a blind flaneur

Hemingway with his first wife, Hadley Richardson, left, and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer. [Source: Hemingway Collection/JFK Library/AP/NYT]

Ernest Hemingway said some mean things about Gertrude Stein and Zelda Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast.  He never forgave Zelda for suggesting that he, Ernest Hemingway, might be a homosexual. Read the scene in which Hem takes F. Scott in tow to measure the manhood of heroic statues in the Louvre. After you stop laughing, you might conclude that Zelda was on to something.

Hemingway was out to settle old scores in his Paris memoir, and he expected to have the last word, even if he didn’t finish the manuscript. But wait – his grandson is revising the history Hem embroidered again and again. According to Motoko Rich in the NYT:

Besides its tart portraits of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous memoir of his early days in Paris, “A Moveable Feast,” provides a heart-wrenching depiction of marital betrayal.

The final chapter, “There Is Never Any End to Paris,” is a wistful paean to Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife, whom the writer left for her best friend. The friend, Pauline Pfeiffer, the wealthy woman who became Hemingway’s second wife, is portrayed as something of a wily predator, and it is Hemingway’s “bad luck” that he falls for her.

It turns out that the story behind the editing of the book is nearly as juicy as the tales within it, and has become something of a multigenerational custody battle over how to cast the larger-than-life author’s stormy romantic history.

Mary Hemingway, the writer’s fourth and final wife, was the one who edited the first edition of “A Moveable Feast,” published by Scribner in 1964, cobbling it together from shards of the unfinished manuscript he left behind. She created a final chapter that dealt with the dissolution of Hemingway’s first marriage and the beginning of his relationship with Pauline, building some of it from parts of the book he had indicated he did not want included.

Early next month, Scribner, now an imprint of Simon & Schuster, is publishing a new edition of the book, what it is calling “the restored edition,” and this time it is edited by Seán Hemingway, a grandson of Hemingway and Pauline. Among the changes he has made is removing part of that final chapter from the main body of the book and placing it in an appendix, adding back passages from Hemingway’s manuscript that Seán believes paint his grandmother in a more sympathetic light.

“I think this edition is right to set the record straight,” said Seán Hemingway, 42, who said Mary cut out Hemingway’s “remorse and some of the happiness he felt and his very conflicted views he had about the end of his marriage.”

Scholars are clear that this new edition should not be regarded as definitive any more than the 1964 version. “This book can’t become a sacred text,” said Ann Douglas, a professor of literature at Columbia University, adding that “there can be no final text because there is not one.”

Indeed, scholars and aficionados have long known that Hemingway did not consider his Paris memoir complete at the time of his suicide in 1961. He wrote a letter — though it was not sent until after his death — to his publisher, Charles Scribner, that “it is not to be published the way it is and it has no end.”

But in an essay she wrote for The New York Times Book Review in May 1964, Mary said Hemingway “must have considered the book finished.” Along with Harry Brague, an editor at Scribner, she shaped the manuscript, changing the order of some chapters, and adding others that Hemingway had decided not to include. Most notably, Mary inserted that final chapter about the end of Hemingway’s first marriage. Read more

A memoir from Big Water (1999)

Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]

When we shoved off the pebble beach, the outer islands that rim Malone Bay looked like green humped turtles on the horizon. All day long we had watched the smaller islands appear and disappear in the fog. Now the icy blue bay shimmered in hazy light. In the long midsummer dusk on Isle Royale, we had three more hours of navigable light.

I steered for open water to clear the surf zone inshore. Out there we bobbed on a slowly heaving swell, waves one to two feet. On a Coast Guard weather forecast “waves one to two feet” sounds almost like flat water; in a 17-foot canoe on Lake Superior, the sensation is more like a gentle roller coaster ride. We call it big water.

“Want to head for Wright Island?” I asked my son.

“No,” Brendan said firmly. “It’s at least a mile. I don’t want to go out that far.”

“We have to go out there half way to quarter these waves,” I told him. “We’ll swing out, then back.”

We set a westerly course midway between Wright Island and shore. I sensed something uneasy about the way Brendan hunched in his life vest. He wasn’t talking.

“Want to go for Hay Bay?” I asked, hoping that an absurd proposition would loosen him up.

“You’re crazy, Dad. Ten miles there, ten miles back — before dark? This lake could change any minute.”

He was right. First came intermittent wisps of clouds scudding across the water. The fog thickened, and five minutes later Wright Island disappeared again. Malone Bay socked in, too. Birches and spruces along its shore blurred like trees in a waterside painting by Claude Monet. Sometimes the shore was there, sometimes not. About the same time, Lake Superior’s rhythmic swell turned into an indeterminate chop.

After three Isle Royale journeys with Brendan, the first when he was nine years old, I knew we were most likely to disagree about things when paddling through chop. He read the fickle wind and waves one way, and I another. Instead of balancing forces, bow and stern clashed and our course was an unspoken dispute until one or the other or both of us yielded.

“How far do you plan to go in this?” Brendan said. It wasn’t quite a question.

“We just got started,” I said. “What’s the matter? You’ve been on big water before. Bigger than this.”

“Not in the fog. I don’t like it when I can’t even see where we started.”

I had to laugh. “But Brendan, this is what the world looks like all the time to me. Just a little fog. It’s a fine day for boating on the Great Lakes.”

Without missing a stroke he turned to dart a skeptical glance at me. Brendan the Navigator. When we named him I didn’t tell his mother everything the legendary Irish name implied. But I imagined him taking on the role of navigator for me. He was christened on Whitefish Bay, on eastern Lake Superior, when he was four weeks old. His first voyage on big water came at age 2, nested securely between my legs at the canoe’s stern. Growing up with Coastal Survey charts and tales of Great Lakes shipwrecks, he came to know Superior as another home. He never doubted the wisdom of canoeing there with a father who was half blind.

Now Brendan was 13. He knew the difference between swell and chop. He could translate a flat navigation map into the protean dimensions of no-name islands and deception bays. He could thread a canoe route between cliffs and shoals, spot a portage trail a mile across the water, scan a snag-filled cove and say with hungry satisfaction, “Hmmmm… looks pikey to me.”

I would like to claim that I taught him these things, but it didn’t happen like that. We learned together, negotiating and navigating small steps along the way. When he learned to walk he became my eyes in the woods, spotting snakes and toads and a hundred other things I would have missed by myself. When he learned to read he assumed responsibility for package labels and street signs and all the incessant visual information that drives everyday life. The teamwork we developed by finding dinner at the grocery store grew into the kind of partnership needed to find camp at Isle Royale. Two days before the fog at Malone Bay, I was amazed at my son’s surety and poise as he guided us through the clamor of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, navigating a course from gate 7 to gate 85 in fifteen minutes, just in time to make our connection.

Our partnership was built in small steps out of patience and trust. I questioned Brendan about what he could see, sometimes directing his attention to what I expected to be there, sometimes waiting for his reckoning of the unknown. I listened to his description of the world around us and sketched my own mental maps. As the weather deteriorated on Malone Bay, he reversed the process to probe my sense of what neither of us could see.

“OK, just a little fog,” he said. “What if it keeps getting worse and we can’t find our way back?”

“We’re heading west,” I said. “We come about and bear east.”

“What if we miss our camp? We could be out here all night.”

“Remember the big rock at the mouth of the Siskiwit River? That’s east of camp. I’ll hear the waves breaking on it. I can steer by it — and I can keep off it.”

“If we stay out here we might not make the shore at all.”

I reminded him of the compass in his pocket. “On this side of the island, bear north. You can’t miss it.”

“What if it’s too rocky to land?”

“Any port in a storm,” I said. “If we have to land we’ll do it — with or without the canoe.”

As soon as I said that I knew I should have kept my mouth shut. I reached instinctively for the throw bag clipped to my belt to make sure it was there. Brendan didn’t say anything but continued to paddle. Then our fitful passage through the chop settled back to a slow, rolling swell.

“Feel that?” I said. “I know where we are. We just cleared the lee of Wright Island. We’re on open water again.”

“Oh boy,” Brendan said flatly.

“How long was Wright Island on the map?”

“Maybe a mile.”

“Then we’re only two or three miles west of camp. No problem.”

The wind off Superior stiffened enough to scatter the fog west along the shore of Malone Bay. The waves picked up with a jolting bounce. I lifted my binoculars quickly to try to make out a landmark in the vague distance.

“I think I see a snag leaning out over the water,” I said tentatively. “Looks like light behind it, like it’s a point. Let’s go for that, then turn back.”

“Dad, there’s a lot of snags leaning out on that shore.” He knew from experience that I used such landmarks to re-negotiate final destinations.

“Look, Brendan. You know I will always defer to your judgement. You’re the navigator. If you say turn back, we turn back. But if I think we can push it a little bit farther and still be safe, I’ll always ask. What do you think?”

After a moment he said, “OK. We go for the point.”

An hour later the canoe crunched wet gravel again on our beach. Somewhere on the southern horizon, the Isle Royale Light on Menagerie Island swept a circle in the growing dark, but we couldn’t see it. Read more

Virtual guide dog Max makes new friends in Second Life. [Image source: Robin Roar/Flickr] Learn more about Helen Keller Day on the Second Life Wiki, and see the Flickr pool.

The King of Pop wasn’t the kind of guy who’d stroll into a dive like the Mouffe. With the outpouring of sentiment following his untimely death, though, even the Mouffe has to pay tribute to Michael Jackson.

Much of that sentiment has included the phrase “soundtrack of my life” – which didn’t exactly fit my life. But as I’ve heard snippets of the old Jackson 5 hits from my sock-hop days, I’ve reconsidered. Man, Michael eclipsed Elvis and James Brown when he was 12 years old! As you follow the progression of these live clips, you witness the evolution of a truly great performer, though I wonder if you can call it “growing up.”

Rockin’ Robin (1972) | Never Can Say Goodbye (1977)

I’ll Be There (2001)

Encore: See the Official Michael Jackson Youtube Channel. And especially Billie Jean.

Café Mouffe opens on Fridays. Please drop by for a listen and a chat. Sometimes the embedded videos don’t work here due to bandwidth constraints, but you’ll always find links to video sources in the notes. Try them. If you’re curious about the Mouffe, here’s the original idea behind it’s creation.

I like to think I am well-read, even as a blind flaneur who works constantly to negotiate access to books. When conversation turns to some obscure old warhorse from the canon, I like to joke that I didn’t finish the book, but I read the Classic Comics. Soon I will have another excuse. “Oh, sure, I read the tweets.

According to Ed Pilkington at guardian.co.uk:

Is there no end to Twittermania? Last week we saw the social networking tool Twitter deployed on the streets of Tehran. This week, moving seamlessly from the sublime to the ridiculous, it is being used to aid the digestion of the world’s greatest literature.

Fans of the classics will either be delighted or appalled to learn that the New York-branch of Penguin books has commissioned a new volume that will put great works through the Twitter mangle. The volume has a working title that will make the nerve ends of purists jangle: Twitterature.

In it, the authors will squish the jewels of world literature - they mention Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling - into 20 tweets or less - that is 20 sentences each with fewer than 140 characters.

The book is the brainchild of two 19-year-old first-year students at the University of Chicago who claim to be starting a cultural revolution from their college dormitory. Bashing their heads together one evening in their university digs, Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman asked themselves what defined the grandest ventures of their generation, and best expressed the souls of 21st century Americans?

Pretentious, maybe. Precocious, certainly. The answer they came up with was double-headed. They identified high literature as a crucial pillar for any generation.

But they also latched on to Twitter, the website where users compress all of human experience into 140 characters. Twitter, they thought to themselves, epitomised the short attention span and info-deluge that defined the contemporary age. Read more

Follow Penguin Classics on Twitter.

Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, showed a thin bird-bone flute carved some 35,000 years ago. [Photo by Daniel Maurer/AP/NYT]

John Wilford Noble writes in NYT:

At least 35,000 years ago, in the depths of the last ice age, the sound of music filled a cave in what is now southwestern Germany, the same place and time early Homo sapiens were also carving the oldest known examples of figurative art in the world.

Music and sculpture — expressions of artistic creativity, it seems — were emerging in tandem among some of the first modern humans when they began spreading through Europe or soon thereafter.

Archaeologists reported Wednesday the discovery last fall of a bone flute and two fragments of ivory flutes that they said represent the earliest known flowering of music-making in Stone Age culture. They said the bone flute with five finger holes, found at Hohle Fels Cave in the hills west of Ulm, was “by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves” in a region where pieces of other flutes have been turning up in recent years.

A three-hole flute carved from mammoth ivory was uncovered a few years ago at another cave, as well as two flutes made from the wing bones of a mute swan. In the same cave, archaeologists also found beautiful carvings of animals.

But until now the artifacts appeared to be too rare and not as precisely dated to support wider interpretations of the early rise of music. The earliest solid evidence of music instruments had previously come from France and Austria, but dated well after 30,000 years ago.

In an article published online by the journal Nature, Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, and colleagues wrote, “These finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe.”
Read more and listen to a replica of the bone flute

Abstract from Nature:

Considerable debate surrounds claims for early evidence of music in the archaeological record1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Researchers universally accept the existence of complex musical instruments as an indication of fully modern behaviour and advanced symbolic communication1 but, owing to the scarcity of finds, the archaeological record of the evolution and spread of music remains incomplete. Although arguments have been made for Neanderthal musical traditions and the presence of musical instruments in Middle Palaeolithic assemblages, concrete evidence to support these claims is lacking1, 2, 3, 4. Here we report the discovery of bone and ivory flutes from the early Aurignacian period of southwestern Germany. These finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe, more than 35,000 calendar years ago. Other than the caves of the Swabian Jura, the earliest secure archaeological evidence for music comes from sites in France and Austria and post-date 30,000 years ago.

NPR Music: “In his book, Perfecting Sound Forever, Greg Milner explores the evolution of sound. His history covers the analog days of Thomas Edison through the present day of digital recordings, and the quest for sonic perfection.

“Technological advances have complicated the debate about the value of the most accurate reproduction of a sound, versus the most enhanced. Whereas Edison set out to perfectly capture a live performance, today’s sound engineers have the ability to create recordings from musicians who aren’t in the same room — or aren’t even alive at the same time.

“Milner takes the reader through major breakthroughs and massive failures in recording history. He also digs into specific recordings from Lead Belly, the Beatles, Mission of Burma, Steve Albini and Massive Attack.”

I may not have the right translation of this passage from Albert Camus’ L’Homme révolté, but I internalized it this way many years ago. The scenes of thugs known euphemistically as the Revolutionary Guard brutally suppressing protesters in the streets of Tehran bear witness to the enduring truth of what Camus said. Be warned: this video includes disturbing, graphic footage of the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan on Saturday, June 20.

Step into the stream: #IranElection

If Great Blue Herons are part of your quality of life, please join me in lifting a toast to the Cuyahoga River. When the river caught on fire in Cleveland 40 years ago today, it became a tipping point in rallying support for passage of the Clean Water Act. Even Richard Nixon had to concede that something needed to be done to curb the pollution of our waterways. Eventually the fish came back, and the herons followed. What am I drinking tonight? A Cleveland microbrew called Burning River Pale Ale.

Be not deceived. This isn’t 1969, or you’d see psychedelic colors. This is the Cuyahoga River fire on Nov. 3, 1952. I haven’t found a good image from 1969, which was a flash in the pan by comparison. [Source: Cleveland State University Library/Ohio History Central]

Paul Cézanne. The Artist’s Father, Reading “L’Événement”. 1866. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

When I stood before this painting last month at the NGA, it happened to be the day that would have been my father’s 88th birthday. It reminded me of his devotion to reading newspapers, his pride when I became a reporter with a byline at age 16. I was a printer with perpetually ink-stained hands, too, and he always saved a cold beer for me when I got home from work on a week night. It didn’t matter that I had to go to school the next day. I’d made the transition from student to worker in his esteem.

Cézanne’s painting also made me think of a slice of 19th-century French cultural history when the invention of steam-powered rotary presses turned newspapers and books into truly mass media. I imagined Cézanne’s father to be a printer or some other artisan who was as passionately literate as my dad. According to the NGA’s notes, though, he was a banker who disapproved of his son’s artist career. And he  read a journal more conservative than that depicted in the painting:

In The Artist’s Father Cézanne explored his emotionally charged relationship with his banker father. Tension is particularly evident in the energetic, expressive paint handling, an exaggeration of Courbet’s palette knife technique. The unyielding figure of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, the newspaper he is reading, his chair, and the room are described with obtrusively thick slabs of pigment.

The Artist’s Father can be interpreted as an assertion of Cézanne’s independence. During the early 1860s, Cézanne rejected the legal and banking careers advocated by his father and instead studied art, a profession his father considered grossly impractical. In this calculated composition, he seated his father precariouly near the edge of the chair and tilted the perspectival slope of the floor as though trying to tip his father out of the picture, an effect heightened by the contrast between his father’s heavy legs and shoes and the delicate feet of the chair supporting him. The framed painting displayed on the back wall is a still life that Cézanne painted shortly before The Artist’s Father, a statement of his artistic accomplishment. The newspaper L’Evénement refers to novelist Emile Zola, the childhood friend who championed Cézanne’s bid to study art in Paris and who became art critic for the paper in 1866. Cézanne’s father customarily read another journal.

The work takes on an existence of its own … Emin at the White Cube Gallery. Photograph: [Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images/Guardian]

Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones reviews Those Who Suffer Love and concludes that
Tracey Emin is far from a narcissist because her depictions of sex and suffering draw on “honest truth”:

It’s as if Egon Schiele had collaborated with Thomas Edison to create the world’s first dirty film. Blue drawings flicker in the dark, or not the dark really, for a neon sign gives the entire space a green tint. Like Schiele’s women, the woman in this cartoon shows us everything, but the title – proclaimed by the neon sign – says this isn’t about sex, it’s about pain: it is called Those Who Suffer Love. The oscillation from drawing to drawing gives it a primitive, raw energy. The handmade quality gives it authenticity. The passion gives it life.

Downstairs in Tracey Emin’s exhibition at the White Cube Gallery, drawings from the sequence in the film can be seen among other examples of her graphic works going back to the 1980s. Emin draws with an honesty that only a snob would mistake for clumsiness. Her total lack of pretence is accompanied by a rich and sensitive knowledge of art: she knows that drawing is more than design, more than a shorthand for ideas, that it has a tangible existence of its own.

Her White Cube show celebrates the publication of her collected drawings. A negative view would be difficult to sustain – it’s an extreme and prissy understanding of drawing that would suggest Emin can’t draw or is only a pasticheur.

There’s a broken, smudged integrity to Emin’s drawings. It’s a powerful achievement to have so ably projected herself as a personality in the modern imagination and yet all the time be so firmly wedded to craft, to making. With a pen or a needle, Emin draws. I suppose the realities of the sex, love and loneliness she depicts are repetitive, but only in the way Munch or Klimt or Picasso are.

Emin is one of the most truthful artists of our century and one of the most substantial. She has never succumbed to the folly of the monumental or turned yesterday’s ideas into today’s merchandise. On the contrary, she always seems to explore new territory, even as she obsesses about the same old things. It’s the thread of drawing that allows Emin to be so artistically vital. If you draw, you work and if you work, you make something that’s not just you.

So here is the paradox: Emin is one of the least narcissistic artists of our time. She pretends it’s all about her; actually it’s all about the art. And the art lives – an autonomous, flickering ecstasy.

I’d never heard off Tracey Emin until a chance encounter with raccoons several days ago. Now I’m intrigued by how she navigates the boundaries between narcissism, documentation and transcendence. I’m adding One Thousand Drawings to my wish list.

What I like most about the BBC is the surrealism that surrounds listening to it in the middle of the night. My local public radio station broadcasts the BBC World Service in the wee hours. If I wake up then I flip on the clock radio and let suave, cultured radio voices on the other side of the world lull me back to sleep.

When that happened several nights ago I was rudely awakened again around 3:30 by a riot of animals pawing at my back door. On the radio I heard a woman with an exotic East London accent talking about art, sex, and despair. I got out of bed, found the flashlight, and then discovered a family of raccoons, mama and five babies, desperately seeking to enter my summer bedroom. They clawed at the door with a ferocious certainty that it would open for them, as if storming the Bastille with Justice on their side.. I heard the woman on the radio say that sex used to get her out of bed in the morning, but now she’s 46 and doesn’t care so much about it anymore. I thought, maybe she needs these raccoons. How could I ship them to London?

I’ll spare you the narrative of how I tried and failed to chase away the intruders during an intermittent skirmish that lasted about as long as the BBC interview. For now, suffice it to say that a Boy Scout bugle sort of worked in the end, but it woke up the neighbors.

Later that day I remembered the scene and wannted to know who on earth I heard on the radio while I was feuding with raccoons. Turns out it was Tracey Emin, notorious Bad Girl of the 1990s British art scene.  She was interviewed by none other than Carrie Gracie, fiercest of BBC inquisitors. And the interview took place at the White Cube Gallery in London. Emin (right) and Gracie pose discretely in front of an erotic Emin drawing in the photo below.

Listen for yourself, although you’ll have to find your own raccoons for the full effect. Here’s the blurb for this edition of  BBC-The Interview:

Tracey Emin is a British artist who has courted controversy for the way she has made her private life public.

Her work includes a tent sewn with the names of everyone she had slept with and a display of her unmade bed complete with empty alcohol bottles, cigarette butts and other remnants of her life.

Her latest show has an animation of a woman masturbating.

Carrie Gracie asks her what lies behind it all.

Tracey Emin says more about her show, Those Who Suffer Love, in an echoing gallery talk at White Cube.  And then there’s the snarky TV news story embedded below.  A video of Emin dancing at the Beverly Hills Hotel comes closest to the surreal energy of my encounter in the middle of the night.

Tower of Song became my new anthem after I gave Leonard Cohen’s Live In London to Ms. Modigliani for her birthday. I find myself singing the lyric at the most inappropriate of times, but hey, it works for me!

My friends are gone and my hair is grey.
I ache in the places where I used to play.
And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on.
I’m just paying my rent every day in the tower of song.

Another song from the London Concert should be the national anthem. I can get choked up when I hear Democracy Is Coming to the USA.

I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.

The official music video is very good, too, but the embed is locked down.

Encore: Also fine and equally locked down are Because Of, Dance Me to the End of Love, and Closing Time.

Café Mouffe opens on Fridays. Please drop by for a listen and a chat. Sometimes the embedded videos don’t work here due to bandwidth constraints, but you’ll always find links to video sources in the notes. Try them. If you’re curious about the Mouffe, here’s the original idea behind it’s creation.

Naked cyclists make their way past Toronto’s Eaton Centre, June 13, 2009, for the World Naked Bike Ride. Participants in Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax rode naked to celebrate cycling and the human body and to demonstrate the vulnerability of cyclist on the road and protest against oil dependency. [Photo by Tara Walton/The Toronto Star]

Whenever I walk by the Eaton Center I remember a poignant story of childhood disappointment when Ms. Modigliani’s grandfather, the Mayor, did not choose her to present the flowers to the Queen in front of Toronto’s Old City Hall. The year might have been 1958. How things have changed! Now this image will be mashed up with my mental map of the corner of Queen St. and Yonge.

If cyclists can pull off a World Naked Bike Ride every year in cities around the world, it’s time for flaneurs to match their audacity. Imagine Charles Baudelaire strolling down the street in nothing but a top hat.

Katie Gillmor Ellis writes in The Toronto Star:

The phalanx of naked cyclists at Bloor and Avenue Rd. on Saturday afternoon drew a variety of responses, but I wonder how many people shared mine?

There was shock, of course, and laughter. It would be politically correct to say the laughter was in response to the shock but, no. The naked cyclists looked funny. Hairy in unexpected places. Floppy flesh jiggling in unexpected ways. And who knew how awkward male genitalia can look when in juxtaposition with a bike seat?

But after shock and laughter, I had an unexpected reaction: chagrin.

Why do I worry about how I look dressed when others are so unconcerned about how they look undressed?

That very morning, I had spent too much time choosing clothes that could diminish or (please, please, please) camouflage my body’s defects. An exercise in futility because I’m 65 and no one is looking. Worse, I did the same thing 35, 40 years ago, when people were looking and had no objection to what they saw.

So while I’m not about to strip and hit the road – the bike would be wobbling as well as my flesh – I am going to reconsider my morning routine. Putting on a costume (or not) is superfluous. Maybe it’s time to like what I see in the mirror. Maybe showing up, in whatever form, is enough.

James Joyce wrote with excruciating effort as he recovered from one of many eye operations in June 1924. He’d had an iridectomy on his left eye in hopes of preventing another attack of glaucoma. According to Richard Ellmann’s biography, the worst part of the operation was the aftermath. “Lying with face bandaged in a darkened room, he saw before his mind’s eye a cinema of disagreeable events of the past. This was varied by thoughts of Finnegans Wake. Myron Nutting went to the clinic, ‘Madame de la Valliere’s chateau, rue Cherche-Midi’ (as Joyce derisively called it), to visit his friend, and found him lying on his back in the dark, his eyes under dressings as big as small pillows. ‘Hello, Joyce,’ he said cheerily. Joyce remained silent and motionless for a few seconds, then reached under his pillow and drew out a composition book and a pencil. Slowly and carefully, by touch, he made an entry, put his book and pencil back under the pillow, then held out his hand to say, ‘Hello, Nutting.’ Aware of his friend’s bafflement, he took up the notebook again and showed him the words, ‘Carriage sponge,’ which left Nutting no wiser. On June 16 the gloom of the clinic was alleviated by the arrival of a bouquet of hydrangeas, white and dyed blue, which some friends sent him in honor of ‘Bloomsday,’ as the day of Ulysses was already called. In his notebook Joyce scrawled, ‘Today 16 of June 1924 twenty years after. Will anybody remember this date?’” (Ellmann 566)

Is there another work of literature today that is so set in the calendar, or read with such exultation?

… and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Read more in the Project Gutenberg e-text of Ulysses.

First posted June 16, 2008. Thanks to @lodro and @ElijahIsComing for letting me remember.

Update: Someone/everyone is tweeting the complete book from “Sttaely plump Buck Mulligan” to “yes I will Yes” at #bloomsday. I just tweeted the climax from “and O the sea the sea” to …

An accident in Jilotepec, Mexico. Traffic injuries are the ninth leading cause of death worldwide. [Photo by ]Juan Garcia/AFP/Getty Images/NYT]

A new report issued by the World Health Organization confirms what every blind flaneur knows. It’s a dangerous rat race out there, and our navigation skills and foot rage will never compensate for the arrogance and negligence of people in their machines.

According to Sarah Arnquist in the NYT:

A vast majority of the world’s countries — 85 percent — lack adequate laws to address the growing problem of traffic deaths and injuries, according to the World Health Organization’s first global report on road safety, released Monday.

Traffic injuries are the ninth leading cause of death worldwide, and public health experts say that without intervention they will rise to fifth within 20 years, surpassing AIDS and tuberculosis.

“In many countries, the laws needed to protect people are either not there or are too limited in scope,” said Dr. Margaret Chan, the health organization’s director general, as she announced the findings on Monday in New York. “Even when the legislation is adequate, the problem we have is enforcement.”

The report was financed by Bloomberg Philanthropies, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg helped announce the findings.

The 287-page report is based on data from a 2008 survey of 178 countries, representing 98 percent of the world’s population. It builds on a 2004 report that estimated that 1.27 million people die and that 20 million to 50 million were injured annually in traffic accidents.

Among the new findings: pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcycle riders make up almost half of the deaths. Read more

I’d hoped my gray hair was a mark of distinction, like ripening into Walt Whitman or some other venerable old geezer. Grecian Formula 44 never tempted me. Now it seems that stem cells are the answer. According to Gisela Telis at ScienceNOW:

If you’ve ever blamed your gray hair on stress, you weren’t far from the truth. Genotoxic stress–the kind that can damage a cell’s DNA–causes hair to whiten over time, according to a new study. The results challenge accepted ideas about how stem cells age and may eventually lead to new ways to prevent graying and treat the more serious conditions caused by genotoxic stress, such as cancer.

For hair, life is simple. A strand grows for several years, then rests for 2 to 3 months before eventually dying and falling out. In 2004, Emi Nishimura, a dermatologist now with the Tokyo Medical and Dental University in Japan, linked this process to the hair follicle’s melanocyte stem cells. As a new hair grows, some melanocyte stem cells become melanocytes, which give the strand its color, while others remain stem cells and store pigment for the next generation of hair. The stem cells continually renew themselves and should theoretically last a lifetime. But over time, the stem cells go missing from hair follicles, leaving people with unpigmented, white hair. How the cells go AWOL remained a mystery.

Nishimura suspected that genotoxic stressors, such as radiation or harsh chemicals, might play a role in the stem cells’ fate, because they’ve been implicated in other signs of aging. She and colleagues at Japan’s Kanazawa University tested the idea in mice, which also gray with age. After exposure to cell-stressing x-rays or chemotherapy drugs, young mice went gray in an unexpected way. More of their melanocyte stem cells matured into color-producing melanocytes, depleting the store of stem cells. Instead of dying or being inactivated, the DNA-damaged cells matured before their time.

“The mature cells lose their regeneration capabilities,” Nishimura explains. “The mice then can’t produce enough pigment-making cells” and consequently go gray. Moreover, the stressed mice’s gray hairs and the cell populations in their follicles were indistinguishable from those of elderly mice, suggesting that genotoxic stress might drive natural graying as well.

The idea isn’t far-fetched, says Ian Jackson, a geneticist at the Medical Research Council in Edinburgh, U.K. “Genotoxic stress happens to everyone over time, and its accumulation is the main cause of aging.” The sun’s ultraviolet radiation, household chemicals, and environmental pollutants can all cause genotoxic stress, as can normal metabolic processes in cells. A single cell in a healthy mammal can suffer as many as 100,000 DNA-damaging events in 1 day, says Nishimura.

“This is a neat study, both for what it tells us about melanocytes and more broadly for what it could mean to stem cell research,” says David Fisher, an oncologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “We normally think of graying as an undesirable thing, but this work suggests it could be protective,” ridding the body of potentially dangerous damaged cells by preventing their further division. Future studies should explore whether stem cells elsewhere in the body undergo a similar premature maturation, he says. Tapping into this natural defense mechanism might enable researchers to prevent cancers like melanoma, which results from DNA damage to melanocytes in the skin, adds Jackson.

The results, published in tomorrow’s issue of Cell, might also lead to new measures for preventing gray hair by modulating the DNA damage response. What they won’t do is support the still-unproven common claim that emotional stress causes graying–at least not yet, says Fisher. “With this mechanistic insight,” he notes, “we might finally be able to look at questions like that one.”

After I posed the rhetorical question yesterday about video tributes to world-class neighborhoods, Alex sent me Paris, je t’aime-Bastille. Point well-taken, and many thanks!

According to Wikipedia:

Bastille (XIIe arrondissement) — by Spanish writer-director Isabel Coixet. Prepared to leave his marriage for a much younger lover (Leonor Watling), a man (Sergio Castellitto) instead decides to stay with his wife (Miranda Richardson) after she reveals a terminal illness - and rediscovers the love he once felt for her.

Returning to Jazz A Saint Germain at yesterday’s Mouffe sent me searching for that album’s cover track, Debbie Harry’s version of “Il N’Y a Plus d’Apres.” I couldn’t find it on YouTube, but Juliette Greco is just as alluring, especially for the grainy 60s feel of the street footage. That made me jones all the more for Saint-Germain des Prés. I’m not alone in this yearning. What other neighborhood has tributes like these produced by Peterkein and DiegoHCantor?

Even the Godfather of Punk wants to croon like Perry Como… or Charles Aznavour. That’s what happened to Iggy Pop as he survived into his golden years. Iggy told NPR’s Fresh Air that his heart’s desire is doing the Lounge Lizard at Café Carlyle and the Rainbow Room. He’ll even wear a tux with glitter – but no shirt.

You can here the transformation on Preliminaires, Iggy Pop’s new release. He sang King of the Dogs and Les Feuilles Mortes (we know it as “Autumn Leaves”) live on French television last week. See more news about the release on his website.

Encore: The first inkling I had that Iggy Pop could sing chanson was his duet with Françoise Hardy on I’ll Be Seeing You. The track comes from an excellent copilation called Jazz A Saint Germain, one of Café Mouffe’s inspirations. Ah, Françoise! You deserve a Mouffe all your own.

Café Mouffe opens on Fridays. Please drop by for a listen and a chat. Sometimes the embedded videos don’t work here due to bandwidth constraints, but you’ll always find links to video sources in the notes. Try them. If you’re curious about the Mouffe, here’s the original idea behind it’s creation.