Juan Rulfo is so Strange

I was squatting on a rock, not doing anything,
only sitting there with my pants down 
so they would see me like that and wouldn't come near me.

Yo estaba acuclillado en una piedra, sin hacer nada, 
solamente sentado alli con los pantalones caidos 
para que ellas me vieran asi y no se me arrimaran.
                                                
                            Juan Rulfo, Anacleto Morones

I just finished reading El Llano en Llamas by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo.  These stories are fascinating, very Mexican, creepy, Poe-like.  He only wrote two books, the other was Pedro Paramo a short novel with strange distortions of memory and mixing of the real and the supernatural.  Always grim, fatalistic, morbid, but these are stories with characters, motives, plots and mood that transcend common writing.

Using the Trains in Italia

The Trains

On our recent trip to Italy we traveled by between cities by train, going from Rome to Naples, then by ferry around the Amalfi coast, stopping for three days in Positano and then another ferry to Salerno where we trucked our luggage 3 blocks to the train station and tried to figure out how the system worked. There were two train companies with ticket offices in the Salerno station.  One was Trenitalia, the government owned system and the other was Italo Treno a supposedly private company.  We started in the Italo-treno office but could not get a good schedule to get to Venice by nightfall where we had an Airbnb room waiting for us.  We ended up going to the Trenitalia station, at first standing in a long, non-moving line, until a woman asked us if we needed help.  She took us into a private office and arranged our trip.  I am not sure why we were treated differently but it was a big help and we got our tickets on a good schedule, although not cheap.  We got off the water bus in Venice about dark and our host met us to take us to our apartment.

We only stayed one night in Venice, eating at a small Osteria in a medieval alleyway late at night and the next day having breakfast in Saint Mark’s square.  When we left, we took the water bus back to the train station and took our place in a long line again to get tickets.  Again, the line was hardly moving, but I had searched online the previous night to find the train we wanted to take, including the price, departure time, and train number.  So I left Pam in line and went around to one of the ticket machines where I found it was easy to buy the tickets I wanted for the train I wanted, although only first class was still available.  The ticket machine easily switched to English and took my credit card, printing out our two first class tickets.  Then all we had to do was watch for the track number on the board, check our coach and seat numbers and be ready to get on board at the right place.  Our first train ride from Rome to Naples we had randomly boarded and sat unknowingly in first class with coach tickets.  We were summarily asked to leave and go to our appropriate coach and class. Once we had learned the ropes the trains were a lot easier to use. 

     My advice on using the trains in Italy:  Know which train company and line you are going to use, there are different companies and some lines stop at every stop, and others go city center to city center.   Know ahead of time the train you want and get your tickets early, they do sell out.  Find the right track on the board, find your car, usually there are numbers on the track so you know where to stand when the train comes in, your seat number seems to matter, but most people are flexible so you can move to sit next to your traveling companions.  The machine bought tickets did not always print out with proximate seats.  On one trip, a woman realized that she had got on the wrong train and was in tears.  She probably had spent a good amount of money on the ticket and would miss whatever appointment she had had, and would have to spend the day returning and re-buying tickets to get to her original destination.  This was always my fear in the early confusion we had finding our way.

     The Trenitalia trips were pleasant enough.  We found ourselves rocketing through the Italian countryside.  As we moved south the rolling hills and mountains got drier and drier.  There are forests, farms and fields in Tuscany, (Just like the Illinois Central),  more farms, less forests and vegetation on the mountainsides south of Rome.  The trains are air conditioned.  Italians do not use air conditioning as much as Americans do.  One bookstore at the train station was oppressively hot and miserable to be in.  When there was AC it was generally turned lower than at home.   The seats on the trains were comfortable although economy class could get crowded.  First class had leather seats, more room and an attendant served drinks and snacks from a mobile cart.  The train information along with news and weather was displayed on Monitors at intervals along each car.  The speed of the train was usually about 240 kilometers per hour.  But it did not feel that we were going that fast.  While we were in Florence, there was a bad train crash in the south, but it was not Trenitalia.

We did try to take the Circumvesuvio railroad from Naples to Sorrento but the train was so hot and crowded that we had to get off, especially after people kept jamming into the already overloaded car.  We forfeited our tickets but they were cheap enough and dragged our luggage onto the Metro to get to the waterfront where we found the ferries.

For we, being many, are one bread and one body, for we are all partakers of that one Bread.

                                           1 Corinthians 10:17

We went to church today.  Our church is a Congregational church in an upscale, all-white town.  It is a welcoming place.  I try to understand what element is missing, for it always seems to me that something is missing.  I cannot fault the people for being white or upscale.  They are merely who they are, gathered together to worship God in the town where they live.  I am one of them, or almost one of them.  I am white, I am not upscale, but always trying to keep up appearances of being so in order to fit in and meet the social expectations of community and family.  I have dropped out of the Catholic church, my childhood religion, and the Baptist church, where I raised my son.  I had major problems with both of those churches either theological or political, in fact more problems than I have with the congregationalists.  But I think they had some things that the Congregationalists lack.  

     The Catholic church had a sense of the sacred.  You could not cross the altar without genuflecting or say the name of Jesus without bowing your head.  The host was said to be the actual body of Christ, and people prayed to Saints embodied in pious statues at the front of the church.  I do not think this was always right and good but I just mean to mention that this provided something the people needed, something sacred, holy awe-inspiring and inviolable.  

       The Baptist church had less of this.  The one thing they had that was inviolable was the Bible.  The Word of God as inerrant, ‘living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword”  provided a sacred center to the service.  Compared to the Baptist church, the Congregationalists lack a sense of urgency.  For them it really doesn’t matter what you do or whether you come to Christ or not.  All are welcome, no attempt is made to make one conform to rules.  There are no expectations of a conversion experience.  There is no heaven or hell mentioned in the sermons.  I did think this was overdone and distorted in the Baptist church, but without it what is the point of believing in Jesus?  Why do we need to spread the Gospel, why bother with any of it?  I have my own understanding of these things, not entirely reflected in any of these churches, and I know that with these compromised positions, some things left unexplainable, some denied, and others interpreted to my own understanding,  I could not well be a minister.  A minister must have a theology, a guiding principle, a set of absolutes that he or she stands for so that the congregation knows what he stands for and where they stand. 

     However, I must give the Congregationalists credit for their efforts to reach out into the community, for their welcoming atmosphere, and especially for their Christ-centered theology.  The communion service is done with great reverence and it was what Jesus commanded his church to do.  

2/15/16

      Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the hater, and this was an immutable law.

                                                            James Baldwin,  from Notes of a Native Son

     We like to see the bad guy get his due when we go to the movies.  This has driven the popularity of many hit films.  The drive for justice is mixed with a desire to destroy and it is that unexamined murderousness which inevitably destroys us.  I think that for many readers it is not easy to understand the pent up, personal, distorting, and crippling anger that he talks about and even less easy to resolve that anger rationally as he does in this essay, concluding that it will destroy him as it destroyed his father and is destroying his community.  And then making the decision to amputate it rather than die from its poison.  How many of us can let go a legitimate injustice, to forgive a real, and unacknowledged wrong?   

Quien a hierro mata, a hierro muere

Acabo de leer la autobiografia de Pancho Villa por Paco Ignacio Taibo II.  I will have more to say about this later, I just wanted to comment on this day which must be one of the most beautiful in the history of time.
aqui en Norwell.

Danville High, Walk to Kentucky 1913-1914

My grandmother, Alice Hickman O'Keefe walked from Danville Illinois to Mammoth Caves Kentucky in the winter of 1913-1914 with members of her high school class.  According to Google Maps it is a distance of 164 miles.  She was born in Danville in 1896 but raised her family in Massachusetts.  She died in 1986. 

Mud

Soon as it was night out we shoved; when we got her out to about the middle we let her alone, and let her float wherever the current wanted her to; then we lit the pipes, and dangled our legs in the water, and talked about all kinds of things—we was always naked, day and night, whenever the mosquitoes would let us—the new clothes Buck's folks made for me was too good to be comfortable, and besides I didn't go much on clothes, nohow.

                                                                                                                                          Huck Finn

     We watched the movie Mud the other night.  It is the story of two boys who live in house boats moored by the  Mississippi river in southern Arkansas who befriend a fugitive hiding on a nearby island.    The boys live in a world of romance and idealism and freedom to roam the wilds of the river.  While back in town their parents wrestle with reality: domestic strife, boredom, and regulation,  (if someone moves out of the houses on the river, the river authority dismantles it),  strip malls with Piggly Wiggly stores and motels line the highway.  But there is no sign of civilization out on the river and on the island with the exception of an old boat stuck in a tree, left behind in some flood that must have been of apocalyptic proportions.  The boys do not have helmets for their motorcycle or lifejackets for their boat.  They take risks, deal with responsibility and honor and right and wrong, but not with rules, regulations or authority.  They are young boys becoming men in an unfettered, elemental environment, free to love and dream, to fight, to swear, to make deals, to desire women.  They agree to get the boat out of the tree for the fugitive to use to escape in exchange for the 45 caliber pistol he carries in his belt.    It is Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer and Nigger Jim come back to life.

立秋

Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird or butterfly
or flower or wearing stone or open eye
when heaven presents in sheets the solid hue.

R. Frost

I sit here, a Sunday morning, observing the blue morning sky and wall of green in sunlight around the yard, sensing just the slightest change of season, from heat to comfortable and cool. 
I will be leaving Duxbury soon after 35 years.  35 years of life with everything of life tempered by the presence of the sea.  Where my greatest pleasure was to walk to the sea or by the sea.  My grandmother once told me that the woods were her church.  But for me there is no place closer to
God and paradise than at the water's edge toes in the sand, terns circling and diving, a late summer warmth and peace, far from the tumult and pressure of everyday existence.  If there was nothing else to put in this blog there was always the tone of grey in the sky as I walked over the bridge, the single duck floating in the fog, the jogger here and there, and in the past the fog horn from Bug Light, and always in the winter the sound of surf.  God has blessed me with this little place, but more and more my observations come from slightly inland and slightly to the north.   

Terminus

last scene of all
that ends this strange eventful history
is second childishness and mere oblivion,
sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste and sans everything.

I am watching the demise of a once proud life
personal dignity stripped from him
nothing remains but to wait for death
but he is loved and cared for.

La Villa Real

Estoy leyendo la biografía de Pancho Villa escrito por Paco Ignacio Taibo II.  Empieza con una advertencia de la incertidumbre de todas historias. Por ejemplo, no dirá cual versión de los acontecimientos del inicio de la vida cuatrera de Villa es la verdadera.   La leyenda es que el joven Doroteo Durango defendía el honor de su hermana contra uno de los Terrazas, la familia latifundera de Chihuahua y tuvo que huir.  Pero todos que relatan la historia incluyendo Villa si mismo varían en los datos, aún en la veracidad de lo todo,  según el autor. 

Ya alcancé la punta media del libro.  Es precisamente escrita, trayendo el lector a los espacios íntimos de Villa y sus generales, y aún al campo de batalla.  Las fotos encontradas en las notas al fin de cada capítulo se refieren atrás a la narración. 

Por mí, un aficionado de las biografías desde mi niñez, hay cuatro aspectos de una biografía que son importantes.  Uno, y el principal que tiene esta, es en las detalles de la acción, de los eventos, las personas, las conversaciones.  Este libro tiene esta calidad en abundancia.  El segundo es en su análisis del personaje de la persona.  Quiero saber cuales eran las calidades de este hombre o esta mujer que lo hizo lo que era,  que le dio éxito o que resultó en la tragedia de su derrota.  Tercero, yo quiero saber el ambiente cultural y histórica.  En este libro poco  se dice de la historia de México, o aún de Chihuahua, su pasado, su economía, su sociedad.  Tengo muchas preguntas, quiero leer de Villa con un retrato preciso de su mundo, de su ambiente, de su motivación.  Quiero tener alguna medida de interpretación del hombre y de los eventos y consecuencias de la revolución.  Yo no tengo de estar de acuerdo con esta interpretación sino que me de algún orientación y algo mas allá de los datos de contemplar.

Finalmente y mas importante es que una biografía tenga un aspecto de suspenso.  Quiero tener la experiencia de la lucha, el conflicto, las derrotas antes de la victoria.  Este se puede establecer en el principio del libro aún si ya conozca la conclusión.  El autor tiene que prometer algo que se vaya a revelar.

 

Flash Bang Whiz

Our dog Baylou has a strange behavior linked to thunderstorms.  He is absolutely terrified by them and tries to crawl into the deepest part of the cellar, and woe to the door that blocks his passage.  When the storm is yet in the distance,  he begins to tremble all over, literally quivering in his doggy boots.  Today I returned home after being away during a brief thunder shower to find the casings and door knobs torn off the doors in the basement apartment and part of the jamb and wall chewed away.  Upstairs their was a crazy pattern of pee around the hardwood floor in the living room.  His bladder completely lets go on the sound of thunder.  Once after  a rumble in the night,  we heard the flood gates open as he stood trembling in the middle of the bedroom floor.

It is a mystery to me why he reacts this way to what is just a noise and as far as I know not associated with anything actually bad happening to him.  It is a problem because he becomes so destructive.

Old Saws, Old Knowledge

I have of sorwe so grete a woon
that joye gete I never noon.


Four years into the recession, my tools are all old and beat.  The bills are mounting and it is harder and harder to make money.  I am, in the ways that count, rich beyond measure.  I have the things I really wanted in life,  a relationship with a good and beautiful woman, I have my son and my step-daughters who remain and are close to me.  If I was younger, it would be easier to believe better times are down the road, but at my age, although I have not given up hope, I know the possibility is there that I am all washed up.  I am highly skilled at what I do and fairly well educated and able, but I cannot seem to get business going again or to get an actual job even though I have spent the last 2 years and much money training to teach. I find my faith, which has sustained me throughout my adult life, is failing me. 

I say my faith is failing me in this sense.  I have reached the point in life when one would expect the bread cast upon the waters would have had time to come back to me.  While in many ways it has, far more than I deserve, there have been disappointments and dreams that remain unfulfilled, and still unanswered prayers after seemingly interminable knocking at the door, and I can scarcely say to others "take the path that I have taken, believe in miracles, risk everything to do what is right, Jesus is the Christ, you must know him".  It seems that most who lived practically, who sought material gain over all else, who put God on the back burner, live more comfortably and securely than I do and even often have more moral authority and respect.  There is no evidence of God, but it was never about evidence, it was always about faith.  What I, early on, believed had the most value: wisdom, knowledge, faith, insight, understanding, and sought with all my heart, I find, in my day to day existence to be almost irrelevant.  So it seems to be a two-pronged loss, I have neither worldly success or spiritual authority.  But I believe as absolutely as ever.

I have been working on a short story as part of a class I am taking to learn to teach writing to second language learners.  This is a paragraph from that story.

     Envolvió la mano con una camiseta de su mochila, y se tomó un trago largo del agua,  La  pena penetraba por su brazo y se sintió una ligereza envolverle. Su pulso se corría desenfrenado.  Sabía que tenía que alcanzar su coche estacionado al base de este colmo volcánico que él había decidido a subir hace unas semanas habiendo perdido su trabajo de los últimos quince años.  Desde su juventud quería regresar a esta región del desierto del Altar que por su gran dureza y soledad parecía ser el antídoto a la ansiedad y presión integrantes a la vida de la ciudad.  Mientras que pensaba en su hija Mara y como iba a castigarle por este nuevo más reciente aventura,  ahora, como las otras, fracasada.  Pero esta vez  sabía que ella tendría razón, sabía que estaba en verdadero peligro una hora del coche y al punto de desmayarse. 

Minor Family History

Made weak by time and fate,  but strong in will
To strive, to seek to find, and not to yield.
                                               
                                              Tennyson


I was, on ancestry.com, able to find the census document from 1940 of the street my father grew up on which listed him, 3 brothers and his mother and father as residents.  He was 16 at the time and his best friend "Colley" lived next door.  Colley was killed in the war.

I met with my 83 year old aunt today in Middletown CT.  I asked her for a little family history as she is the last relative I have on my mother's side, the O'Keefe side who was actually born an O'Keefe.  She told me that two of her mother's brothers had been gassed in ww1 and had never been the same after the war.  She also said that her uncle Bob was born 13 years after my grandmother and that he always considered my grandmother as his mother because she had taken care of him.  Frank, the one most severely wounded was an alcoholic.  He had married a women who was heir to some of the Dodge family fortune and had a daughter Rosie born to him.  Rosie was about my aunt's age and they had played together whenenever my aunt and my mother went to Illinois to see the Hickman side of the family.  Rosie's mother died shortly after she was born and because her father would not or could not care for her she stayed for a while with my great grandmother and then was adopted by a family named Fletcher.  The lawyer in charge of the trust left to her by her mother stole most of the money from the trust,  some of the land she had in the trust was sold to create OHare airport.  Rosie's adopted brother was so angered by this that he set out to become a lawyer and bring the man to justice.  He actually did succeed in becoming a lawyer and brought suit against the man who had robbed the trust.  This man committed suicide before the court date.  Rosie did receive some money from the life insurance that the man had.  Interestingly enough he had bought the insurance through my grandfather at my grandmother's urging.  I had never heard this story before.  Rosie had been injured as a child when a large tire fell on her and crushed her hip.  She never married and has since died. 

My grandfather was an accountant for an insurance company in Boston.  I guess he was the head accountant and the firm had offices all over the country.  He also studied for the bar but never took the exam.
On my grandfather's side,  I had asked about his brother Harry who had died when I was a child and I remember my grandparents inherited a cadillac and a collection of cut glass from him.  I believe my grandfather was also the executor of the estate.  Harry had made a fortune providing heavy equipment for the city of Boston.  He was a friend of James Michael Curley. 
Another thing my aunt told me was that my great grandfather OKeefe had been killed when he fell under the wheels of a trolley when my grandfather was 16.

para esto aperecio el hijo de dios, para deshacer las obras del diablo

Last week we were working on a house half way down the slope of monument hill, in sight of the bay and the distant beach.  About 5 pm I happened to look up and saw an amazing sight.  High above were hundreds of seagulls circling in a great flock in the light of the setting sun.  Their wings glinted white as they wheeled and turned in slow, graceful interwoven patterns.  They were at such a height that at first I only saw bright flickering white lights before I realized it was birds.  When  I was a boy living a stone's throw from the Charles River I remember the gulls would also congregate in flocks high above the river at the end of the day.

Es, pues, la fe la certeza de lo que se espera, la conviccion de lo que no se ve.


I am beginning a new course at Umass Boston and I will occasionally post bits from the writing I do for that course.  The first one is below.

Culture is probably as complex and multifaceted as language, deeply engrained in every individual save perhaps feral children.  As such, a definition is going to be hard to come by without some serious consideration.  But what we immediately think of when asked to define culture is the particular way that a particular group of people do things.  Culture has to do with group identity, it is a set of shared characteristic behaviors.  On one level cultural differences are easy to detect,  language is probably the principal identifier of culture, followed by cuisine, social manners, music, shared mythology, taboos, religions, world views, religious views, rituals and rites surrounding festivals and feast days, coming of age, marriage, childbirth and death.  As part of our nature, we human beings form cohesive social units that enable our survival in the primitive world, fortify us against enemies, let us overcome obstacles impossible to scale  individually,  that constrain us on one hand and on the other release immeasurable creative potential for all manner of things both good and evil.  Culture is the glue that holds us together as a tribe, a people or a nation, and perhaps, transcending tribalism at some ethereal level, as human beings.

Tu le peux si tu le veux, lui disait-il
                          
                               Marcel Proust

You can get it if you really want
                          
                               Jimmy Cliff

锄禾日当午

汗滴禾下土

谁知盘中餐

粒粒皆兴苦

To the Farmers

Plowing in the midday heat                  

Sweat drips into the tilled soil
Did you know in a bag of wheat
Every grain is gained by toil.

By Min Yong,

My translation

I have started another blog where I will attempt to write political and social commentary.
franmaloney.blogspot.com