The Devil's Music: A History of the Blues by Giles Oakely

This book was first published in 1976 as a companion volume to a BBC television documentary series on the blues. That such a deeply American musical form would receive such capable treatment from an Englishman should come as no surprise, given the enthusiasm for the blues felt by a generation of British musicians that included Clapton, Page, John Mayall, The Rolling Stones, et al. The book forms a social history as much as a musical one, giving documentary testimony to the grinding poverty and oppression suffered by generations of African Americans in the Deep South. The arc of the blues, of classic blues as it were, was a relatively short one. The blues developed from a variety unschooled musical forms - field hollers, jug band music, stomps and other manifestations that were miles away from what was considered respectable music at the turn of the 20th century. When in 1903 W.C. Handy, a formally trained musician and bandleader, heard a guitarist on a train platform in Clarksdale, Mississippi playing with an old knife for a slide, and later had a request for his orchestra to forgo his more accomplished tunes in favor of “native music”, he began to see the potential of the blues. Handy’s revelation was a somewhat conscious turning, as opposed to the pianist Jellyroll Morton, who absorbed the music in whorehouses, gambling joints and dives along the Gulf Coast. The Holy Land of the Blues was the fertile delta between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers near Clarksdale, where the music - unamplified as it was, and performed by men (and women) who toiled all day at hard labor - had to be loud to compete with the whoops and shouts of the gamblers, johns and drunkards in some pretty rough spots scattered among isolated communities. Even as the music spread, west to Texas and up to Chicago, it was looked down upon as a very low, unsophisticated type of music, the music of the downtrodden and the poor, attitudes that persisted even among some black communities as the momentum of the music wound down in the postwar era. The blues largely remained a rural music, despite being carried to and being revitalized in cities such as Chicago, Memphis, and Dallas. It was in some ways analogous to the “hillbilly” music of the southern whites that would coalesce into country music, and there was clearly some cross influence going on, even if the performers tended to labor under segregation.



Oakley’s book, while putting the music in social context, does not skimp on discussions of the great blues artists of the 20’s and 30’s such as Mamie Smith, Peetie Wheatstraw (“the Devil’s Son-in-Law”), “Ragtime Texas”, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Victoria Spivey, and the big-hearted Ma Rainey. The legends are also here – Charley Patton (whose only known photo, with his serious mien, belies the man’s expansive sense of humor), Skip James, Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, Son House – as well as the postwar greats such as Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Elmore James. If you are lucky enough to have recordings of these artists, you’ll want to supplement your reading with some listening. When Oakely and company were preparing their documentary, they had opportunity to interview some of the greats and get some terrific anecdotes. (A vaudeville performer tells the notoriously unlovely Ma Rainey that there are only two things he’s never seen, “an ugly woman and a pretty monkey”, to which Rainey replies “bless you, darlin’”.) This book is a sympathetic, informative, and entertaining history, with an emphasis on the singularly remarkable blues of the 20’s and 30’s, and is well worth the attention of any blues enthusiast.

Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Soderberg

A short psychological novel, told through the diary entries of a Swedish doctor in his mid-thirties, at the crossroads of isolated youth and lonely middle age. Doctor Glas has largely gone through life as an observer, a non-participant. His attraction to women is limited to those already flushed with love, to who he is invisible. His unknowing nemesis is the toadish elder clergyman, Reverend Gregorius, who inspires in the doctor an almost tangible disgust. By some coincidence, the clergyman’s young wife comes to Doctor Glas’s consulting room. She has an embarrassing anguish: her husband, an old hypocrite whom she has come to despise, is given to forcing himself upon her sexually in the name of the divine duty of procreation, a revelation that the doctor finds confirms his repugnance towards Gregorius. Glas promises to assist her – to give testimony to the Reverend that his wife is of a delicate constitution and must practice abstinence for the sake of her health. Despite his acceptance of this diagnosis, the Reverend cannot resist, and after a few days is once again going after his bride like a satyr in an attack that she characterizes as a rape. A new ruse must be devised, that of giving Gregorius the impression that he has a severe heart ailment, one which could be fatal in the event of sexual overexertion.

This sequence of events ties into the doctor’s increasing perception of himself as a kind of self-appointed savior to the wife (even as it conflicts with his judgmental attitudes towards the sexual responsibilities of his other patients). He is already aware, from her confession, that she has a lover, and the doctor has easily determined who this might be. The doctor’s motivations towards the wife are not overtly sexual, although he finds himself having disconcerting dreams in which she appears naked, offering him a rose, like a maiden to a knight. In the course of the novel, Glas becomes more obsessed with, and agitated at, the problem of Gregorius. He begins to look for means by which he can free Mrs. Gregorius completely, so that she may live a happy life with (who the doctor imagines to be) her true love. But Glas’s isolation increases even as he seeks to put his plan into effect, and he comes to a too-late realization that his perceptions of the situation (and of his own motivations) may not be as he believes them to be. Soderberg’s 1904 novel is, like the works of such contemporaries as Strindberg and Schnitzler, remarkable for its modernity, addressing issues such as abortion and euthanasia against a backdrop of Freudian analytics of the self and the nature of obsession. A perceptive introduction by Margaret Atwood is included in this edition.

Accumulated Wisdom

"This world is fulla people seekin' the advantage of other people...Now this type of person don't care about anything, and the least thing he get, he'll make out with it. He don't have no sympathy for those that are tryin' to do right and be honest. You go to Dallas, Texas - there's a place where you can pay fifty cents and see anything you want. Some guys there would sell their brothers. Crimes against nature: make you sick to your stomach.

I never did seek for those things, but it's a good idea sometimes to experience things because heaps of times everybody ain't gonna tell you exactly how things are. You might think or say 'Aw, I don't believe that humans would do things like that.' Well, you take your fifty cents then you go there and you'll see things you may not think are existing in the world."

Skip James,
quoted in Giles Oakley,
The Devil's Music: A History of the Blues

Painted Veils (1920) by James Huneker

I happen to think that one of the worst things an author can do in a novel is to constantly remind his or her readers of books that a) are much better than the one that they have written, and b) they really ought to be reading instead. James Huneker’s decadent American novel, an attempt to bring the fin de siècle sensibilities of Paris to Manhattan is at bottom a rather melodramatic morality play. It is the story of Ulick Invern, the Paris-born son of an Irish drunk who, thanks to his maternal grandfather’s money, has managed to secure a place for himself on the outskirts of New York society, while not neglecting his studies of Baudelaire and Huysmans and the practical application of Baudelairean aesthetic theory in his field work among the demimonde . (To be fair, the pursuit of whores seems to be the boy’s greatest vice – he neither smokes nor drinks - and Huneker doesn’t quite convince me that he even engages in this particular vice wholeheartedly. Honestly, for a rakish protagonist, he’s a bit of a windbag.)

The apparent catalyst for the novel is the appearance, subsequent long absence, and reappearance of a naturally gifted soprano from Virginia, Miss Esther Brandes (who calls herself Easter, and who takes the professional name Ishtar, and who much later comes to be known as Dame Lucifer – but I’m getting ahead of myself). It appears that Easter and Ulick have had some previous acquaintance, having gotten swept up into the company of some sort of Negro temperance cult known as The Holy Yowlers (or rather, “De Holy Yowlers” - Huneker employs all the stereotypes of his age, down to the rolling eyes and blubbery lips). Of course, the leader of this little revival, one Brother Rainbow, gathers his sheep into a tent, blows out the candles, and an orgy ensues. When Easter and Ulick meet up again, their relationship is colored by their recollections of who may have bumped into whom, accidentally on purpose, when the joint went dark and the night was rent with animalistic cries of pain and ecstasy. Woo Hoo!

Most of the novel takes place without Easter. Ulick, in her absence, has to contend with his growing feelings for the sister of his seminarian friend Milt, an independent but sweet girl with a strong mother instinct which creepily manifests itself in the form of imaginary children and a large doll with whom she shares her bed. There is also, to round out the cast, a rich jackass with a loud checkered suit and slicked back hair (or so I imagine him) who keeps showing up to make an ass of himself, a sort of sexually ambiguous friend who moves the story along with his catty gossip, and a nicely stacked prostitute.

Well, I won’t go into a lot more details. I’ll just say that there is a lot of decadent intellectualizing in the pages that follow, most of it coming from Ulick (who has the unfortunate tendency to sort of “go off” on extended flights of aphoristic fancy, none of which are worth quoting, but many of which revolve around sex and a highly romanticized view of bodily excretions) but also, for the sake of some kind of balance, from his friend Milt the seminary student, who tries his damndest to throw a wet blanket on all the fun by quoting Thomas a Kempis. Aside from the whore-mongering, the best bits involve an elaborate orgy (Yes! Another one!) staged for the benefit of a select crew of young bucks. As a matter of fact, Mr. Hunecker, as if to prove that he isn’t just some staid ol’ music critic, tries with all his faint might to shock his 1920 audience. For a while, I was afraid there wouldn’t be any homosexuality, but he managed to get a whiff of lesbianism in just before the closing pages.

I’ve noted that Mr. Huneker had previously issued a work entitled Egoists: A Book of Supermen, in which he interprets for his American audience all the most exciting intellectual celebrities of 19th century Europe: Stendhal, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Huysmans, Wagner, Anatole France, Bernard Shaw, Flaubert, Barres (whoever the hell he is). He manages to name drop most of these figures into this book. I can’t fault his enthusiasm for at least some of those then-electrifying figures, but as a philosophical novel, Painted Veils is a bit of a dud.


Note: An item of interest pertaining to the orgy scene in the novel:
http://jameslbreese.blogspot.com/2009/02/james-l-breese-pie-girl-dinner-by-jim.html

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf

The violent incursion of the Norman princes and their fanatical allies into Asia Minor and the Eastern Mediterranean seaboard in the closing years of the 11th century could be reasonably characterized as the last of the great barbarian invasions. Through a 200+ year ebb and flow of hostilities and alliances, the establishment of so-called “Frankish” states in the Middle East left deep scars upon the Muslim psyche which the intervening centuries have not effaced. The narrative of this misadventure is by turns thrilling and horrifying – with episodes of gracious chivalry exhibited between sworn enemies alternating with the most heinous atrocities.

The exploits of the combatants have passed into folklore. For generations, western children heard the tales of Richard Coeur de Lion, while the eminent and just Saladin, an ethnic Kurd, remains a strong symbol of Arab resistance. More recently, the well known chronicles have been supplemented with eyewitness accounts from the other side, most readily accessible in Francesco Gabrieli’s excellent anthology Arab Historians of the Crusades. The Lebanese journalist and novelist Amin Maalouf, using these writings as a starting point, has spun a compelling narrative history. As one might expect in a popular history, battles and personalities dominate. One gets a sense of the Western war machine, well disciplined in the beginning by the desire to “liberate” the holy city of Jerusalem. Upon first view, the Franks were terrifying – mounted giants with armor impenetrable to Asian arrows and an apparently inhuman bloodlust. We also see the weaknesses of the Muslim princes – rivalry and intrigues that undermined united resistance, a highly developed code of honor which often compelled them to release prisoners following victory (leaving them free to fight another day), the tragic inability to establish mechanisms for succession, leading to violent bloodbaths which weakened their ability to resist the invader.

We also see that, upon establishment of the Crusader states, the Franks were quite willing to “go native” to some degree. They learned Arabic, made use of the medicine and sciences which the Arabs inherited from the Greeks (the Muslims were shocked at the quality of medical care exhibited by the Franks in the early years) , and introduced a tolerant and well-organized variant of feudalism. On the defensive, the Muslim princes never ceased to have some measure of disdain for the Westerners and, understandably, learning the languages of the intruders was not a priority. It took time for the Arabs to develop coherent strategies to push back against the Westerners, most notably exhibited in the genius of emirs such as Zangi and Saladin.

Over the years (and with some exceptions), the presence of the Crusaders became a tolerated fact of life, and a certain balance was achieved. All this changed, however, in the late 13th century, with the Mongol invasion of Persia and Syria. Many prominent Mongols had sympathies with Nestorian Christianity, and were thus potential allies of the weakened Crusaders. At one point, this threat was so great that Islam might have been, with the loss of its heartlands, reduced to a marginal religion at best. Yet again fate and blind luck intervened. Fighting over Khanic succession and some lucky breaks for the fierce Mamluk military machine enabled the Tartar threat to be minimized and the last of the Crusader strongholds to be reduced and their knights expelled. The dream of Jerusalem faded as the Europeans returned home to fight their own interminable battles on native soil, and a new political entity under the Ottoman Turks gained ascendancy in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Crusades were, ultimately, an exercise in futility.

Balthasar's Odyssey by Amin Maalouf

In the year 1666 (“the Year of the Beast”), mystically inclined adherents of the three Abrahamic religions have reason to believe a transformation of the world is at hand. In a small Levantine town, a bookseller and antiquities dealer named Balthasar Embriaco, descendant of an impoverished Genoese house, becomes aware through the agency of a Russian pilgrim of the existence of a book of Islamic scholarship which purports to reveal the secret and powerful “hundredth name of God.” Astonishingly, the only known copy of this rare book is subsequently given to him under strange circumstances, and is just as quickly whisked away from him by a French diplomat who visits Balthasar’s shop at the very moment he prepares to examine the precious tome. While Balthasar prides himself on his lack of superstition and what we nowadays would call his moral compass (in his case, a weathervane might be a more apt symbol), he is also – as we shall see in the course of the story - easily manipulated, and the more pious of his nephews convinces him that he must pursue this most divine book.

The narrative takes Balthasar and company to Constantinople, to Smyrna and Chios, to Genoa and even to London through a convoluted series of coincidences and unlikely circumstances. Who could not see in this odyssey the hand of Fate? Along the way, he falls in love with the wife (widow?) of a notorious brigand and develops intimacies with a series of sympathetic confidants, including a kindly and skeptical Jew, a rich Genoese merchant (who sees in Balthasar – the descendant of a noble yet almost extinct house – the perfect potential son-in-law), a dour ex-Puritan chaplain who almost incidentally possesses what Balthasar seeks. There are also myriad minor characters, including the mystical false messiah (and subsequent convert to Islam!) Sabbatai Sevi.

Now, given the geographical and philosophical distances traveled in this novel, one would expect that the text would progress towards some essential unity – some grand design or intrigue in which each character has a secret function in facilitating Balthasar’s odyssey. It seems we are in the midst of a grand novel of 15th century conspiracy, and we furrow our brows trying to tease out the connections and significances of people and events. But we do so in vain. Throughout the book, Balthasar is torn between his preferred rational skepticism and the strong pull of apocalyptic mysticism and superstition. Clearly, the signs are there pointing to an impending transformative conflagration, either in the form of Sevi’s rumored dominion yet to come or in the fire that engulfs London before the protagonist’s eyes. Yet such dramatically definitive resolutions are not in the cards for poor Balthasar, the supreme ditherer, for whom all vital decisions are made either by others or by the hand of Fate. He is, ultimately, soft and indecisive, given to the attractions of comfort. When he hits a new town, the first order of business is to find out where the good food is, and if it’s delivered by a plump and buxom redhead, so much the better. Is this a man who really wants to know the secret name of God? Given the opportunity, his eyes go dark, either from psychological blockage or his inherent unworthiness in the eyes of the Divine.

In the end, the great treasure is all forgotten in the face of an impending betrothal to the rich merchant’s teenage daughter, the book destined to be left “discreetly on a shelf in some bookshop, so that one day, years hence, other hands may take it up and look avidly into it, eyes which may by then be able to read it.”

Live Together, Die Alone

The Birds Discover the Simorgh

The thirty birds read though the fateful page
And there discovered, stage by detailed stage,
Their lives, their actions, set out one by one -
All that their souls had ever been or done:
And this was bad enough, but as they read
They understood that it was they who’d led
The lovely Joseph into slavery -
Who had deprived him of his liberty
Deep in a well, then ignorantly sold
Their captive to a passing chief for gold.
(Can you not see that at each breath you sell
The Joseph you imprisoned in that well,
That he will be the king to whom you must
Naked and hungry bow down in the dust?)
The chastened spirits of these birds became
Like crumbled powder, ant they shrank with shame.
Then, as by shame their spirits were refined
Of all the world’s weight, they began to find
A new life flow towards them from that bright
Celestial and ever-living Light -
Their souls rose free of all they’d been before;
The past and all its actions were no more.
Their life came from that close, insistent sun
And in its vivid rays they shone as one.
There in the Simorgh’s radiant face they saw
Themselves, the Simorgh of the world - with awe
They gazed, and dared at last to comprehend
They were the Simorgh and the journey’s end.
They see the Simorgh - at themselves they stare,
And see a second Simorgh standing there;
They look at both and see the two are one.
That this is that, that this, the goal is won.
They ask (but inwardly; they make no sound)
The meaning of these mysteries that confound
Their puzzled ignorance - how is it tru
That ‘we’ is not distinguished here from ‘you’?
And silently their shining Lord replies:
‘I am a mirror set before your eyes,
And all who come before my splendor see
Themselves, their own unique reality;
You came as thirty birds and therefore saw
These selfsame thirty birds, not less nor more;
If you had come as forty, fifty - here
An answering forty, fifty, would appear;
Though you have struggled, wandered, traveled far,
It is yourselves you see and what you are.’
(Who sees the Lord? It is himself each sees;
What ant’s sight could discern the Pleiades?
What anvil could be lifted by an ant?
Or could a fly subdue an elephant?)
‘How much you thought you knew and saw; but you
Now know that all you trusted was untrue.
Though you traversed the Valley‘s depths and fought
With all the dangers that the journey brought,
The journey was in Me, the deeds were Mine -
You slept secure in Being’s inmost shrine.
And since you came as thirty birds, you see
These thirty birds when you discover Me,
The Simorgh, Truth’s last flawless jewel, the light
In which you will be lost to mortal sight,
Dispersed to nothingness until once more
You find in Me the selves you were before.’
Then, as they listened to the Simorgh’s words,
A trembling dissolution filled the birds -
The substance of their being was undone,
And they were lost like shade before the sun;
Neither the pilgrims nor their guide remained.
The Simorgh ceased to speak, and silence reigned.

From The Conference of the Birds by Farid Ud-Din Attar

"The Hangman" by Maurice Ogden

Into our town the hangman came,
smelling of gold and blood and flame.
He paced our bricks with a different air,
and built his frame on the courthouse square.

The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
only as wide as the door was wide
with a frame as tall, or a little more,
than the capping sill of the courthouse door.

And we wondered whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal? What the crime?
The hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.

And innocent though we were with dread,
we passed those eyes of buckshot lead.
Till one cried, "Hangman, who is he,
for whom you raised the gallows-tree?"

Then a twinkle grew in his buckshot eye
and he gave a riddle instead of reply.
"He who serves me best," said he
"Shall earn the rope on the gallows-tree."

And he stepped down and laid his hand
on a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for anothers grief
at the hangmans hand, was our relief.

And the gallows frame on the courthouse lawn
by tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way and no one spoke
out of respect for his hangmans cloak.

The next day's sun looked mildly down
on roof and street in our quiet town;
and stark and black in the morning air
the gallows-tree on the courthouse square.

And the hangman stood at his usual stand
with the yellow hemp in his busy hand.
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike,
and his air so knowing and business-like.

And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done,
yesterday with the alien one?"
Then we fell silent and stood amazed.
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."

He laughed a laugh as he looked at us,
"Do you think I've gone to all this fuss,
To hang one man? That's the thing I do.
To stretch the rope when the rope is new."

Above our silence a voice cried "Shame!"
and into our midst the hangman came;
to that mans place, "Do you hold," said he,
"With him that was meat for the gallows-tree?"

He laid his hand on that one's arm
and we shrank back in quick alarm.
We gave him way, and no one spoke,
out of fear of the hangmans cloak.

That night we saw with dread surprise
the hangmans scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
the gallows-tree had taken root.

Now as wide, or a little more
than the steps that led to the courthouse door.
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
half way up on the courthouse wall.

The third he took, we had all heard tell,
was a usurer..., an infidel.
And "What" said the hangman, "Have you to do
with the gallows-bound..., and he a Jew?"

And we cried out, "Is this one he
who has served you well and faithfully?"
The hangman smiled, "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows beam."

The fourth man's dark accusing song
had scratched our comfort hard and long.
"And what concern," he gave us back,
"Have you ... for the doomed and black?"

The fifth, the sixth, and we cried again,
"Hangman, hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick", said he, "that we hangman know
for easing the trap when the trap springs slow."

And so we ceased and asked now more
as the hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night
the gallows grew to monstrous height.

The wings of the scaffold opened wide
until they covered the square from side to side.
And the monster cross beam looking down,
cast its shadow across the town.

Then through the town the hangman came
and called through the empy streets...my name.
I looked at the gallows soaring tall
and thought ... there's no one left at all

for hanging ... and so he called to me
to help take down the gallows-tree.
And I went out with right good hope
to the hangmans tree and the hangmans rope.

He smiled at me as I came down
to the courthouse square...through the silent town.
Supple and stretched in his busy hand,
was the yellow twist of hempen strand.

He whistled his tune as he tried the trap
and it sprang down with a ready snap.
Then with a smile of awful command,
He laid his hand upon my hand.

"You tricked me Hangman." I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men,
and I'm no henchman of yours." I cried.
"You lied to me Hangman, foully lied."

Then a twinkle grew in his buckshot eye,
"Lied to you...tricked you?" He said "Not I...
for I answered straight and told you true.
The scaffold was raised for none but you."

"For who has served more faithfully?
With your coward's hope." said He,
"And where are the others that might have stood
side by your side, in the common good?"

"Dead!" I answered, and amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me.
"First the alien ... then the Jew.
I did no more than you let me do."

Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
none before stood so alone as I.
The Hangman then strapped me...with no voice there
to cry "Stay!" ... for me in the empty square.

Vanished Splendors: A Memoir by Balthus

This “as told to” memoir of the painter Balthus leaves one wanting. If we expect some revealing statement as to why he painted such unusual portraits and tableaux, it isn’t here. Those famously unladylike young girls were, he assures us, not intended to have any (or rather, not as much as some would like to read into them) erotic appeal, but were rather created as an expression of transitional adolescent innocence, painted consciously in the manner of the Renaissance masters. Ok, I’m skeptical, but I’ll go along with it for argument’s sake. On a personal level, I must say that I find the artist’s paintings strangely compelling, interesting for their subtle surrealism (which he claims to abhor, but see the weird 1933 composition The Street, painted when he still had some obvious connection to that crowd), their overt creepiness (his portraits of Derain and Miro), and their occasional technical maladroitness (Cat with Mirror III, with the impossibly poor figure of the girl). And yet the paintings and drawings still have an undeniable mastery, particularly in works such as the Passage du Commerce Saint-Andre and The Children. Strangely, while this book contains several pages of photos of the artist, there are no illustrations of his paintings other than the self- portraits on the front and back covers .

Born into the Polish nobility, the painter’s father made the laughably bad decision to sink the family fortune into Russian railroad stock on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution (ouch!). The financial prospects of young Balthus and his brother were somewhat redeemed by what he refers to as a small legacy from another relative. Balthus spent the 20th century amongst the intellectual nobility of Europe. As a child, his mother played footsie with Rilke, who encouraged his artistic interests (Balthus published a picture “novel” as a child which revolved around the first of many cats who answered - or not, as cats do – to the name of Mitsou), and he casually name-drops the likes of Gide, Artaud, Picasso, Malraux, Fellini, etc. in the course of this memoir. (He also notes that Bono was a visitor to the chalet, although that may overstretch the term “intellectual nobility”.)

The main issues with this memoir are its repetitiveness and apparent coyness. Balthus stresses his indebtedness and kinship with the old masters such as Piero della Francesca and Poussin and his distrust of Breton and the Surrealists. He stresses (rightfully) the significance of his friendships with Rilke, Picasso, and Giacometti. He describes his favorite relaxations of contemplating the canvas with a cigarette and of stretching out in the chateau and letting Mozart’s operas wash over him, resounding through the empty rooms. He emphasizes that he is, as befitting old-school titled nobility, a conservative Catholic. As interesting as these facts may be, they are repeated quite too often, and there is no real depth or revelation to the memoir. There are some madding allusions to situations that call out for explanation : the relationship with his niece Frederique, with whom he lived before the Countess Setsuko came into his life being the most tantalizing bit of coyness. There is also the odd caption that reads “The painter and his daughter, Harumi, understand each other perfectly.” Now what the hell is that supposed to mean? Balthus’s relationship with his brother, the notorious author Pierre Klossowski de Rolla, is passed over quickly, in a chapter of less than a page (he sees his brother’s work as “transgressive”, lacking luminosity). He notes that Klossowski’s work is “a black diamond, while I try to paint starbursts, shuddering wings, and children’s flesh lightly touched by angels.” Okay, then.

I can’t help coming away from this memoir feeling that something has been hidden, that there is some dimension of honesty that is lacking. Whether deliberately, as of an old man whistling past a graveyard, or from some deeper sense of denial, I can’t say. The repetitiveness, if not born of senility, seems to suggest a strategy of “here’s my story, and I’m sticking to it”, and the absence of any reproductions of his paintings suggest that the artist would just as soon not be confronted with them as any sort of evidence to the contrary in terms of the image he is attempting to project. There are some lovely and strange passages, such as Balthus’s jaw-dropping confession that “I’ve never felt a real attraction to horror, ugliness, and oddness” and his wonderfully politically incorrect cultivation of “the aristocratic taste for displeasing”, which he attributes to the 19th century dandies. There are also some passages replete with unctuous piety. In the end, what we get in this book a nice portrait of the outer trappings of a man – the silk kimonos, the hundred-windowed chalet in the Alps, the aristocratic profile – but the inner man seems out of reach.

The Marquis of Bolibar by Leo Perutz

This novel relates an unlikely series of events surrounding the annihilation of a garrison of occupying troops in a Spanish town during the peninsular war. The eponymous figure of the Marquis appears only briefly in these pages, yet he sets in motion the mechanism by which the German units of Napoleon’s army occupying the town of La Bisbal will be destroyed almost to a man, with one significant exception who survives not only to relate the incidences, but who also comes to strongly identify with the now-legendary Spanish nobleman.

Perutz’s tale is told with a certain lightness, as a group of German officers plot the sexual conquest of their Colonel’s new Spanish concubine who, in a book where the double and issues of identity play important roles, has an uncanny resemblance to the Colonel’s dead wife, whom the officers had managed to seduce in the past.

The story is told from the perspective of the 18 year old officer von Jochberg, and begins by relating how a wounded German officer eavesdrops on a conversation between one of Wellington’s officers, a guerrilla leader, and the Marquis in which the Marquis outlines a plot by which the garrison at La Bisbol may be destroyed. The plot relies on the ability of the Marquis to infiltrate the town incognito and give three signals intended to set the stage for its liberation. Unfortunately, in the guise of a poor mule-driver, the Marquis overhears the German officers planning their seduction, and he is taken out and summarily shot so that the secrecy of the planned seduction may be maintained. Before he dies, the muleteer asks that they fulfill a promise that he has made. When the officers ask for specifics, he replies cryptically “God will tell you.” The remainder of the novel details how the officers, both deliberately (driven by jealousy and lust) and unknowingly fulfill the doomed man’s plans.

The characters in this historical novel are finely and satirically drawn, and Perutz’s themes of the motivations of evil and the fluid nature of identity do not get in the way of the unlikely yarn at the core of the story. Originally published in Perutz’s Vienna, an English translation was first published in 1926. . It appears that an Austrian film based on this novel was made in 1922, with a UK production following in 1928. Perutz’s idiosyncratic novels were admired by Borges, Greene, and Calvino. It ought to be pointed out that Perutz makes sly reference to the legend of the Wandering Jew while at the same time lightly satirizing both Spanish piety and the contemptuous rationality of the Germans. The Marquis of Bolibar is a nice page-tuner - a worthy entertainment which concludes with a neat twist.

Ugetsu: Moonlight and Rain

The supernatural tale has a significant history in East Asia. Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, in the Dover edition and recently updated by Penguin has long been a favorite for browsing, with its enchanters, ghosts, and other supernatural beings. A couple of months ago, I enjoyed reading Lafcadio Hearn’s retelling of some Japanese ghost stories in his In Ghostly Japan. These tales put me in a cosmically fortuitous state of mind when, browsing a nondescript bookstore in a Scottsdale strip mall, a copy of Ugetsu Monogatari: Tales of Moonlight and Rain fell into my unsuspecting hands. This is a collection of supernatural stories written in the 18th Century by Ueda Akinari, most with settings in medieval Japan and reflecting a worldview steeped in Buddhist (and Daoist) mythology and ultimately derived from the literature of Ming Dynasty China. (According to the introduction, Akinari was particularly indebted to the Chinese collection “New Tales for Lamplight”.) Moonlight and rain evoke romantic sentiments in the West, but translator Leon Zolbrod’s introduction explains that in Japan, ‘rain’ and ‘moon’ are contrasting qualities, with the former implying qualities such as life, love and passion, and the former evoking grief and melancholy, but wisdom and enlightenment as well.

The stories evoke those seemingly precise aesthetics of Japan - the scent of pine on a mountain road, the rustle of silk, the gentle sliding of a rice paper door - and also contrasting elements such as a ruined mansion, a hoard of rusting weapons, an abandoned temple and a skeleton among the weeds. One of the best stories is “The Lust of the White Serpent”, wherein a studious young man is repaid for an act of chivalry with an offer of marriage from a beautiful noblewoman. Little does he know that he is under a dangerous enchantment - that the fine mansion in which he reclines is a ruin and that the beautiful girl is in fact a noxious spirit endangering his very soul. In these tales, the dividing line between our world of illusion and the deeper world of the spirits is thinner than a gauze curtain.

It was also through this edition that I was made aware of Kenji Mizoguchi’s enchanting 1953 film “Ugetsu”, which reworks two of these stories (including the story mentioned above) along with a tale by de Maupassant into a parable of avarice, honor and seduction in the midst of a brutal civil war. The Criterion Collection edition of this film includes a beautifully done restoration of the film, a booklet with an essay and translations of the pertinent stories, and a lengthy documentary feature on the director.

Traditional and World Music

I have been slowly cataloging my music collection on my LibraryThing account. I am about 1/6th through the vinyl, with most of the classical stuff entered except for multiple disk sets. Now I'm deeply into the traditional/world music, and it's been fun listening to forgotten recordings while working on the computer. As a result of this activity, I've come across a nice blog for fans of this type of music called "The World's Jukebox". This site is now listed on the blogroll. On this site, you'll also find links to sites "Excavated Shellac" and "The Old Weird America". If you enjoy ethnic and world music, I hope you'll enjoy these links.

To browse my collection in progress, look for the "Music" collection on my LibraryThing profile. Be warned - it is tragically uncool.

Photo: Makifat's Museum of Obsolete Technology. You may be happy to know that I've recently installed bigger and better speakers.