowman stood in for him. And did a pretty good job for a guy with polyester for brains.

The obligatory photo documentation is here.

If my web site (or is it a blog now? I think the kids are calling it a blog these days) were to be believed, I've listened to nothing but Crooked Fingers' Dignity and Shame for the last two years. Records are apparently different than books this way. I tend to read books serially -- that is, one at a time, start to finish. I'm not usually one of those people who has a whole stack of books that I'm reading all at once. And when I finish a book, it goes on the stack until I've written something about it. And while there is always a backlog, eventually I sit down and knock a couple off the stack.

Of course, records don't work that way. And the more digitally-dependent I become, the less they work that way. Gone are the days when I would endlessly flip a cassette on the school bus until I had the album memorized. Now it goes into a digital shuffle of thousands of other albums: a playlist 60 days long and growing. Other folks have already adequately lamented the death of the album, and how we're returning to the days of 45s, except that the 45s are now called MP3s. It's not quite true in my case; I still buy albums, but they invariably get dissected into their constituent parts and tossed into the Great Shuffle. Which means (among other things) that I hardly ever review albums any more.

But if I did, I would be obliged to point out that Dignity and Shame is a good one. Eric Bachmann has certainly had some musical changes over the years. I remember seeing him first at the Black Cat in the Archers of Loaf days when he was a tower of a young man awash in a sea of electric guitars. And then again at Lounge Ax in Chicago a couple of years later, sombre and solo with only a guitar and an digital delay pedal. And then once more at the old OttoBar in Baltimore with Crooked Fingers, for an acoustic set complete with cello and banjo. Dignity and Shame sets out in the full band direction again, going further beyond the mariachi horns of Red Devil Dawn into full-on orchestrated rock. Not the awash-in-electric-guitars sort of rock of the Archers, but a studio-produced sort of rock awash in mature songwriting and textured instrumentation and the trademark Bachmann gravelly vocals. And I guess maturity ain't always a bad thing.

"I would change for you, but babe, that doesn't mean I'm gonna be a better man..." -- Crooked Fingers

It's been particularly fun to read the Greek Lives on the heels of Machiavelli. Athens is synonymous with Democracy, while Machiavelli is synonymous with Tyranny. The modern United States is supposed to be synonymous with "democracy building". But guess what? Modern American federalism has far more resonance with Machiavelli than with Plutarch. We've got a plutocracy (at best) in which we elect our favorite millionaire based on American-Idol-style popularity contests, and the most popular millionaires get to create legislation. We've got Kennedy family dynasties, Bush family dynasties, Clinton family dynasties, ad nauseam. Poor ol' W has to take weekend-long photo ops trimming brush on his Texas ranch -- it's hard work becoming a Man Of The People when you're the multi-millionaire son of a U.S. President! Contrast this with the story told again and again in the Greek Lives, in which too much popularity is the political kiss of death. Ostracism was a pretty good incentive to stay humble. It wasn't criminals or traitors who were ostracized (there were other penalties for those things); it was the public servant who had amassed too much power and had become a threat to egalitarianism. It was when people started murmuring things like, "Hey, this guy's pretty good! Maybe we should hand over wartime powers to him -- you know, just temporarily -- until this situation with those terrorists in Sparta gets sorted out..." that the assembly would lay the chips on the table and suggest that maybe you needed to take a little vacation in Persia for oh, ten years or so. Or you could be put to death. Your call, really.

Of course, I don't really mean to romanticize Athenian democracy. While it did strive for egalitarianism among citizens, citizens were defined as free men -- free, as in "not slaves", and men, as in "not women". I do however, mean to point out that modern American "liberal democracy" is much closer to fascism than ever before, and nothing much like Democracy as Plutarch would have understood it. And that a little ostracism goes a long way.

The full photo spread is here.

If morality and aesthetics are really the same question, then Hunter S. Thompson can be nothing less than a saint, and it's the petty, predictable social conservatives who deserve our moral condemnation. The passive consumer of mass produced goods, television, shrink-wrapped religious dogma with no guts whatsoever. That is what evil really is. Fear and Loathing revels in drugs, sexual depravity, interstate crime, and a disregard for common sense so flagrant and intentional as to become a kind of sense of its own. It's not that any of those things are good -- most people who use recreational drugs aren't any more creative or interesting than most soccer moms. (They just think they are.) What makes Thompson's genius isn't the fact of the drug abuse and depravity; it's the style with which he does them, and the ability to tell a good story about it later. For Thompson, the lived-in art form itself wasn't enough (although he certainly surpassed just about everyone else -- ashes shot out of a cannon is about as gonzo as it gets). He had both the guts and the clarity to document it for the rest of us. His was a two-fold genius -- a genius of living and a genius of writing. Most of us don't manage either.

Was he immoral? I guess it depends on whom you ask. But if morality is an aesthetic -- I think a strong argument can be made that it is -- then for my money, he did all right. Certainly better than a grey-cinderblock moral realism would have us believe.

However, I can still grasp his principles, which are intended to transcend history. When we invoke the name of Machiavelli, we mean for it to be synonymous with treachery, deceit, and mercilessness. Machiavelli does indeed advocate those things when appropriate, but only as means to an end. That end is the maintenance of the power of the monarch and the order of the state. His point is not that a leader should be cruel, but that a leader should be capable of cruelty when the situation calls for it. A leader need not be subversive all the time (indeed, should not be subversive all the time), but must be skilled at and capable of subversion when necessary to maintain power. It makes an interesting complement to Plutarch's Lives of the Greeks, which I've been reading at the same time. Machiavelli is pretty clear that the preferable method for a monarch is to win the loyalty of the people; failing that, he must subjugate them utterly as to keep them powerless and incapable of revolt. When conquering a foreign state, the ruling family must be wiped out; without that, there are credible forces for organizing a popular uprising.

I'll admit that it is impossible for me to read The Prince without drawing some parallels to the modern American state. The Bush administration seems to have treated Iraq as a monarchy in the sense that Machiavelli would have understood it -- hang the monarch, hunt down the ruling family, and there is nobody left to lead the populace against you. The miscalculation, of course, is to treat "the populace" as a unified body, which it isn't. In hanging the monarch, you may instead create a power vacuum into which heroes from previously-subjugated castes can arise. As such potential heroes arise in Iraq, they are assassinated in short order. At some point, a more successful hero will probably arise (or be installed by more powerful military forces), and the fear of assassination will mean that he will be a well-armed and highly militant leader, which doesn't bode well for the region. (Bin Laden, anyone?) As for American domestic politics, it looks like nepotism is alive and well. We've endured 12 years of Bushes, and it looks likely that we'll endure at least 12 years of Clintons. 24 (and maybe 28) consecutive years of the presidency in the same two families? I'll confess that it worries me, no matter what their political platforms may be. It's not quite the Medici court, but we're moving in that direction with major consolidation of executive branch power, and that can't be good.

Regrouping with the fiddler at the close of the festival, we tired to make a list of high points. Here's what we found:

1) Hanging out with the French-Canadians. They were great guys and great musicians. We'll almost definitely see them again somewhere.

2) The overwhelming weirdness of the event had us so out of our element (and our senses) as to count as a positive. Most places I've traveled internationally, the McDonald's-ization of the place has been apparent. Not the case here -- I had plenty of chances to be completely disoriented. Emblematic moment: standing in the cold rain outside of the stadium, simultaneously speaking in broken French to a Polish guy and broken sign language to a mute Brazilian. Linguistically challenging, to say the least. The various creoles that developed during the week would have linguists throwing up their hands in agony.

3) Final highlight -- the hospitality of the Brazilian people, festival organizers notwithstanding. I got to be plenty friendly with the cachaça distillers; some of the ladies got cozy with the mulled wine vendor. On the last day of the festival, the mulled wine vendor invited us to her shop, saying that she had something special for us. She was dressed in her best suit, with hot wine poured out for everyone, and proceeded to relate the following story (by way of our translator):

Even though she spoke no English, the woman had always had a fondness for Americans, and particularly for The King of Americans, Elvis Presley. She had a large collection of Elvis records, and knew all of the words, if only phonetically. A couple of years back, she was diagnosed with cancer, and became too ill to work. So she prayed to be healed -- not to Jesus, but to Elvis. And Elvis heard her prayers, and through time and medicine, her cancer was healed, and she started her mulled wine business. She vowed that one day she would repay her debt to The King. And then along came us, a bunch of American dancers and musicians, visiting her wine hut every night for warmth and good cheer. Her chance had come. So she put on her best clothes, presented us with complementary beverages, and so fulfilled her debt to Elvis.

Some things can only make sense in Latin America, I guess. Everything has a saint -- even the bus stop. But it was pretty all right to be an emissary of Elvis for a day.

Today I climbed another mountain, this time to the Parque du Santa Cruz, an enormous cross towering over town. From the top of the mountain, the whole region is spread out below. One can see the cathedral, the industrial district, the favelas, and the mountains. Fences separate the haves from the have-nots -- everyone who owns something worth protecting has a fence and a dog to do the job. Santa Cruz du Sul is one of the wealthier towns in the region, but even here the wealthy homes are fairly modest by North American standards. I've not been able to talk politics much because of my very meager Portuguese skills, but there is definitely not much love in this part of South America for the Republican white house. Too many guns and dollars going to the wrong side of those fences, I guess.

****

Last night, in the midst of a cachaça-fueled hotel party with the German marching band, the mother of one of the cloggers turns to me and says "You don't much like rules, do you?" I guess it was a rhetorical question. Does anyone, when the rules are arbitrary or paternalistic? (When we were told that we needed to remain together and in sight of the guide, one of the cloggers had nodded knowingly and said, "For security." Apparently the fear society has already gotten the best of her.) I had wandered out earlier into the night, body full of liquor and nicotine, bundled in an alpaca wool Peruvian tunic, to see the stars. This is the farthest south that I've ever been, the sky had finally cleared, and I intended to see the Southern Cross. There it was in all of its winter glory, splayed across the Milky Way, and just like that I have seen twice as much of the galaxy as I have ever seen before. It's one thing to be in a place where the buildings are different and you don't speak the language, but it's something quite different when even the stars -- billions of years old and almost utterly immobile in the human time scale -- are completely foreign and entirely illegible.