Kid brother strikes back

Gerald Durrell and his
pet owl Ulysses

I'm the oldest of three siblings -- I have a brother three years younger and a sister eight years younger.  As the eldest, I had certain responsibilities during our childhood.  As my parents were unable, or unwilling, to administer the firm discipline that the younger kids clearly required, it fell upon me to do so.  When necessary, like Lloyd the bartender, I "corrected" them.* 

I suppose there was occasional resentment.  But I was the oldest.  Resentment happens.

Four weeks ago, I discussed in this blog the book Prospero's Cell, by Lawrence Durrell.  Durrell wrote of his three years or so living on Corfu at the end of the 1930s.  Lawrence was already a promising poet, and went on to write a number of excellent travel books (those about his life on Rhodes and on Cyprus having been discussed in earlier posts on this blog), and -- his best known work -- the Alexandria Quartet novels.

What Lawrence didn't mention in Prospero's Cell, so far as I can recall, was the fact that his family was also living on Corfu at the same time.  He spoke frequently of his wife Nancy -- who he coyly called simply "N." -- but nothing about his mother, his two brothers Leslie and Gerald, and his sister Margo.  Prospero was a high-minded book, discussing the joys and difficulties of living as an expat in a foreign culture, and the history of Corfu and its natural environment.  It was an intellectual book, describing Lawrence's long philosophical conversations with fellow intellectuals, Greek and otherwise, also living on Corfu.

And then, more than a decade after Prospero's Cell, the family struck back. In 1956, the youngest son, Gerry, published the extremely popular memoir, My Family and Other Animals.  Gerry had been ten years old when the family first moved to Corfu, and was 15 when they left at the beginning of World War II.  My Family was the first of three books about Gerry's young life on Corfu -- collected together as the Corfu Trilogy. 

Gerry is an entertaining writer both because of his precocious and intense interest in nature, and because of his sense of humor in describing the family's problems in dealing with the local Greeks, and even more their difficulties in dealing with each other.  As Gerry views the family, only he himself (surrounding himself and his family's house with a menagerie of marine and insect specimens, dead and alive) bore any semblance to normality.  The number two son, Leslie, was a total gun nut, and sister Margo was a bundle of adolescent neuroses and body image pathologies.

And Larry?  Big brother?  Larry the writer lived in his own personal cloud, watching as others worked and strived, making clever and acerbic comments about their efforts.

It was Larry, of course, who started it.  The rest of us felt too apathetic to think of anything except our own ills, but Larry was designed by Providence to go through life like a small, blond firework, exploding ideas in other people's minds, and then curling up with catlike unctuousness, and refusing to take any blame for the consequences.

Gerry nails the flavor of Larry's personality.  Or at least he nails the impression he wishes to convey of Larry's personality.

"I ask you!  Isn't it laughable that future generations should be deprived of my work simply because some horny-handed idiot has tied that stinking beast of burden near my window?" Larry asked.
"Yes, dear," said Mother, "why don't you move it if it disturbs you?"
"My dear Mother, I can't be expected to spend my time chasing donkeys about the olive groves.  I threw a pamphlet on Theosophy at it; what more do you expect me to do?"

Gerry is a very funny writer, and he went on to become a distinguished naturalist, zoo curator, and advocate for wildlife.  But he was also, in my big brother's opinion, a sniveling little liar.

Gerald Durrell never mentions in his book -- in fact he describes totally to the contrary -- that Lawrence was married and living on Corfu before his family moved there, and that he lived with Nancy some distance from the rest of the family.  In the book, Larry is always skulking about the house, muttering complaints and issuing airy intellectual fiats. Larry cannot abide his young brother's fascination with smelly animals and creepy insects, especially whenever said naturalist's exhibits tend to touch upon Larry's tender sensibilities.   

I suppose that Gerald would argue that his description of his big brother conveys some larger truth, some evaluation of Larry's personality based on close observation before Larry married and fled the family home in England for life on Corfu.  The "Larry" persona is too well-drawn and consistent to be totally a product of a resentful younger brother's imagination.

I, of course, relate to Larry/Lawrence not only as an older brother, but as an older brother who likes to stand around making witty observations while my siblings and other relatives do all the work that I am commenting upon so cleverly.  Can't help it.  I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam.  But Lawrence perhaps gave his younger brother unknowing permission for the liberties the young twerp takes with the facts.  Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet is a study of the same facts as observed by three different individuals, with the fourth volume presenting in part a (possibly) more objective view. 

Every person sees life from his own perspective, as the Quartet emphasizes, and family life is no different.  A 23-year-old intellectual and writer will necessarily view family life on Corfu differently from a 10-year-old naturalist.  Luckily for Larry and Gerry, neither Leslie the gun nut, nor Margo the girl with "spots," chose to write from their own viewpoint.

A friend has described my own family as a group of disparate individuals with nothing in common but a bunch of collective memories and the same weird sense of humor.  That's been enough to hold us all together.  But, of course, none of us so far has chosen to write a book about it.
----------------------
*I'm fantasizing. Wildly.

Travel agents

My sister and her cousin -- born within a month of each other -- celebrate a landmark birthday this autumn.  When you combine those birthdays with the fact that my sister's middle son and her granddaughter are living in Chiang Mai, Thailand -- well, a party in that part of the world seemed in order, with various relatives and friends invited.

Actually, we will be based most of the time in Chiang Mai, with a one-week expedition to Bali, where the actual birthday festivities will take place.  And we'll stop for a couple of nights to explore Angkor Wat in Cambodia, on the way "home" to Chiang Mai. 

Some birthday.  I'm lucky to get a mylar balloon on mine.

Everyone's getting himself to Chiang Mai on his own, but we've tried to coordinate the move to Bali so we're all traveling more or less in sync.  On behalf of five of us, I made a number of flight reservations today, after some on-line cogitation, figuring out which flights offered the best times and the cheapest rates.

I love doing stuff like that.  I'm clearly a frustrated travel agent.

And the dying term "travel agent" reminds me of how different travel planning was before we had the internet.  When I was a kid, if my family was traveling anywhere other than by car, it was done through a travel agent.  My mother might have bought railway tickets directly from the railway company's agent, but for anything else -- certainly any travel as grandiose as a stay in Hawaii -- we visited the travel agent.

It was kind of nice.  The agent developed a relationship with regular customers, much as a stock broker might still do today.  My mother would sit down at his desk, and be handed various dazzling brochures as they discussed what she wanted to do, and how much it would cost.  The agent didn't handle just the transportation.  He put everything -- hotels, tours, shows, bus travel --together as a package.

My parents' first visits to Europe -- as were the visits of most Americans -- were arranged as package tours, such as those run by American Express.  A bus, traveling from town to town, staying at a different hotel each night.  Sort of like cruise ships today -- everything was prepaid and pre-arranged.  The best surprise was no surprise. 

By the time I was throwing discretionary income into travel, Americans were more self-confident about getting around on their own.  All-inclusive tours were considered for "old folks."  The very young might just head to Europe on a charter flight, and then live off the land for a few weeks.  Older, but not "old," adults might want the security of hotel reservations when they arrived in a city;  travel agents continued to put together ad hoc packages of transportation and hotels, leaving the reasonably sophisticated traveler to figure out for himself what he wanted to do once those details were taken care of.

I was a pretty independent traveler, used to finding a hotel through local tourist offices once I arrived in a city.  But for airline reservations, I still always called a travel agent -- Doug Fox was a major agency in Seattle.  Actual in-person visits to an agency continued to be available for people, like my mother, who enjoyed chatting with "her" agent, but if all one wanted was air travel, it was easier to call an agent on the phone.

Then the internet eliminated the need to even talk to an agent.  I can pick a flight and make a hotel reservation in five minutes on my computer -- no visit downtown, no being placed on hold by a busy agent.

And yet -- part of the excitement of travel for folks in my parents' generation was the pre-travel experience of being greeted by the agent, enjoying the dreams evoked by colorful travel brochures and the agent's stories of his own travels, and working out with an expert in whom they had confidence how best to spend their precious two or three weeks of vacation time.

I'd never surrender the convenience of today's digital world, but I can't deny that the more leisurely and convivial planning that working together with a (now nearly extinct) professional travel agent allowed did have its charms.

All hail, Kindle the Third

I've been a compulsive reader since the age of six.  That's no brag.  That's just a statement of fact. It may be good or bad. "Reading" satisfies one's curiosity about the world, and that's good.  But for some of us, reading's also a way to avoid unnecessary contact with the sometimes boring, often frightening, always confusing creatures who surround us.

Reading is the default instinct of the congenital introvert.

I welcomed -- with some trepidation -- a new reading paradigm in December 2011, a new paradign about which I of course blogged.  Averting my eyes from the shock and horror expressed on the faces of books lining the walls of my home, I bought a simple Amazon reader.  I won't say that I stopped buying hardbound books, but since 2011 I have downloaded 199 books from Amazon.  And unlike the case with some hardbound books I've purchased over the years, I've actually read all 199.  Draw your own conclusions as to the impact Kindle has had on my life.

At some point following 2011, I also purchased a Kindle Fire, which has a larger backlit screen, a camera, and the ability to connect with the internet.  Before I got around to signing up for an iPhone, the Fire served as a way to keep in touch with Facebook and other sites while I traveled.  I really never used it for book-reading, however, because it's heavy and bulky, compared with my original basic Kindle, and the backlighting causes it to gobble up battery power prodigiously.

Nevertheless, Amazon refers to my Kindle Fire as my "2nd Kindle" and makes sure that my all my Amazon book purchases are available on that device as well.

All was well and uncomplicated until last week, when my original Kindle jammed up for unknown reasons.  I finally ordered a replacement -- henceforth officially denoted my "3rd Kindle" -- which arrived today.  Same size screen as Kindle the First, still no backlighting, but slightly smaller in overall dimensions.  Plastic rather than metal frame, and so slightly less heavy.   Looks good; feels good.

Kindle the Third is now charging from my wall socket.  I stopped the charging long enough to ensure that it would hook up to my Wi-Fi, which it does, and that all of my books from my original Kindle, books that also float dreamily about "the cloud," would be available.  They are, and the new Kindle instantly downloaded the book I'd been reading and opened it to the last page I'd read. 

I still have new bells and whistles to investigate, once I get it fully charged, but clearly the new Kindle will be able to handle with aplomb, at a minimum, all of the functions of my original Kindle, with none of the angst and irritation one so often encounters in replacement purchases of this sort.

In fact, it becomes clear to me that Amazon really knows what it's doing, and is fully capable of taking over and ruling the world.  And I don't say that just because it's a Seattle company, which is already taking over and ruling Seattle..

Although the fact that Amazon is an offspring of the Northwest Corner certainly doesn't hurt.

It is in the stars!

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
--Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

I will be in Challis, Idaho -- within the "zone of totality" -- for Monday's eclipse.  It will be my second total solar eclipse.  I witnessed my first in my home town, here in the Northwest Corner, in 1979.  It was impressive.

I remember reading a science fiction story -- maybe one of you readers recalls the author and/or title, but I don't -- about a civilization similar to ours on a planet in a multi-star solar system.  Because  more than one sun beamed down, the sky was always well lit.  Always day, never night. Scientists speculated -- but had no way of knowing -- whether there were any stars in the universe other than their own two or three "suns."

Geological and archeological studies showed that about every 40,000 years, a fairly highly developed civilization had ended overnight with no apparent cause. Their present civilization was getting close to the 40,000-year mark.  But they were also excited, because their suns were finally reaching a point of being so configured as to be all on the same side of the planet, thus allowing darkness on the other side, a night just like ours on earth.  (Somehow, they weren't disturbed by the fact that this also happened about every 40,000 years.)

And so it happened.  The sudden darkness revealed to the planet's inhabitants for the very first time the vast immensity of the universe and the billions upon billions of stars that swirled across the sky.  They learned in one night what it took us centuries to learn -- that their friendly little world didn't make up the entire universe. 

Every single person went stark raving mad.  And thus ended another civilization.

I can assure the uninitiated, based on my 1979 experience, that you will not go mad at the moment of totality, even if the experience does "blow your mind."

However, astrologers -- "learned" guys sort of like the Three Wise Men -- suspect bad things in store for President Trump, as a result of the eclipse.  They claim that the stars have been excellent for the Orange One throughout his career.  Until now.  Now he has problems looming ahead.  (Duh!)  Why?

[Astrologer Wade] Caves notes that the position of the August 21 eclipse in relation to the star Al Jabhah, which is located in the mane of the constellation Leo, typically "brings loss and danger," which, in the case of "a military officer" -- such as the Commander in Chief -- could mean "danger of mutiny and murder by his soldiers."

Yeah.  How about that, eh?  But that's just the beginning.  Astrologer Stephanie Iris Weiss points out another problem:

To get technical for a minute: This eclipse is at 28 degrees of Leo, the sign of kings. Trump's ascendant (or rising sign, the place where his chart begins) is at 29 degrees of Leo. So that's considered an exact match. The eclipse is also just a couple of degrees from his Mars—Mars is the sign of anger, aggression, rage, violence, and power.

Caves sizes it all up:

I'm not sure that I want to say this all points to Trump's death, although I feel I'd be well within my bounds astrologically to make such a prediction given the symbolism. To me, it's equally possible that there will be a sudden health issue that lands on Trump's shoulders, pulling him out of the Oval. It's also quite reasonable to suspect ousting, either through official channels (i.e., impeachment) or a mutiny behind closed doors.

Well, that sounds exciting.  Maybe a little too exciting for me, at least for a few days.  That's why I'll be hanging out in Challis -- about as far away from Washington, D.C., Western Civilization, and the consequences of Mad Donald's horoscope as possible. 

See you next week.  Maybe. 
--------------------------
All quotes are from an article by Alex Lasker on AOL.com.

A kind act

Suppose I had given twenty bucks to the tearful man with the beard, the guy I discussed in yesterday's post?  Would it really have helped him?  Beyond buying him a couple of meals?  Or, more cynically, a bottle of booze or some drugs?

Who knows?  The effects of a kind act are unpredictable.

My brother and I were 15 and 18.  We had pitched our tent the night before in the back yard of a willing but somewhat puzzled family, and were now biking toward Centralia, Washington.  We had spent two weeks by ourselves, a final bonding experience before I left for college, biking around southwestern Washington. Biking on two old, beat-up, one-gear bikes that would be curiosities today.  We still had a long way to bike, but if all went well we would be home that night.

We were out of money, but I had phoned our parents when we were back at Lake Quinault, and they had agreed to send a ten dollar check to us, c/o General Delivery, in Centralia.  More than enough money to feed us and get us home.  We arrived in Centralia before noon, and eagerly located the post office.  Oh no! No check from home!  I think I frantically phoned the folks; they said the check should have arrived.

We had eaten no breakfast.  It was now lunch time.  Nevertheless, we decided to see if we could make it home, biking the shoulder of I-5 (it had much less traffic back then!).  We got as far as Chehalis, about 4½ miles south of Centralia, and knew our teenage bodies needed food.  What to do?

We found the Chehalis police station and described our plight.  We were two small, skinny kids -- we both looked about 15.  We hadn't had a bath in two weeks.  We had this wild story that our parents had cheerfully allowed us to bike all by ourselves all over Western Washington.  The desk officer explained patiently that the Chehalis Police Department simply didn't have funds for that sort of "emergency." 

But then he looked at us again.  He rolled his eyes and pulled out his wallet.  "Here's a dollar of my own money; hope it helps.  Pay me back whenever your check arrives." 

We dashed off to the nearest café.  A dollar then was worth about $8.50 in today's money.  We gorged on hamburgers and milkshakes.  Food had never tasted so good!   We then biked back north to Centralia and revisited the post office.  Yes!  The check had arrived!  We cashed it at a bank (how we persuaded a prudent banker to cash a check for us two wild Indians, I don't remember).  Then, back to Chehalis. To the police station, of course. We never considered doing otherwise.

Our desk officer had gone off duty.  I handed a dollar bill to his replacement, and began to explain what it was for.  I hardly said two words before he grinned and said he knew all about it.  The entire police department knew all about it.  There was an office pool as to whether the "sucker" desk officer would ever see his dollar again.  "Oh.  Well, tell him thanks," we said, politely, and bid him farewell.   We still had 40 miles of freeway biking ahead of us.

My dad was incredulous that, first, we would have asked the cops for money, and, second, that they would have given us any (as opposed, I suppose, to locking us up for vagrancy).  Was I equally surprised?  Not really.  They'd always told me that the police were our friends.  My experiences during our two-week travels assured me that most folks were good. Now I knew that cops themselves would help kids who needed help.

Dropping a small pebble in a pool gives off ripples, ripples that spread a long distance. A few years later, my generation was deeply involved in a struggle over the war in Vietnam.  Demonstrators and police were  at each other's throats.  Like most young people, I was strongly opposed to the war and supported the demonstrations. 

Many of my friends hated the cops, and sneeringly called them "the pigs," throwing in an expletive or two.

I never could. I never did.

Lost

He was sitting on a bench as I got off the train at the UW light rail station, three long escalator rides beneath the surface.  He looked a bit older than the mobs of UW students passing around him, maybe 30, and a bit scruffier, but not terribly so.  He had a beard.  I hardly glanced at him, until I heard him crying.

A security guard was bent over him, speaking sternly.  The guy with the beard was sobbing, but he wasn't hysterical.  Not combative.  Not argumentative.  He just looked and sounded like a guy who had worked through all his options and had no idea what to do now.

I had a bit of a line to work through before boarding the escalator, and I kept my eye on the bearded man and the security guard.  Was he traveling without a fare?  Had he simply been sitting too long in one place?  I have no idea.  Strangely, the guard insisted that he enter the train from which I'd just unloaded.  He was entering the door, still crying, as the escalator carried me up and out of sight.

For many of us -- certainly for nearly all of the students hurrying around the bearded man -- life progresses easily.  We may think we have tough decisions to make, but we make the really significant decisions almost automatically.  Decisions like studying hard for grades, applying to college, finding a job.  Keeping our clothes clean and our bodies washed.  Looking people in the eye with at least some degree of confidence, real or feigned, when we speak to them.

We absorb these lessons from our parents and our peers.  But not everyone does -- not, at least, at the time when they would do the most good.  And if you miss one of those steps, you find yourself shunted off the main line track.

"There are no second acts in American lives."   F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong, I think.  America gives more second chances -- and third and fourth chances -- than just about any other developed nation.  But the "second act" is harder to perform than a "first act" would have been.  And the third and fourth acts often become almost impossible.  Especially when all of your enthusiasm and self-confidence have been drained by the consequences of not successfully performing that "first act."

I know nothing about the bearded guy's back story, although I tend to make up stories for people in my head.  But I'd say he was a gentleman who had no further physical or emotional resources available, regardless of what "act" of his life he was contemplating.  I suspect we are surrounded by people like him.  Maybe they still have enough pride not to cry.  In public.  But they want to.

After I reached the surface, adjacent to Husky Stadium where all the lucky kids cheer their school's football team on autumn Saturdays, something occurred to me.  Too late.  How easy it would have been to break away from the line at the escalator for just a second, walk onto the train, hand the guy a $20 bill, smile, and say good luck.  Maybe that one act of kindness -- more than the money itself -- would have kick-started his ability to cope again.  But I didn't.

I try to make up for having done nothing by writing about it.  But, of course, things don't work that way.

Sick of it, sick of him

David Brooks -- the New York Times's resident conservative columnist -- has had enough.  He can't read -- let alone write -- another word about the President's latest bizarre tweets or actions.

For the past two years Trump has taken up an amazing amount of my brain space. My brain has apparently decided that it’s not interested in devoting more neurons to that guy. There’s nothing more to be learned about Trump’s mixture of ignorance, insecurity and narcissism. Every second spent on his bluster is more degrading than informative.

Instead, Brooks proposes to conjecture and discuss in writing about what comes after Trump, what America of the future will look like, now that we apparently have exhausted the "moral capital of the past."

I fully sympathize.

This blog of mine used to be a beehive of political comment and speculation.  Jeering and sneering at Bush the Younger.  Analyzing the conflicting merits of Hillary and Obama in 2008.  Cheering Obama on for eight years.  Gasping with amazement at the moral collapse of the Republican establishment in the last political campaign.

But after nearly seven months of the Trump presidency, like Brooks, I'm exhausted.   I'd be happy to debate Republican versus Democratic proposed policies, but that's no longer the issue.  The issue is that we have an ignorant, incurious, crude, barbaric, and self-centered habitual liar roaming about the White House -- when he isn't residing at one of his own many properties, at government expense. 

But it goes even beyond that.  We now have a sizable minority -- at times approaching a majority -- of the American public who profess to love Mr. Trump.  Trump bragged during the campaign that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot people, and that his "Base" would still love him.  He has come close to fully testing that hypothesis.  Although his Base does want him to push his "program" through Congress -- whatever that program may be at any given moment -- they mainly just love him.

They love him apparently because he is tearing down everything that we thought all Americans supported -- representative democracy, judicial independence, courtesy, tradition, a spirit of compromise, acceptance of diversity, a welcome to immigrants.  Some of them may support "white supremacy," but most of them just want to shout down and eliminate all the "elitists" -- meaning educated and/or experienced officials -- who have managed the country for generations. 

This populist urge doesn't lend itself to debate.  It's more a food fight, a rumble, a storming of the Bastille.  When I write, I can slug it out on a gut level for a while, but I've about had it.  Until something comes along that invites a little intelligent discussion, I'll turn my attention to more satisfying topics.

Like the fact that it's getting mighty hard to find a good Sears store anywhere near my neighborhood.

Nuclear war

World War III!  As a young lad, a seventh grader, I read with fascination a prediction of how such a war might occur and be fought, and how it might end.    A war that would result in horrific casualties on all sides, but would end up with the U.S.S.R. under United Nations occupation.  The good guys won, if  -- considering the casualties -- you could call anyone the winner.

The entire October 22, 1952, issue of Collier's Magazine -- a general interest magazine similar to its competitor, the Saturday Evening Post -- was dedicated to describing the war that no one wanted.  The cover showed a redrawn map of Europe, following the war, with the Soviet Union's Eastern European satellites, the Baltic republics, and the Ukraine -- as well as the city of Moscow -- under U.N. occupation.  Always a lover of maps, it is this map on the cover that I remember most about the issue.

This week's issue of The Economist reminds me of that long ago doomsday Collier's issue. The magazine has dedicated much less space (three pages) to a scenario of how, in 2019, we might blunder into a nuclear war in Korea. North Korea is not the Soviet Union -- it is far smaller and less populated.  But relative to its size -- or maybe even in absolute terms -- its nuclear capacity is far greater than the Soviet Union's was in 1952.  Both the Collier's war and the Economist's war were "accidental" -- as always feared, the parties drifted into all-out
war by a series of miscalculations and misunderstandings of each other's intentions and conduct.

In the Collier's war, the United States sustained nuclear attacks, from missiles fired from submarines, against Chicago, New York, Washington and Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Norfolk and other US cities.  America responded by dropping multiple nuclear bombs on Moscow, and sending 10,000 suicide paratroopers into the Urals to destroy Moscow's remaining nuclear stockpile.  The war ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1955, after three years of warfare.

In the Economist's scenario, the United States escapes nuclear attack.  After sustaining enormous initial damage, and realizing he and his nation are doomed, Kim Jong Un decides to fire everything he has left, ending the war in as much destruction as possible.  But his last two ICBMs are destroyed on the ground, and American Patriot missiles shoot down North Korean intermediate range missiles aimed at Tokyo and Okinawa before they can reach their targets.

Seoul had been nuked, with 300,000 deaths -- and many more doomed to die from radiation exposure.  Military losses were in the hundreds of thousands.  North Korea was in total chaos, facing starvation.  China was facing a critical Korean refugee problem, together with radioactive fallout crossing the border.

The article ends with China's reaction still unknown.

President Trump tweeted:

Nuke attack on Seoul by evil Kim was BAD!  Had no choice but to nuke him back.  But thanks to my actions, America is safe again.

The world reeled economically, on the brink of a worldwide recession.

In both the Collier's and Economist nuclear war scenarios, war came through miscalculation, and victory was won at an awful price.  Such victories bring to mind King Pyrrus's lament: "If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined."

In 1952, the Collier's war seemed like a reasonable forecast of the future.  Through common sense by both American and Soviet leaders, it never happened.  Do today's American and North Korean leaders possess similar common sense?

As the Economist likes to end provocative articles, "Only time will tell."

Prospero's Cell

PBS portrayal of Durrell
family on Corfu (2016)

"This is a supercool place to have a music party," said Simona Dimova, a 27-year-old marketing researcher who attended the festival -- a concert followed by a 16-hour techno party.  "I'm sick and tired of all the mainstream bars and clubs in Sofia, where you meet the same crowd of people.  Sofia needs more underground venues like this one."
--New York Times

I read this morning of techno parties and bars and clubs in Sofia, Bulgaria.  The wild and woolly Balkans.  So much for exoticism.  So much for travel to get away from it all.

'Twas not always thus.  I've just finished reading Lawrence Durrell's Prospero's Cell, a poetic description of places and people, based on Durrell's journal that he kept in 1937 while he lived on Corfu.  Prospero's Cell was the first of Durrell's travel writings.  It was written in 1941-42, after the fall of Greece, while Durrell was stationed in Alexandria.

Corfu (Corcyra, or a number of related Latin spellings, in Greek) is a crescent shaped island in the Ionian Sea, offshore from the point where Greece borders Albania.  Lawrence and his wife Nancy (N. in the book) lived for a time in a "white house" at the northern-most tip of the island, facing Albania across the strait.  Their house was 20 miles from the nearest town, a distance much easier to cover by small boat (caique) than by vehicle.

Lawrence was a poet before he was a travel writer or a novelist, and Propero's Cell is a compilation of poetic descriptions.  As with Reflections on a Marine Venus (an account of his post-war experiences on Rhodes), only more so, his language is lush, repetitive, impressionistic.  Perhaps too much so, but for Durrell, Corfu was an isle of magic, and magic can be expressed only through poetry.

At any rate, for a young poet, one still not much more than a teenager, untroubled by a need or desire for money, an isolated house on beautiful Corfu with a loving wife was heaven.  His bliss was only compounded by the company and friendship of a number of amateur philosophers and other intellectuals, Greek and foreign, who hung about the nearest town.  Long evenings were spent in conversation while the moon rose over the Albanian shoreline and the stars wheeled overhead.  The food was local and simple, and the wine -- although hardly French in quality -- was good. 

Durrell's book tells us far more than we need to know about Corfu's history and geology and crops and festivals and demographics.  Most of what he tells us -- unless we are perhaps already well familiar with Corfu -- will go over our heads and be forgotten.  But these subjects are but a pretext for the poet to exercise his facility with prose, to demonstrate his love of words.  

And the poetry, the prose, reveals to us the delight to be found in an almost total isolation from the "real world," in the immersion in a local culture that had not yet felt the effects of  modern culture and technology.  A culture where the people, including the local clergy, still believed in vampires -- the "Vrikolas" -- as the fate of those who had led exceptionally evil lives.  A culture untouched, as he remarked darkly in a speech* he gave much later, by the leveling effects of television.  A world that could be understood not so much by rational thought as by the senses and the emotions.

If I wrote a book about Corcyra it would not be a history but a poem. 

World of black cherries, sails, dust, arbutus, fishes and letters from home.

And a world yet untouched by tourism. 

In Alexandria, after fleeing the German invasion, he wrote his eulogy for Corfu -- for the villagers who were killed in the invasion, for the "white house" that was bombed to rubble, for his tiny boat that was sunk.  And for Greece itself, and especially for the ageless traditional peasant life that he and his friends had so enjoyed observing and joining.

Before the German disaster, one of his friends described Durrell to his face:

You are the kind of person who would go away and be frightened to return in case you were disappointed, but you would send others and question them eagerly about it.

I sympathize.  I'd be the same sort of fellow.

Lawrence at least had a chance to experience an unspoiled world, a world not yet overwhelmed by mass tourism, by mobs descending from giant cruise ships, a world that required no 16-hour techno parties to avoid boredom.  For the most part, we today have lost that opportunity; it was lost before we even arrived on the scene. 

Lost not just on Corfu, but everywhere on earth.
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* L. Durrell, Blue Thirst: Tales of Life Abroad (1975), the transcript of a speech given at Caltech in California.

Dog days

First day of August.  A strange month, to my way of thinking.  Still summer, but pointing the way toward fall. 

Sextilis, the Romans called it.  The sixth month in the Roman calendar.  But then Caesar Augustus came along,   He noted that the Senate had honored his non-imperial predecessor, Julius Caesar, by converting Quintilis into July.  What's an emperor to do?  August it had to be, especially since Julius Caesar's Julian calendar had already increased Sextilis's days from 29 to 31, making it a worthy choice for honoring the first emperor. 

Luckily, this re-naming fad didn't continue, or our October would now be known as Caligula.

As a boy, I found that the first day of August inspired both anticipation and alarm.  Anticipation for the next school year, because the joys of a small town summer had already begun to pale; alarm for the same reason, because my relationship with school was one of love-hate.  My brother was far less ambivalent.  I could provoke him into a tantrum merely by pointing out, in early August, that the stores were carrying "Back to School" fashions.

August 1st is well past the summer solstice, and the days are already perceptively shorter.  My bedroom's no longer flooded with sunlight at 5 a.m., and the twilight is deepening by 9 p.m.  And yet, the weather always lags behind the length of days.  August, along with July, is a hot month.

I type this post in early afternoon, as the house is beginning to heat up.  Outside, the temperature will reach a predicted 86 degrees today, 91 tomorrow, and 95 the next two days.  The highs will not dip below 85 for any of the next ten days.  We are told that the temperature this week may reach the three digit mark.  Only three times in the past 120 years -- the period during which records have been kept -- have we reached 100 degrees or higher in Seattle.

So 100 means nothing to you folks in Phoenix or Las Vegas?  Well, bless your fevered little hearts, but we in the Northwest Corner don't live in Phoenix or Vegas -- or aspire to.  But in August?  In August, sometimes, we begin to understand what you feel.  Except we don't have residential air conditioning.

In my home town, it wasn't only the "Back to School" sales that prompted thoughts of waning summer, of school days, of the coming of the autumn rains.  There was also the mint.  Large mint farms lay between our town and the Columbia.  About this time of year, the mint ripened, or whatever mint does when it's ready for harvest.  A breeze off the river brought whiffs of the mint tang into town.  "A hint of mint," we called it.  For my brother, another treasonous harbinger of school days to come.

The dog days of August.  These days now projected to lie ahead -- with temperatures in the 90s or higher -- were the dog days that we envisioned as kids.  Days fit only for lying in the shade, hoping for a breath of a breeze, staggering into the house hoping to find some Kool-Aid to quench our thirsts.  We felt like dogs -- tongues lolling out of our mouths and panting. 

But "dog days" -- however appropriate to describe the heat of August -- actually gets its name from the fact that Sirius, the "dog star" is first seen each year in August rising above the horizon just before dawn.  Sirius is part of the constellation "Canis Majoris" -- the big dog -- which follows Orion the hunter across the sky.

 Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky
On summer nights, star of stars,
Orion's Dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat
And fevers to suffering humanity.

--Homer, The Iliad

Surely Augustus knew his Homer, and knew of the "evil portent" of the dog days?  And yet, he recklessly chose Sextilis as his month.  As reckless and unheeding, I suppose, as making a wild call to a New Yorker reporter and assuming nothing bad would come of it. 

For Augustus himself, nothing much bad did come of it.   But it augured poorly for Rome -- his family, by descent or adoption, gave the world Caligula and Nero.

But all that is history.  Today's dog days, uncomfortable as their heat may feel, have little cosmic meaning.  They merely suggest -- especially when combined with a hint of mint -- that school days, while not yet upon us, are peeking, like Sirius the dog star, over the horizon.