a mine in Madagascar

Katherine Standefer has a rare genetic condition that makes her heart go into fibrillation with seemingly little provocation. When a heart is fibrillating, it’s basically just quivering, which means it’s not pumping blood, and one cannot live long without blood on the move. A defibrillator is a machine that shocks the heart back into its regular rhythm. Only in the last couple of decades have doctors figured out a way that a defibrillator can be inserted into the body so that the quivering heart can be shocked back into useful activity immediately, no EMT necessary; you can be hiking in the wilderness and your internal defibrillator will be ready to rescue you, no helicopters, no doctor on the trail. It sounds great. And Katherine Standefer thought it meant her life had been saved. 

It certainly meant her life had been changed.

Katherine Standefer’s medical memoir gets its title, Lightning Flowers, from the aftermath of a lightning strike. It seems that a person struck by lightning may end up with a sort of tattoo as the electricity surges through the body, the patterns of capillaries just under the skin visibly seared close enough to the surface that they look, well, not flowerlike so much as “arborescent,” as the Free Dictionary puts it. Something to show off if you survive, I guess.

Standefer never refers to any lightning flowers of her own, but she does undergo painful electric shocks, which may or may not save her life. 

She becomes curious about where the device came from. Who made it? Standefer even travels to mines in Madagascar to see firsthand where metals essential to the Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD) are dug up. There is no unalloyed good in what Standefer learns. Mining, for one thing, is hard on the land, and on the people who depend upon what grows upon the land, the water that flows over and through it, and, of course, mining is extraordinarily hard on the plants and animals whose habitat is ground up.

Nevertheless not all of the change is bad for the people of Madagascar. Some of the people experience the power of the government-like multinational corporation that comes in to run the mining operation and see what a competent government might do for its citizens. Madagascar doesn’t have the kinds of roads, bridges, schools, or power plants that, suddenly, people see can exist, as the mining company seemingly drops such things from the sky. 

Katherine Standefer describes contrasts between those who have been helped, those who have been harmed, and those whose lives have seemingly remained the same. They all have opinions. “Perhaps the source of the heartbreak was this: however much a Western presence in these towns created strife, it also came with a brief bright hope — that someone, at long last, would accountable for improving their lives.”

source:

Lightning Flowers: my journey to uncover the cost of saving a life

by Katherine E. Standefer

2020. Little, Brown Spark, New York

Between Oz and Vietnam

On the web Dare I Read is where you come for your Oz-themed poems. This one I found in an anthology:

Eagle in the Land of Oz

I was talking

to a friend

and I noticed

a tin

leg

               hanging on his wall

he said he

got it

               in cambodia

there had been

an air strike

on a

               n. v. a. hospital

it had been on

one

               of the bodies

I thought of the 

Tin Man of Oz

               who had no heart

lions and tigers and bears

Don Receveur

The last line makes clear that the poet is thinking about the 1939 MGM Wizard of Oz movie. (That’s where the “lions and tigers and bears” line occurs.) In the movie the Tin Man was made by a tinsmith. “He forgot to give me a heart,” the Tin Man says. 

In L. Frank Baum’s original story the Tin Woodman was first an ordinary flesh and blood person. A wicked witch curses the man’s ax so that it swings back on its user, chopping off an arm. The man goes to a tinsmith who replaces the missing limb with a tin one. Unlike a prosthetic in the real world, in Oz the tin replacements (eventually the man’s entire body, including his head) are as alive as the parts they replace. Presumably, the tinsmith thought a heart replacement no more important than a set of tin intestines or lungs.

In a sequel Baum eventually introduces a doppelgänger for the Tin Woodman, a Tin Soldier. Similar origin story. 

In his dark Oz novel, The March of the Tin Soldiers, Steve Ahlquist has the wicked witch herself providing the prosthetics, though in this case the replacement parts are the ones that are cursed, forcing their new owners to obey the magical maker. Seems like a good way to build an army.

We don’t know if the person killed in the hospital in Don Receveur’s poem was a soldier, but it’s a good guess. Perhaps the soldier was heartless? Or maybe the war? — after all, bombing a hospital is a war crime. Receveur leaves it to the reader to find meaning in the connection between Oz and Vietnam. 

source:

Carrying the Darkness: the poetry of the Vietnam war

edited by W. D. Ehrhart

1989. Texas University Press, Lubbock TX

Wherefore art thou Rosenberg?

The idea that many people coming in from Europe in the early 20th century changed their names at Ellis Island -- or had their names changed for them by immigration — is a persistent one. Immigrants’ names were supposedly switched out for names that could be more easily spelled by Americans or that obscured their ethnicity (or Jewishness). 

Yet there is counter evidence, says Sara Lipton. "A fine scholarly book [A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: a history of Jewish name changing in America by Kirsten Fermaglich] … definitively proved that no names were changed at Ellis; they were changed by legal petition [by the immigrants themselves] between 1920 and 1960.” Nevertheless, Lipton also notes, “many [contemporary Jews] indignantly insist[] that their own family names were indeed changed at Ellis Island.”

“My own father openly told his children that he changed his name because of anti-Semitism,” says Lipton, clearly skeptical of those claiming the changes were imposed. “I doubt he was alone in being so forthright.” Those who changed names, then, wanted to be less a target for the haters. But wouldn’t it be particularly humiliating to change your name for this reason? Where’s your pride in your heritage? Would it make a difference if you felt little connection to the name you were leaving behind? That would make abandoning it easier, wouldn’t it?

“[I]t is worth noting that the names Jews surrendered … were of relatively recent origin. Eastern and Central European Jews only assumed surnames in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Austrian, Prussian, and Russian laws required them to do so. … [N]ames like Rosenberg, Greenberg, and Lefkowitz were surely not essential links to [honored forefathers]. Isn’t it possible that Jews fleeing persecution and pogroms might have felt little attachment to names imposed by the very governments that had persecuted them, derived from towns and landscapes from which they fled? That they might bear the name Rose no less proudly than Rosenberg?”

By the way, in reference to the Shakespeare-derived title of this post, “wherefore” doesn’t mean “where” but rather “why.” Thus the title post could be rewritten, “Why are you called Rosenberg?”

source: 

“The Jewish Authenticity Trap” by Sara Lipton

The New York Review of Books, November 24, 2022, v.LXIX n.18

Jesus, failed writer

I wasn’t sure what to make of Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure. Much of the essay is stories of writers down on their luck, the implication being that’s the standard situation. He stretches that to include famous and bestselling writers by suggesting they, too, often feel undervalued and ill-done-by. Marche digs back into history for the misfortunes of Herman Melville and Jane Austen, then much farther back to ancient China when Tu Fu and Li Po (or Du Fu and Li Bai, as Marche’s choice of transliteration spells them) wandered the nation trying to put together a living, or even back to Confucius who, it seems, couldn’t find a new patron and, one gets the sense, starved to death. The essay culminates with a paragraph on the Son of God:

Jesus Christ may be the most failed writer. He preached love as clearly and as evocatively as possible. In return, his friends betrayed him, his people turned against him, the authorities crucified him. After his death, his disciples gathered a bunch of his speeches into a handful of potted biographies that contradict one another and their world took to massacring his own people on the basis of what they thought he meant. Two thousand years later, Jesus has over a billion devoted fans. They get together, sometimes once a week or more, to read his stuff out loud* to each other. A career could not have gone much worse or better.

Well, that takes your thesis to the apex, Mr Marche. After reading the above I was even less sure what I was to take away. I don’t aspire to Jesus-level consequences for my work. I don’t even dream of paying the bills with my writing. I do suffer. Yeah. There’s that.

source:

On Writing and Failure

or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer

by Stephen Marche

2023. Biblioasis, Windsor ONT Canada

*update 10/10/23: David in a comment notes that I posted this as "out lout" -- perhaps Jesus fans were trying to out lout each other? It was merely I typo so I am correcting it. Funny tho.

“the closest thing … to love”

There aren’t a lot of records of true gay love stories, the farther back you go, the fewer. And far back includes living memory. While browsing the stacks of the Doe Library at UC Berkeley, I came across A Union Like Ours, Scott Bane’s new biography of two men and their marriage-in-all-but-name. F. O. Matthiessen sounded vaguely familiar. He was famous in mid-century, a well-known and somewhat radical academic. He seems to be credited with the founding of American Studies, American history and literature as a worthy discipline, a change from the up-to-then taken for granted Europeward raptured gaze. The other man in A Union Like Ours is Russell Cheney, a painter who achieved his greatest recognition as a regional painter, of Maine mainly.

Frank (the F. of F. O.) and Russell met on a transAtlantic crossing, and quickly fell in love. They built a life together, which lasted twenty years. When Russell died of a heart attack in the house they shared, Frank was stricken. Says author Bane about Frank’s decision to remain:

Matthiessen acknowledged that being in the house was painful, but he opted to stay there instead of going away because, as he described to a friend, his pain was the closest thing he had to love.

Pain is a powerful sensation. I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer numbness, but philosophically I get it. 

source: 

A Union Like Ours: the love story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney

by Scott Bane

2022. Bright Leaf / University of Massachusetts Press, Boston MA

Oz and vampires

In an interview Charlaine Harris (author of the vampire mystery books filmed for HBO as True Blood) says a major influence was the Oz books:

“Frank Baum’s Oz books fed my imagination in a good way,” she says. “I read them over and over. I am still trying to find a way to work Princess Langwidere into a book.”

When I read that to long-time Oz Club friend Peter Hanff, Peter pointed out that I pronounced “Langwidere” to rhyme with “here.” Rhyme it with “there,” and you get a woman with a “languid air,” Peter said. 

Langwidere (who appeared in the book Ozma of Oz) wore a different head for every occasion. This was played for laughs in the book, but the makers of the Disney movie, Return to Oz, didn’t have to take the concept and character far for horror to manifest. I imagine Charlaine Harris would accentuate the fearful prospect of collecting undead heads, but I don’t know, I haven’t read any of her books. True Blood was fun.   

source:

Publishers Weekly

May 8, 2023

“a seemingly endless procession of …”

I grew up with the Soviet Union as the great antithesis of the US. Often a literalist I was confused by the conflation of the USSR and Russia. Were they one and the same or two entities? Within the USSR’s sphere of influence were other nations with their own names, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and so on. But the USSR itself was usually just called “Russia” despite there being entities within the USSR (regions or republics) that had different names — Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc. I couldn’t have named them all. I remember analogizing them to the states of the US. Texas was big like Russia was big, and Rhode Island was tiny like Estonia, but the USA was a single unit, America, the individual states no less America, and far from being independent nations. Of course, I grew up a century after the US Civil War when the South tried to remove itself from that America, and thought surely such ancient history did not impinge on the present. The Soviet Union’s formative struggles were rather more recent, but seemed to me equally settled. 

In the 1980s there were various movements to cool the antagonism between the USA and the USSR, from the Nuclear Freeze to the building of sister city connections. My own small Northern California town of Sebastopol developed a sister city connection with Cherkasy in the Ukraine. I attended an event or two to see photographs of Cherkasy and talk to people from Sebastopol who went there. Everybody with any authority always used “Russia” as shorthand for “USSR,” so I let my thinking subsume the other republics under that name. Sebastopol had a sister city in Russia, I said to myself. 

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and, soon thereafter, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the non-Russian Soviet Socialist Republics began to reassert individual identities. The Baltic States were the noisiest about it, as I recall. Suddenly I knew the names Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as something other than words on a map.

Ukraine’s independence, however, looked unlikely. Wasn’t it virtually Russia? Ukraine’s first years of independence did appear to be in name only, Russia seemingly dictating the nation’s politics and policies. I noticed the Orange Revolution and the subsequent Maidan, and I rooted for positive change, but it really wasn’t until Russia invaded Ukraine that I had a clear idea of Ukraine being Not Russia. I have followed the prosecution of the war, and it’s clear how horrendous the Russian army is being and the lies Russian leader Vladimir Putin has spewed to justify the attack. But what exactly was Ukraine? Wasn’t it “The Ukraine”? (The definite article is not an official part of the country’s name but an artifact of translation.)

I have finally read a history of Ukraine, Anna Reid’s Borderland. The Ukrainian language is different from Russian, though closely related. Most Ukrainians are bilingual in Ukrainian and Russian — although the very large Russian ethnic minority in the country tends to be monolingual in Russian. Language is an indicator of identity. If your community speaks one language and the community across the way speaks another, the two communities are a long way toward being ethnically distinct. 

I knew something of the horrors of the 20th century in the USSR — the famines caused by agricultural collectivization, the gulag, the two invasions of the Germans. But in reading Borderland (a translation of the word “Ukraine”) I could see these horrors being visited specifically on Ukraine, not just Russia. It was worse in Ukraine than in Russia — one reason being that Russia considered Ukrainians to be lesser than themselves. Genocidal policies were imposed on Ukraine by the Russian regime partly to prevent Ukraine from being anything other than a sidecar of Russia. I got the feeling that Russians were afraid Ukrainians could assert themselves as Not Russia, while at the same time Russia tried to claim no belief in Ukraine at all.

I am not going to try to recapitulate Ukraine’s history here. I have to admit I am still disambiguating the two countries. But having now read something of the history I am clear that the people of Ukraine deserve a future uncoupled from Russia. 

Here’s a passage from Borderland describing the early days of the Maidan protests, which led to the ouster of President Yanukovych, and inaugurated a new era for Ukraine. As Ukraine was turning toward the West, Russia gobbled up the Crimean Peninsula, and occupied a band of territory in Ukraine’s East (2015). Ukraine has essentially been at war with Russia in the years since. In February 2022 Russia, however, majorly escalated, seeking to swallow everything it hadn’t yet taken.But the nastiness was in the future when the Maidan protests against Yanukovych began. (A maidan is a city square, and Kyiv’s main square was the gathering place.) 

Bounded by barricades, the protests initially had a music festival air. On the Maidan itself, green canvas tents filled the area round the fountains where in normal times elderly men gather to play chess. Facing the Stalinist Ukraine Hotel, a covered sound stage hosted an almost round-the-clock stream of speakers and performers. Ruslana, winner of the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest, appeared night after night, leading the crowds in the national anthem. So did rock bands, folk singers, children’s choirs, Cossack drummers and a seemingly endless procession of poets.

“A seemingly endless procession of poets.” Yes! Suddenly Ukraine felt real to me. 

source: 

Borderland: a journey through the history of Ukraine

Anna Reid 

1997, 2015. Basic Books / Perseus, New York

“substitute meat”

As the Save the Whales campaigns gradually reduced the number of nations committed to continued whaling, those that refused to sign on became more and more noticeable — and obviously intransigent. The standouts seemed to be the Soviet Union, Norway, and Japan. Although Russia remains pro-whaling, it has not returned to the hunt after the Soviet Union mothballed its whaling fleet in the late 80s. Whaling was not economic. The Soviet Union could subsidize money-sucks, until it couldn’t. Japan still can. Whaling does not pay its way in Japan; there is not much of an internal market and there is no international market. According to Rebecca Griggs in her book Fathoms: the world in the whale, great quantities of surplus whale meat is sitting in gigantic freezers in Japan. Yet every year Japan sends its whaling fleet to drag more bodies out of the drink. 

I was always curious about what made Japan so adamant about continuing to hunt whales. I remember some sort of vague story about how whaling was traditional in Japan and the Japanese were not about to let outsiders dictate what traditions they could maintain. Griggs visits an expert on Japan who tells the author the “tradition” doesn’t really go back very far:

Toward the tail end of World War II and into the 1960s, Japan experienced a food crisis born of the wartime decimation of supply chains and the Japanese agricultural sector. … US overseer general Douglas MacArthur urged recommencing Antarctic whaling, not only for nutritional reasons but also to retrofit and repurpose Japanese naval vessels, decommissioned as per terms of surrender. The Japanese people were starving and crippled by vitamin deficiencies, whale meat served in elementary and middle schools helped bring young people back to health. Though, in time, the Japanese turned away from this substitute meat, its association with the ideals of self-reliance, and restored pride, have never entirely been dropped.

Whale meat may still bring a warm feeling to those born in the middle of the 20th century — “Why, I remember when I was fed whale meat in my school lunch; boy, did that keep me from starving!” — but few people actually buy it when it shows up in the market. 

Norway’s whaling “traditions” may go back to the Vikings, but so what? All sorts of bad things can be justified by saying we’ve been doing them for a long time. Is the whaling industry paying for itself? Considering that whale meat is increasingly contaminated with heavy metals and other poisons, human made pollution which accumulates in the animals at the top of the food chain, fewer and fewer people want to risk eating it. For some reason ending the hunt is politically toxic in Norway. So it likely doesn’t matter whether there’s a market. 

source:

Fathoms: the world in the whale

by Rebecca Giggs

2020. Simon & Schuster, New York

word of the day: swink

word of the day: swink

context:

Swink how we may, evenings or early morn, 

Our garden crops bring only a bare return.

— lines from a poem by Fan Ch’eng-ta, translated by Gerald Bullett

definition (Collins): labor; toil

While one unfamiliar with the word can figure out a working definition from the context, I do wonder about translators who use such unfamiliar terms in the destination language. 

source:

Anthology of Chinese Literature: from early times to the fourteenth century

edited by Cyril Birch

1965. Grove Press, New York

word of the day: floccinaucinihilipilification

word of the day: floccinaucinihilipilification

context: 

Ferdinand and Isabela [ruled that Columbus] could not be allowed to retain the monopoly of transatlantic navigation. Apparently, though not explicitly in any surviving document, they decided that he had broken his contract by failing to deliver his promises. They added a dextrous piece of floccinaucinihilipilification. Columbus had forfeited his right of monopoly on the coast discovered on his third voyage because ill health had prevented him from landing and taking possession in person.

definition (Cambridge Dictionary): the act of considering something to be not at all important or useful. It's an 18th-century coinage that combines four Latin prefixes meaning "nothing."

While it’s a fun word — one I’ve never seen used before — I don’t quite see how its meaning is appropriate in the context of the quote. It seems to me the Spanish crown decided Columbus failed to do something important. Presumably the crown was looking for an excuse to undo Columbus’ rights-by-discovery, and they found one. Perhaps it is Felipe Fernandez-Armesto  (the author I’m quoting) who considers the technicality to be elevated from its prior floccinaucinihilipilification. 

source: Amerigo: the man who gave his name to America

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

2007. Random House, New York