The Reluctant Traveler

Where Have All the Warring Families Gone?

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 11 May 2013 22:27:00 +0000

Isola Bella overflowing with the Borromeo Palace and its terraced gardens

Borromeo Palace

The Isola Bella is an island in Lake Maggiore that is the home of the Borromeo Palace. Begun in 1631, it took over 300 years to complete (1951). The island is the size of 12 and a half football fields and is literally filled to the brim with the palace and its terraced grounds.

The entrance to the main gallery of the palace is a history lesson. It is lined with massive crests of the powerful and warring families of Italy's past, the Medici, the Farneses, the Odescalchis, the Savojas, the Barberinis and, of course, the Borromeos themselves. As various members of these families came to visit, they would see their crests displayed prominently along the walls of the staircase. So, too, would lesser visitors who were by these crests silently instructed in the power of the Borromeo family. Italy's history is a history of powerful families. Even the mafia sees itself as a “crime family.”

The Medici, for example, were the dominant family of Florence, warring against the Republicans. (Under their despotic rule, Florence experienced one of the most fruitful periods of the Italian Renaissance.) The war between the Torriani and Visconti families over control of Milan ended with Como falling to the Visconti in 1335. Como has plowed in the wake of Milanese history ever since. The Sforza family of Milan is another example of a warring family. In fact, Francesco Sforza and his son fought one another at the Battle of Montolmo in 1444. The elder won. The Barberinis and the Farneses are on the Borromeo staircase. They fought one another in the Castro wars, though there was no clear winner.

And then, of course, there is that feud between the Montagues and the Capulets that led to the demise of both Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare could take for granted that powerful families would be at one another’s throats. After all, they were Italian.

Things have changed in modern times. Italian family bonds are as strong as ever, but the families are nowhere near as belligerent as they once were with the exception, of course, of the mafioso. In today’s Italy it is not uncommon for young Italian men and women to live with their families all the way through college. Children from Como who go to college in Milan don't live in Milan. They take the Ferrovie Nord everyday. It takes about an hour each way. Those who go farther afield, say Venice, come home on weekends.

The domestication of the Italian family may not be accidental. I am thinking of the experiments by the Russian scientist, Dmitri Belyaev, who selected foxes for their aggressive tendencies and bred them through twenty generations, selecting foxes at certain stages, for example, the 8th generation, that showed themselves to be demonstrably less aggressive than their siblings. With repeated selection of less aggressive foxes, Belyaev ultimately produced a breed of fox that resembled the family dog. You can go on line now and purchase a Belyaev fox as a pet!

Could the decline of the warring families in Italian history be related to Belyaev's experiments? When I mentioned this to a friend and colleague, he thought it was highly possible. He even suggested an ingenious explanation for the trend toward tranquility; namely, the widespread use of firearms. His argument was that since only aggressive medieval families acquired firearms, it would be only aggressive families using them against one another. In other words over the centuries aggressive families knocked one another off, leaving the field to their placid relatives. That might be an argument for supporting the NRA.

On second thought, maybe not.

Joined at the Hip

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:36:00 +0000

Both Cuba and the United States are facing a critical problem: how to distribute income. Cuba’s socialist economy wants to have an equal distribution throughout the population. The Cubans I talked to told me that they make somewhere between $30 and $40 a month. UN data available online increases that by a factor of 10. Even so, it isn’t much. Cuba is slowly allowing a “private sector” to emerge in an effort to create more wealth for everyone. But they are doing it slowly and cautiously. By contrast, the United States has no ideological commitment to income equality. It opts for a free economy. Let the chips fall mostly where they may. When Obama mentioned the “R” word (redistribution) during his first campaign, opposition to it became a cri de coeur of the conservatives.

In his January 27, 2013, column in the New York Times, Paul Krugman fought back:

Republicans have a problem. For years they could shout down any attempt to point out the extent to which their policies favored the elite over the poor and the middle class; all they had to do was yell “Class warfare!” and Democrats scurried away. In the 2012 election, however, that didn’t work: the picture of the G.O.P. as the party of sneering plutocrats stuck, even as Democrats became more openly populist than they have been in decades.

As a result, prominent Republicans have begun acknowledging that their party needs to improve its image. But here’s the thing: Their proposals for a makeover all involve changing the sales pitch rather than the product. When it comes to substance, the G.O.P. is more committed than ever to policies that take from most Americans and give to a wealthy handful.

Krugman’s comment underscores the fact that the United States is currently engaged in a real battle over redistribution. Indeed, for the past half-century we have seen an unprecedented migration of the nation’s wealth to a small segment of its population. The chart shown below (from Wikipedia) indicates that in 2007 the top five percent of the population controlled 62 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Edward N. Wolff chart reproduced from Wikepedia

During the 20^th century the great economic conflict was between capitalism and socialism. In a nutshell the former wants to maximum profit, the latter wants to maximize satisfaction of human needs at the expense of profit. The 21^st century marks the apotheosis of capitalism. China and Russia, both standard bearers of socialism in the 20^th century, have given way to capitalism. Cuba is on the verge of a similar transition, though probably one not so radical as in China or Russia. But there is a problem. Capitalism works pretty well for 20 percent of the people and not so well for the rest. Here is what Castro himself said about the matter in a speech before the Group of 77 South Summit Conference in 2000:

In over 100 countries the per capita income is lower than it was 15 years ago. At the moment 1.6 billion people are faring worse than at the beginning of the 1980s. Over 820 million people are undernourished and 790 million of them live in the Third World…The world economic order works for 20 percent of the population, but it leaves out, demeans, and degrades the remaining 80 percent. We cannot simply accept to enter the next century as the backward, poor, and exploited rearguard.

It isn’t ironic that the United States and its professed enemy, Cuba, are both struggling with the same economic problem. It is the economic problem facing everyone in today’s world: how to make an economic order that works for everyone?

A City Time Is Trying to Remember

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 17:21:00 +0000

Pepe Rivera

El Caballero

On the Calle de los Mercaderes Pepe Rivera, La Santiaguero, sits motionless outside a hostel for expectant mothers. He is not protesting. He’s making a living. He is a living statue though several passersby have mistaken him for the real thing, i.e. a statue. He is that good, so good, in fact, that he makes the statue of El Caballero de Paris look like it has a nervous tic. At Pepe’s feet is a satchel. Drop a coin into it, and Pepe comes to life—well, he comes to a snail’s pace life. He turns ever so slowly, lifts his eyes ever so slowly, and like a man traveling close to the speed of light, he extends his hand in a gesture of goodbye that feels as if it will take a lifetime to complete.

The buildings look as if they had a skin disease.

Pepe is supplanting Fidel as my avatar for Cuba. He is a reminder that Havana is a surrealistic city.

Scaffolded Walls

It is after all strange to pass block after block of abandoned buildings several stories high and to see boarded-up windows on the ground floor while clotheslines dangle outside broken floor-to-ceiling windows on the second floor. It has the feel of a Ridley Scott movie. I’m thinking, of course, of Blade Runner. There are electric wires that droop openly (and probably illegally) from one window ledge to the next as they snake their way along the facades of these boarded-up hulks. They are like dark rivulets of wire that shadowy inhabitants dip into the way a villager living alongside a forest stream might dip a bucket for water. Buildings are either collapsing or about to collapse. They look as if they have a skin disease. Then there are walls—single walls, in fact—held up by scaffolding the way you might support a drunk. All around the wall and its scaffolding is a vacant lot filled with the rubble of some previous collapse that has left nothing standing but the wall. Why haven’t the authorities put it out of its misery instead of forcing it to stand there in all in feebleness? If it were a horse, you would shoot it. And then there are the empty buildings with corrugated fences surrounding them and a gap, a guard at the gap, and painted in big black letters above the gap, “This is not a toilet.” Is it meant to impart a warning? Or information? Or is it an appeal (this is not a toilet, for Chrissake)?

Driving through the town at night is like driving through a blackout. There are hardly any lights and those that are there glow dimly and in the oddest of places: a tall office building, pitch dark save for a glimmer two floors from the top on the corner, or a squatter’s second floor room, a spare yellow gleam buried deep inside the building like a gravedigger’s lantern, the electricity most likely tapped from a nearby building.

Amid all of this descending rubble there are pockets of life—the Buena Vista Social Club, the San Cristóbal Paladar, and all the hot spots that lie hidden from the tourist trade because they are too authentic to share. And then there are all those 1950s chick mobiles floating through the city like particles from a different universe.

Havana is a contradiction. America is its enemy and yet it loves its enemy. What could be more surrealistic than a city in love with tail fins and grinning grilles? Havana is, indeed, a special place. Havana is a not a city that time has forgotten. It is a city that time is trying to remember.

Shedding Humiliation

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 23:55:00 +0000

You can never overestimate the impact of humiliation on a society. It is as profoundly palpable as it is on a human being. Before going to Beijing, my wife and I visited Bishu Shanzhuang, a palace complex that the Chinese Emperor and his retinue occupied for six months out of each year when the heat in Beijing became unbearable. Kangxi, the great Qing Dynasty Emperor, began the complex in 1703.

On the wall of the emperor’s bedchamber, the so-called warm room, there is a plaque that reads:

NO FORGETTING THE NATIONAL HUMILIATION

Emperor Xianfeng signed Beijing Treaty here

On October 28, 1860 . . . it was in the warm chamber Xianfeng was forced to sign Beijing Treaty with Britain, France and Russia which ceded south Kowloon to Britain and to admit Aihui Treaty through which more than 1,000,000 square kilometer territory that lies to the north of the Heilongjiang river and to the east of the Wusulijiang river was ceded to Russia.

For most of the past 200 years China has been a country whose relationship to the rest of the world has been one of humiliation, pushed around as they were by the British, the French, the Germans, the Americans, the Japanese and the Russians. China’s current strong posture internationally is a response to that humiliation. Never again.

Portrait of Camilo Cienfuegos and Fidel Castro commemorating
26th of July Movement that overthrew Batista dictatorship in 1959

This sheds light on the affection the Cuban people have for Fidel. He has pulled the thorn of humiliation out of their collective psyche. Mao described Castro as having shown the Cuban people how to “stand up” and grasp whom they really are. Is it any wonder that the Cuban people’s affection for Castro has remained as strong as it has for as long as it has? After more than 600 years of domination, he showed them how to stand up.

Before coming to Cuba I read “Cuba’s New Now” by Cynthia Gorney in The National Geographic. She describes an encounter with Eduardo, a 35-year-old Cuban.

“I love my country,” she quotes him as saying, “but there is no future for me here.”

Eduardo drives Gorney around in a 1956 Plymouth. He shows her a boat he is secretly building with some friends. They intend to sail to America. He will be taking advantage of the current “wet foot, dry foot” immigration policy put into place in 1994 by President Clinton. If you make it to American soil (dry foot), you are granted asylum. If you are intercepted on the water (wet foot), it’s back to Cuba with you. This applies to aliens even if they cross into America from Mexico, just so long as they are Cubans. If they are Mexicans or Latin Americans and try to cross the Rio Grande or the Sonoran Desert, they are at risk of running afoul of the sometimes-lethal Border Patrol.

Back in America and out of touch with Eduardo, Gorney tracks down his brother in Mexico. He tells her that a short way out into the Atlantic the rudder on the boat broke off. Eduardo and his friends had to row back to Cuba.

On January 14, 2013 all restrictions on when and where Cubans may travel were lifted. Now Eduardo can sell the boat and use the proceeds to fly to America. Obviously, the times are changing.

I take it as highly significant that the inaugural poet for Obama’s second term was Richard Blanco. Blanco describes himself as having been “ . . . made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the United States.” His strong Cuban connection is, I take it, telescoping a policy change.

None too soon.

Remember the Weapons of Mass Destruction

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 23:25:00 +0000

It took me longer to get to Havana than it did to get to Chennai, India. Part of the reason was a four-hour delay at the Miami Airport. Rumor had it that the delay was because Hugo Chavez was dying. Dignitaries were flying in. Chavez was supposed to have been sworn in on Thursday. That didn’t happen. So who’s running Venezuela? Cuba needs to know. Venezuela has virtually replaced the Soviet Union as Cuba’s life support system, selling Cuba oil at controlled prices since 2000. Cuba, in turn, has been supplying Venezuela with doctors. Since 2004 Venezuela sends Cuba 100,000 barrels of cheap petroleum a day. Cuba sends 30,000 health professionals to Venezuela and trains thousands of its citizens in Cuban medical schools. Were this arrangement not to continue, the Cuban economy would suffer.

When I exited the airport, I glimpsed a billboard with a message for Che Guevara, presumably from the people of Cuba. The message was next to the image that appears on T-shirts worn by young people in almost every country I have visited. I’ve been to 51. It is an image made in 1960 by the famous fashion photographer, Alberto Korda.

In our eyes you are always pure, as a child and as a man,
Commandant Che, friend

Che is looking into the middle distance. I will buy a refrigerator magnet with that image on it before I leave. I’ll bet there are Che dolls in the store. I saw one of Korda’s Che images with a legend. It said, “Let’s Go, Mets.”

The impact of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro on the 20^th century is extraordinary, far out of proportion to the size of their domain, slightly smaller than the state of Pennsylvania. Fidel was born in August 1926. His father, Angel, was a white settler from Galicia and his mother, Angel’s second wife, Lina Ruiz, was a Cuban from Pinar del Rio. Angel came to Cuba at the turn of the 20^thcentury, just about the same time that my own father came to America from Eastern Europe.

Angel arrived at the beginning of the Cuban Republic, a period that lasted from 1902 to 1952 and marked the beginning of a new kind of American influence. The Spanish, the Portuguese, and the French had for hundreds of years practiced colonial expansion by forced occupation. America stayed at home. All that changed at the end of the 19^th century. America declared war on Spain and immediately attacked and destroyed its fleet in the Philippines in Manila Bay on May 1, 1898.

Next was Cuba. The government needed a pretext for the invasion. William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal, provided one. On February 15, 1898, the American battleship Maine was lying at anchor in the harbor just off the shore of what is today the Malecón. The battleship blew up. Hearst marketed the explosion as an act of treachery. Teddy Roosevelt echoed the accusation. A tsunami of patriotic outrage flooded the country. Volunteers poured into the armed services. On April 25, 1898, the US declared war on Cuba.

It hardly mattered that there had been no Spanish mine in the harbor. Indeed, almost 70 years later Admiral Hyman Rickover conducted a study that strongly pointed toward spontaneous combustion in the coal bins as the culprit. It was enough for Hearst’s newspaper to declare a mine to make it true. America invaded Cuba. One hundred years later it is still here. It is instructive to think of these things today, when mutatis mutandis the slogan would be Remember the Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The Bay of Orangeside Triggerfish

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 23:51:00 +0000

Anti-aircraft gun used at Bay of Pigs invasion

On a recent trip to Cuba I stopped at the Bay of Pigs Museum (Museo Girón). The name is an oddity. There are no pigs in the Bay of Pigs. What is in the bay is a fish called the Orangeside triggerfish. In Caribbean Spanish the word “cochino” is used for both. Inappropriate translation aside, The Bay of Pigs is much more descriptive a name than The Bay of Orangeside Triggerfish, especially if you are a loyal Cuban.

I was en route to the town of Cienfuegos when I stopped at the museum. Here the ill starred plot to put together a group of anti-Castro rebels, have them meet up with their Cuban counterparts, and bring down the Castro government with the same alacrity that Castro demonstrated in bringing down the Batista government is described in great detail. In retrospect the invasion seems like such a pipe dream. It makes you wonder what the CIA Special Group planners were smoking?

Airplane flown during Bay of Pigs invasion

When you read the history of the invasion and some of the Mickey Mouse deceptions that were employed—for example, removing the cowl of an airplane, shooting it full of bullet holes, replacing it and then having the pilot land in Florida after a phony Mayday call and pretending to be a Cuban defector—you have to scratch your head at the Keystone Kops mentality of the planners, especially since the results of the Bay of Pigs fiasco could not have been more effective in solidifying the Cuban people around Fidel. Here is one of the quotes in the museum that sums up the ethos of the time. It is from Fidel Castro immediately after the ignominious defeat, grammatical warts and all:

That is what they cannot forgive us: That we are there under their noses and that we have made a socialist revolution in their own noses of the United States. And that that socialist revolution we will defend it with those rifles! And that that social revolution we will defend it with the same value which our anti-aircraft gunners yesterday riddled to pieces the aggressors airplanes! Workers and farmers, men and humble women of the homeland, you swear to defend until the last drop of blood this Revolution of the humble ones, by the humble ones and for the humble ones.

Those are the moments that become bookmarks in the history of a country. I can’t help but notice the echo of the American Declaration of Independence—a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Castro certainly knew how to rub it in.

Guard at Museo Girón

I spoke with one of the guards at the museum. She was a chunky woman with short graying hair. She was sitting just inside the entrance. I asked her if she thought this museum was important. Her eyes lit up and she grasped my hand in between hers: “Oh yes,” she said. “It is very important. After this, everything was better.”

I suspect that all this is going to be very soon buried in the annals of what used to be. Raoul Castro has already lifted all restrictions on Cubans wanting to leave the country for whatever reason. It went into effect while I was there, January 14, 2013. Nowadays visits to Cuba are about as easy to arrange as visits to Bhutan.

I could not help but notice that the inaugural poet, Richard Blanco, was born--well, conceived--in Cuba. (I’m surprised the newspapers haven’t picked up on that signal.) And just today (February 12, 2013) in the Boston Globe the editorial was entitled “Cuba’s reforms pave way for new US policy, too”

I certainly hope so. It has been long overdo.

Cuba's Creative Panhanders

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 19:17:00 +0000

I am impressed by the creativity of Cuban panhandlers. On the Calle de Mercaderes, a man in a white T-shirt tells me he is a cigar maker. He has some of the finest cigars I could possibly want. I tell him I don’t smoke. Undeterred, he wants to know where I’m from. When I say Massachusetts, he says he has relatives there. He says he has five little kids at home. He wants me to contribute one peso each to their care and feeding.

Farther up the street, an old man catches my eye. He is a wizened old man with no teeth, sunken cheeks, lips like anchovies, and a ferocious stare that suggests he’s read Coleridge.

“I am a poet,” he declares.

He begins to recite a long poem. Then a shorter one, La Paloma. This is his way of asking for money. I think of the opening lines of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

It is an ancient Mariner,

And he stoppeth one of three.

‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

Excuse me, I say. I have to go. Unlike the wedding guest in the Ancient Mariner, I manage to extricate myself but only physically. This will be the face that comes to mind every time I read the Ancient Mariner.

The most astonishing approach of all occurred when I left the Hotel Saratoga to go to a paladar for dinner. I had just stepped out of the front door when a man of about fifty with a barrel chest, a pushed in fighter’s face, and wearing a yarmulke said, “Are you Jewish?” It was almost as if he had been waiting for me. How did he know? Do I look Jewish? I couldn’t tell a Jew in London if my life depended on it. Yet this guy’s Jew-dar scored a direct hit. I was too startled to counterattack. I told him that I was. I didn’t tell him that I haven’t been to a synagogue for years, that my views on religion are very complicated and that, if we are to see eye to eye, we need to sit down somewhere and discuss it like two sensible adults.

Instead I asked, “Where are you from?”

“Poland,” he said.

“When did you come here?” I asked.

“1980,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

He said business was terrible in Poland. He thought it would be better in Cuba.

“What do you do?” I asked.

“Sell gas,” he answered.

“For cars or for everything?” I asked.

He gestured grandly. I took that to mean everything.

He said—all this is happening in English—that there is a synagogue around the corner and that I needed to come on Sunday. I told him that I wouldn’t be here on Sunday. He didn’t take “no” for answer. Instead, he took the four fingers of his right hand and stuffed them into his mouth. Then, so that he could speak more clearly, he removed them just as quickly. He said he had five small children. He needs money.

This guy I didn’t listen to any longer. I knew that Jews don’t go to synagogue on Sunday. Saturday is the big day. Even so, he does have a yarmulke. Is that his shtick? Could it be that he really isn’t Jewish? He looks Jewish, but what do I know? I think he is Jewish. I also think that this is the first time in my life that I have ever been hit up by a Jewish panhandler.

I came to Cuba for this?

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? (Corinthians 15:55)

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 18:42:00 +0000

I have heard two stories about people dying while they were traveling. By the time I heard them the story tellers had blunted the sting of death and snatched victory away from a waiting grave.

A funeral pyre on Harishgandra Ghat, Varanasi----November 3, 2012.
Photographed from a rowboat in the Ganges River by Nancy D. Kelly

The first death was on a ship headed for Antarctica. The husband had a fatal heart attack when the ship was two days out. The wife, not surprisingly, was hysterical. She wanted the ship to return to port. That was impossible. Too many people had invested too much money. It was a high-end trip. The body had to be preserved until they got back. A practical-minded crew put it in the ship’s freezer. The problem was that the freezer was not all that roomy. The kitchen staff began to complain about not being able to get to the vegetables. Folding the body over like a letter in an envelope did the trick.

At first there was some concern about whether this ungainly solution would be more than the widow could bear. Far from it. Once the initial shock of her husband’s death wore off she did, to everyone's surprise, a 180º turn. A sullen companion before the untimely death of her husband, the widow became the life of the party, doing everything but dance on the captain’s table.

When the ship returned to port, she told the captain that this had been the best trip ever.

The second death was in Africa. A friend of mine, a doctor whom I have known for years, was an eyewitness. The place was a tree house, one of those elaborate hotels built into the tops of trees. Queen Elizabeth visited it with her husband in 1952. While she was there, her father died. People are fond of saying that she went up a princess and came down a queen.

You have to climb a ladder to enter. Once inside, apart from the railroad car feel of the place, it has all the amenities of an excellent hotel. Plus, there is a viewing platform to watch wild animals attracted to a salt lick close by. Each room is equipped with a buzzer. If, for example, a rhino comes to the salt lick in the middle of the night, your buzzer goes off. You may stay in bed or rush to the viewing platform.

Unless, of course, you happen to be like the hapless individual who went to bed one night and died in his sleep. No more buzzers for him. This man was grossly overweight. While he managed to pull himself up into the hotel, it was virtually impossible to maneuver his dead weight (pun intended) back down. The owners hired a backhoe. They sawed a hole in the side of his room and neatly rolled his body into the waiting scoop of the backhoe.

The story doesn't end there. Unlike the widow of the first story, this widow loved her husband. She wanted to fly him back to American for a decent funeral. The problem was the cost. To buy a coffin and load him onto the nearest plane was going to cost $10,000. She loved him, but she was not stupid. She ordered the body cremated and carried him home on her lap: total cost $125.

I recently returned from a trip to India. While in a rowboat on the Ganges, my wife and I happened to pass a funeral pyre. A body was being burned in plain sight on the riverbank as we glided past. That was the nearest I have come to death while traveling.

Close enough.

The Highest and the Lowest

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 21:36:00 +0000

Indian history is straightforward. In the distant beginning there was the Indus Valley Civilization of roughly 3000 BCE that morphed into early, middle and late Harappan lasting from 2500 BCE to 1900 BCE. Then came the Vedic period (roughly 1700 BCE to 500 BCE). This was the period in which the Rig Veda, one of the four canonical texts of Hinduism, was composed. It is a remarkable fact that everything we know about the Harappan culture is archeological—there are no surviving texts—while everything we know about the Vedic period is literary—there are virtually no surviving artifacts.

The next great empire was the Mauryan (322-185 BCE), one of the largest in the world, at the time dwarfing any other on the Indian subcontinent. After the Mauryans we have the Gupta Empire (320-700), the so-called Golden Age of India, the period when the great poet Kalidasa wrote his epics. After the Guptas we have the late classical age (700-1192), a period of great economic growth when India controlled a quarter of the world’s worth. Then the Muslims arrived. The two major Muslim periods were the Sultanate from 1192 to 1526 and the Mughals from 1526 to 1757. Then came the British and then in 1947 independence.

This is just a brief sketch. It leaves out several hundred intervening dynasties in which what's-his-name defeats whozit at the battle of whatchamacallit and whozit doing likewise to what's-his-name's second son and so on and so forth. In the course of all of this every so often someone would pause to raise a monument to whozit. There you have it in a nutshell. Nothing could corroborate better the adage that history is one damned thing after another.

The buildings I saw on a recent trip to India, among them the tomb of Humayun, the Jama Mosque, the Qutb Minar tower, the India Gate, the Red Fort--as it happens all of them in Delhi--are like all such monumental buildings anywhere in the world. They are the bookmarks of history. Sultans, emperors, generals go to war. Soldiers die. Someone builds a monument. We get to see it.

Are there any lessons to be learned from this 4500-year sweep of history aside from the obvious one that war has been the basso ostinato of homo sapiens over which the highest—as well as the lowest—of human achievements have been built? In India among the highest one would certainly have to count the temples at Khajuraho, Mughal architecture, the concept of “zero,” the Kama Sutra and the discovery by Indian astronomers that the earth spun on its own axis. And the lowest? Well, the caste system comes immediately to mind.

Although discrimination by caste is illegal in India, the fact of caste remains the elephant in the room. Every guide I met found an opportunity to assure me that he or she was a Brahmin. Or a Vaishya. No one ever admitted to being a Dalit.

The harshest thing about the caste system is its permanence. Once an untouchable, always an untouchable. In America a poor boy can grow up to be president. In India a poor boy can grow up to be a poor man.

Now that caste is illegal that may change. But the pace to this outsider seems glacial.

To Catch a Fish

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:24:00 +0000

Nancy and I were in the lounge of Etihad airlines at 1am on the morning of November 5, 2012. I was feeling pretty glum. Going home, we were facing 22 hours of travel time ahead of us. Nor had it been lost on me that Eithad, the airlines of the United Arab Emirates (Etihad means ‘united’) is an anagram for I Death.

I struck up a conversation with a man from Bangalore. His name was Sunil. He was a helicopter pilot en route to Lagos, Nigeria where he was going to fly workers to and from an oilrig in the Gulf of Guinea. He has family in Bangalore. He will work for a month, then fly home for a month. The money, he said, was much better in Lagos.

He wanted to know what I thought of India. I told him about the Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen take on it; namely, that India is among the strongest economies in the world and yet at the very bottom in terms of malnourished children (“Putting Growth in Its Place,” Outlook 11/14/2011), even below every country in Africa. While I was talking, an older, elegant looking man who had been sitting to my right moved closer and said, “I couldn’t help overhear your conversation. Do you mind if I join you?”

To Catch a Fish You Need a Net

He told me that he has worked closely with the head of MIT’s Media Lab, Joichi Ito. He handed me his card and said that I was to call him “Jay.” Now was this a meeting made in heaven or what?

Jay told me what Dreze and Sen said about India was undoubtedly true. But the root cause was not cultural barriers like, for example, the caste system and the way in which it inevitably skewed the Indian government’s initiatives away from the social needs of the people. (Of the 315 editors of major newspapers and journals in India none are from the so-called scheduled castes.)

“Imagine you have a lake filled with fish,” Jay said. “If you stick your hand in it, you will not catch a fish. Why? You need a net. India has no net. If the prime minister of one state is charged with corruption, people will not investigate. They will say ‘How can you investigate him and not the prime minister over there who is also corrupt. It isn’t fair to go after one and not the other. In the end nothing happens.”

Jay says that is India’s biggest problem. The government has no workable mechanism to hold people accountable. No wonder corruption goes unchecked.

“You have many problems in America,” he said. “But you have a structure to address them.”

Shortly after I returned home, I read an editorial in the Boston Globe (November 26, 2012). The editorial was about the death of Bal Thackeray, an 86 year-old leader of the right wing Shiva Sena (Army of Lord Shiva) party. According to the editorial, Thackeray was “indicted after the Mumbai riots of 1992-1993, when he reportedly told his men to ensure that every Muslim be sent to Allah’s house. But he was never tried. India’s leaders feared the chaos that would erupt if he were ever jailed.”

I imagine that this was, in part, what Jay was talking about; a country suffering from the trauma of its own divisions but unable to address it through legal channels acceptable to everyone.

I thought it was significant that this conversation took place on the eve of our own presidential election. In any event I came away from the conversation imbued with a renewed respect for federal prosecutors.

The Real McCoffee

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 16:23:00 +0000

Sweet Maria's Clever Coffee Dripper on top of my
favorite coffee cup

I make a good cup of coffee. No! Wait a minute! I make a great cup of coffee. I’m not ashamed to say so. I’m not blowing my own horn. Nor am I blowing my wife, Nancy’s, horn. She taught me. I am blowing my son, Benjamin’s, horn. He’s the one who taught Nancy. I don’t know where he got it from. Maybe, like Athena, it sprang steaming and dark from his own brow.

For those of you interested in coffee, here is what I do. First off, I make sure the beans I use were roasted yesterday, or maybe, in a pinch a day or two before. Fresh roasted is critical. A coffee bar down the street prides itself on its coffee. Let me tell you, it shouldn’t. I asked the barista when the beans were roasted. She said two weeks ago. Amateurs!

They are not alone. I rarely order coffee out. Most American restaurants haven’t a clue how to make good coffee. Or, more cynically and probably truer, they know how but they also know that most of their customers haven’t a clue how good coffee is supposed to taste. How else can you explain the popularity of coffee bar chains whose coffee, on a scale of 1 to 10, would rate, maybe, a generous 5? One of our favorite Cambridge restaurants, a $$$ one, makes coffee that is as bad as their food is good. It is astonishing how bad American-made coffee can be.

Why am I picking on American coffee? My son lives in Madrid. Now there they know how to make coffee. Ditto, Italy. I haven’t been to France for a while. But if you go to India, as I just did, switch to masala tea for the duration. The coffee at the Taj in New Delhi—I stopped in for a taste—is execrable. I suspect they use Nescafe.

Anyway, back to the grind. I measure out 32 grams of fresh-roasted coffee beans. I like Vienna dark roast. You’ll have to find your own taste center. I grind the beans in my indispensible (and expensive) Preciso coffee grinder with the micro-adjuster set about halfway. Properly ground beans are essential. The ground coffee goes into a paper filter that sits inside a gold filter that fits inside a Clever Coffee Dripper that Nancy purchased from Sweet Maria’s in San Francisco. That too is indispensible. If you get one, you’ll see why. Next I pour boiling water into a plastic container that is sitting on a scale. I stop when the scale measures 17 ounces. That exchange from water boiler to plastic container is sufficient to lower the temperature to the proper 200ºF plus or minus 2º. I pour the water over the grounds, set my timer to 4 minutes, stir the mixture, put a plastic lid on top and wait. Four minutes later, I stir again and place the Clever Coffee Dripper over my cup and let it run through.

You can drink it black if you like. I prefer my coffee sugared and light. Here is a final tip. Never use milk. It interacts chemically with the coffee and leaves a slightly bitter taste. Either cream or nothing.

One day my plumber came to the house. I made him a cup of coffee. He came again today. He said his wife refuses to make coffee the way I do. With small kids in the house her life is hard enough, she says.

I can sympathize with that. Each morning I work for my coffee. But when the work is done, the reward is commensurate.

Caveat Viator: Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 17:50:00 +0000

A line from Amazing Grace comes to mind.

I once was lost but now am found.

Although the line refers to the soul of the singer, it could just as well have been sung by Nancy’s passport.

Yesterday, October 11, 2012, I dropped Nancy off at the Tip O’Neill Building in Boston. She had a 4pm appointment to pick up a new passport to replace the one lost at Logan. The plan was then to fly to JFK at 6am the following morning, take a taxi into New York and hope we could replace the India visa by the end of the day. Getting up at 4:45am to make that plane was demoralizing, driving into New York even more so.

That was why, after I dropped Nancy off, I drove around the block, found a parking space in front of Porter’s Bar and Grill and went it. The place was empty, save for a couple at the end of the bar who looked as if they could have been painted there by Edward Hopper. I look a seat next to a beefy guy with a friendly smile who was watching a Cincinnati/San Francisco playoff game.

“Can’t much get interested in baseball,” he said and took a swig of beer.

I ordered a Guinness. It's only 99 calories.

“Me neither,” I said, “I feel as if the Red Sox dissed me last year. Chicken wings and beer in the clubhouse. To hell with them.”

He nodded.

“I’m from Georgia,” he said. “Beautiful country.”

I nodded. “My wife’s from North Carolina.”

Each of us went back into ourselves trying to think where to take the conversation next when my cell phone—I’d left it on the counter—started hopping like spit on a griddle.

Must be Nancy to tell me she’s got her new passport, I thought

“This is the TSA lost and found calling,” said a helpful male voice. “Ms. Kelly’s passport was turned in this morning.”

My cell phone signaled another call. I thanked the TSA person, said I'd get back to him shortly and answered the call. This time it was Nancy.

“That was quicker than I thought,” she said. “You can pick me up. I have the replacement.”

I asked the bartender if he could give me a paper cup for the rest of the Guinness.

“A traveler,” said the beefy guy next to me.

“How could you tell?” I asked astonished.

“I’m talking about taking your drink outside,” he said. “That’s what we call it in Georgia. A traveler.”

“This isn't Georgia,” said the bartender.

“Great name,” I said to the beefy guy.

I didn’t have time to tell him how ironic it was.

Postscript

As near as I can figure out, the passport was lost at 5pm on October 9. Nancy ran back to the checkpoint at 5:45pm. No one had seen it. At 10pm the TSA night shift went off and the so-called morning crew came on. Someone on that shift found it sometime before 6am on October 10. Whoever found it didn’t turn it in until sometime on October 11, the next day. Why, nobody seems to know. That extra day cost us a couple of thousand dollars or roughly the price of 348 Guinness’s at the Porter Bar and Grill.

Caveat viator.

Caveat Viator: Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 01:40:00 +0000

The Marsh Boardwalk at Hunting Island State Park
(from Wikipedia with thanks)

This is about a disaster. My wife’s passport was either lost or stolen. We may never know which. It doesn’t really matter. In either case it is a disaster. Think of this blog as a warning; never ever, ever travel. Or, if you do, understand to the very core of your being that you do so at great risk. Instead of writing this blog, I should be in my own bed pulling the covers over my head, wishing that all this would go away. It will someday.

This is what happened. Yesterday, at Logan Airport, somewhere between the ostentatiously labeled security podium where you have to take off your shoes unless, like me, you are 77 years old, and the Jet Blue gate where they ask for ID, my wife, Nancy, realized that her passport was gone. She had taken it out at security. That was the last she saw of it. Did someone swipe it? Did it drop between the rollers at the security podium? Did it get caught in the X-ray machine? Who knows? In a sane world this would have been at best a minor irritation. But in our world it is a bonanza for the airlines and a disaster for the traveler.

When the passport disappeared, we were embarking on the first leg of our journey to India. Our flight would take us to New York where we would take Qatar Airlines to Doha and then on to Chennai (Madras). A helpful Jet Blue attendant said he would look for our passport and get it on the next flight to us. Thank you, Leonardo.

An hour later Leonardo phones and leaves a message. No sign of the passport. Call Transport Security Administration (hereinafter TSA) lost and found. He leaves a number. I call. A recording says they are open from 8am to 4pm except holidays. It is now 7pm.

Maybe it isn’t a problem. Nancy has a photocopy of the first page of her passport and of her visa for India. We go to Qatar Airlines. The attendant at the counter says no way can Nancy enter Qatar with a photocopy of her passport. She must have the real thing.

Since a replacement passport will take maybe a day, we will miss the flight. Not to worry, says Qatar. Just change the departure date. Can you do that for us? Sorry, she says. You will have to contact the booking agent. He must do it. Not to worry, says Qatar again. There will be no penalties, no extra fees.

The representative at Qatar is very helpful. She tells us that we can get a replacement passport at a post office in Jamaica, NY. Really? It is nearby. She gives us the contact information. We find a hotel close to the post office. We determine to go there in the morning.

By now it is 10pm. Time to call it a day. At 8am the next morning I call the post office. They say there is no way they can help us. They tell us that we need to call the national passport center. We do. That center says that for a replacement passport we will need a birth certificate, an old passport and proof that we intend to leave the country. The first two are back in Boston. Is there no way we can get a replacement without going back to Boston? Yes, says the national passport center, but it will cost $395 and no telling how long it may take.

We’ll think about it, I say. I call TSA lost and found. Maybe they have found the passport and all our problems will be solved. By now it is 8:20am. TSA lost and found will have been open for 20 minutes. I call. The recording reminds me once again that office hours are 8am to 4pm. It says the same thing at 8:30am, 9am, 10am, 11am and noon. I am invited to leave a message. I do, but my heart isn't in it.

A TSA representative at JFK offers that lost passports are normally handed over to the airlines. Great! Maybe Jet Blue has it. We call their administration number. A recording tells me that we can dial an extension at any time. We don’t have an extension. Frantic to talk to a human being, I start punching random numbers. The recording assures me that none of those numbers are recognizable.

Maybe someone found the passport and turned it into the Massport lost and found. Online we find a number. A recording asks us to leave our name and number. If one didn’t know better, one would think that all these organizations were conspiring to keep their customers and themselves from talking to one another.

We decide we have no choice but to return to Boston, gather the necessary bits and pieces of information and get a replacement. Just before take-off at 1pm my cell phone rings. Someone at TSA has gotten my message. She is returning my call. Hallelujah! They've found it, I think. No passport, says the TSA lady. The stewardess tells me to turn off my cell phone. When we arrive back at Logan, we check the TSA security podium and the Massport and Jet Blue lost and founds. Nothing.

We hear from Qatar Airlines. We spent an hour talking to them the night before when we tried unsuccessfully to board. That was when they recommended the post office. They also said that because we were trying to board, we would definitely not be labeled no-shows. This afternoon back in Boston I get an e-mail. Qatar has declared us no-shows. A line pops into my head: United breaks guitars. Qatar breaks promises.

In Boston the passport people tell us they will deliver an emergency replacement if we can show that we have reservations to travel. We can get those reservations only if we have an Indian visa. However, the Indian visa company says that a visa cannot be issued unless we have a passport. If this seems like a Catch-22, then clearly you know how to count.

Have you ever been on one of those nature hikes where local environmentalists have built a path over an endangered marshland? There is a picture of one at the top of this blog. That is how I see travel. As long as I stay on the boardwalk, I'm fine. But step off it and I'm up to here in muck.

Remember the admonition: caveat emptor ‘buyer beware?' Here is my update: caveat viator ‘traveler beware.’

Thanne Longen Folk to Goon on Pilgrimages

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 17:41:00 +0000

St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers

The Canterbury Tales is one of English literature's greatest shrines. I use the word deliberately. Medievalists and their students journey to it just as surely as the pilgrims in the tales themselves journey toward Canterbury. It is a long, rough slog. You have to have mastered Middle English to approach the gates and then there are the tales themselves to master. Here is how the Tales begin:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every vein in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

When Zephirus eek with his swete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heath

The tender croppes, and the young sonne

Hath in the Ram halfe his cours yronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open ye

(So priketh him Nature in hir corages);

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

The original is in iambic pentameter, but since I'm only concerned with the meaning, I'll give you a prose version:

When April with its sweet showers has pierced to the root the drought of March and bathed every vein in a liquid whose magic brings forth the flower; when likewise Zephyrus with his sweet breath has brought to life every wood and heath with tender shoots and the young sun has run half its course under the sign of the Ram and small birds that sleep at night with eyes open sing (So does Nature goad them into these wild ways), then common folk yearn to go on pilgrimages.

My mind turned to the Canterbury Tales because Nancy is about to leave on a month-long trip to India for no other reason than she wants to. I am about to follow her. In Chaucer’s day one didn’t travel for such frivolous reasons. One traveled to enlist St. Ronan or St. Giles to help in curing your carbuncles. Nowadays, one needn't be sick to travel. Quite the contrary, one gets sick because one travels.

In ancient times—and, indeed, it is still so in many countries—the pilgrimage was the poor man's sacrifice. The Mahabharata, one of ancient India’s major epics, makes that abundantly clear when its author, Vyasa, declares:

This is the secret of the sages, O King: the holy practice of pilgrimage [tirthayatra] excels even the sacrifice.

Vyasa's point was that one can easily give gold or jewels to assuage a god’s need for adoration if one is a king. But what is a poor man to do? The answer: go on a pilgrimage.

Salmon Rushdie wrote that a migration was a crisis in the making, a time of painful redefinition. Each immigrant was about to “tear down the old” in search of the new. Rushdie’s rumination—the thought around which Satanic Verses crystallized—brings out a modern difference between immigrations and pilgrimages. Nowadays the former are escapes; the latter, merely escapades.

The modern world has produced a new kind of pilgrim; perhaps the dominant kind, though I have no numbers to back that up. I am thinking, of course, of the “tourist,” the one who goes on a pilgrimage just to, well, go. There is no pact with St. Bernadette to cure scoliosis; no sacrificial "thank you" for her having done so.

I know what was in the for the immigrant. I thank my parents for that. I know what was in it for the pilgrim. I thank Chaucer for that.

But why do tourists put themselves through long lines, disrobing searches, ridiculous regulations that screen for three plus inches of gel, delayed departures, long layovers, lost luggage, microbe laden lounges, recirculating cabin viruses, suspect water supplies, suspicious vegetable salads, painful shots, cramped seats behind fellow passengers who refuse to raise their back rest even an inch, overbooking, undercooking, marathon hikes to connecting flights, unavoidable arrivals at the height of rush hour?

Beats me.

Bullet Holes

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 21:05:00 +0000

When I travel, I have been struck by the number of times I have come upon buildings with bullet holes in them. You can see them in a wall opposite the House of Parliament in Budapest. You can see them in the façade of the Czech National Museum in Wenscelas Square in Prague. You can see them in church walls and on the sidewalks of Dubrovnik.

The bullet holes in the wall opposite the House of Parliament are there as reminders of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising by the people of Hungary against their Soviet backed government. At first the Soviets were tempted to acquiesce to a change in government. Then they changed their minds and invaded Budapest. Several thousand were killed, Hungarian citizens and Soviet soldiers.

Bullet holes in facade of Czech National Museum in
Wenscelas Square, Prague

The bullet holes in the Czech National Museum were put there in 1968, again by the Soviets who invaded Prague to put a stop to the political liberalization that we know as the Prague Spring. While the bullet holes in Budapest are deliberate reminders of the 1956 Uprising—they are actually spheres embedded in the wall—the bullet holes in the façade of the Czech National Museum are there because no attempt was made to match the color of the original sandstone when the holes were repaired. I don’t know it for a fact but I suspect this failure was not accidental.

The bullet holes in the pavement of the sidewalk in Dubrovnik, the Stradun, were caused when on the 6^th of December 1991 Slobodan Milosevic and his Yugoslav People’s Army shelled half the houses of the town and a significant number of its monuments in an attempt to build a greater Serbia. When you walk through Dubrovnik today, you see small craters in the marble cobbles of the Placa Stradun. They were put there by mortar fire. You pass pitted walls of nearby churches. The telltale pockmarks of machine gun fire are still there 21 years later.

I am led to think about these bullet holes because of events here at home in the past month. On July 21, 2012 12 people were shot and killed by a gunman at the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. On August 5, 2012 a gunman opened fire on a Sikh Temple in Milwaukee, Wisconsin killing six worshippers before killing himself. In New York City on Friday, August 24, 2012 one man was shot to death outside the Empire State Building and nine were subsequently injured in a gun battle between police and the shooter that took the life of the gunman.

Will the bullet holes left after the gun battle in New York be allowed to remain as a reminder of the killings? What about the Century 16 theater? City officials in Aurora are currently asking the people of the town their views on what should be done with it. The owners of the theater will make the final determination.

In Columbine, Colorado the library where 10 students were killed in 1999 was replaced by an atrium. The building where 32 people were killed and 17 wounded at Virginia Tech University in 2007 was re-opened. There is a memorial to the dead and a bench to the survivors nearby.

As important as memorials are, they are, in the end, abstractions. I think those who are thinking about how to remember their dead might keep in mind the bullet holes of Prague, Budapest and Dubrovnik. These are about as un-abstract as you can get.

Perhaps a display of the firearms used at each of the killing locations might do it.

The Man Who Loved Venice

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 20:21:00 +0000

Fifteen years ago Nancy and I visited Venice. We stayed at the Pensione Seguso on the Zaterre in a sestiere of Venice called the Dorsoduro. Dorsoduro literally means “hard backbone.” It is probably a folk-etymological distortion of osso duro ‘hard bone,’ a reference to the soil. This part of Venice is less swampy. The terra is firmer, as it were. Here compacted clay lies beneath the swamp Venice was built on in the 5th century when the Venetians-to-be took refuge from the marauding Goths.

Santa Maria della Salute by Claude Monet (1908)

Just a few minutes walk from the pensione was Santa Marie della Salute, a church built to thank God for ending the bubonic plague of 1630. The plague took 100,000 Venetians, over half the island's population, Titian among them. The architect, Baldassare Longhena, designed a massive stone structure whose bulk by rights ought to have submerged the entire island. Of course, it didn’t. His first step was to sink a million pilings through the swampy ground into the compacted clay beneath, into the dorsoduro. Longhena never saw his masterpiece to its completion. He died in 1682 at the age of 84, five years before the church was finished.

Our bedroom in the pensione was on the fifth floor in a corner of the building. We could see the canal beside us out of one of the windows. If you leaned way out, you could see the Chiesa del Santissimo Redentore across the Giudecca canal. I remember the curtains you had to part to gain the view. They were heavy and purple. They reminded me of the line from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven: “And the silken, sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain.”

Chiesa del Santissimo Redentore

Breakfast in Pensione Seguso consisted of coffee, crackers and little squares of bel paese in aluminum wrappers. Dinner was more extravagant but for that you paid extra. It didn’t matter, those extra dollars. The food was execrable. The location, however, was great. The pensione was bookended by Santa Maria on one side and John Ruskin on the other. He had lived next door while writing The Stones of Venice. The stage was set for something remarkable.

What was remarkable happened in the person of a lodger, an elegant old man in his late eighties. We met him on our second evening in the dining room. He was dressed for dinner despite the slightly down in the mouth feel of the room, to say nothing of the food. He wore a trim blue blazer, an ascot and carried a cane. His gold-grey hair was long and overran the collar at the back. He was alone as, indeed, he had been whenever we saw him. He had been coming to the pensione for years.

“How long will you stay?” I asked.

“Half a year,” he said, maybe longer.

It was the maybe longer that made me look at him twice. Despite his elegance he was showing his years. He looked tired, maybe worse. I was curious. But there are conversational boundaries, even for strangers.

He told us that he was a Shakespearean actor, that he had appeared in a number of films and stage plays, that he had children who lived in Great Britain but that he was essentially here on his own.

When I asked him why, he merely said, “I love Venice.”

Both Nancy and I had the same reaction to him, an old man of considerable style who ought not be spending nights talking to strangers he will never see again. There was something very sad about him and it was that sadness that I think kept us from trying to know him any better than a good morning or a good evening. Instead, we thought, though we never said so aloud, that he might very well die in Venice, alone, estranged if only by distance, from his family, his homeland, his memorabilia. Here was Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice in the flesh.

Recently, two of my friends have lost their wives. In both instances the wives were seriously maimed, either by a deep dementia or a crippling disease that made life cost more than it was worth. When news of their deaths came, I was relieved. Soon enough I realized that I was the only one who was relieved. In each case the widower, the one who bore the sadness of watching his wife die, now bore the sadness of not having a partner to look after even in sickness.

These recent deaths have brought back to me the memory of that old man in Venice, the one in the Pensione Seguso. I realize now that while I was sad, he wasn’t. I think I know why. He would never be bereaved because his partner would never die. I’m thinking, of course, of Venice.

A Heart Rending Coincidence

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 19:40:00 +0000

Travel engenders remarkable things for its travelers. One of the most remarkable is the coincidence. I have already written about one in this blog. You can link to it here.

Today I would like to write about a different kind of coincidence. Nancy and I had gone to Prague on the 17^th of June of this year. We visited the six synagogues administered by the Jewish Museum of Prague. Each synagogue is a kind of exhibit telling about the history of the Jews before, during and after the Nazi occupation. One of the most heart-rending of those visits was to the Pinkas Synagogue. It contained an exhibition of drawings made by children who were imprisoned in Theresienstadt concentration camp between 1942 and 1944. The camp was located 30 miles northwest of Prague. Frield Dicker-Brandeis, one of the prisoners and an artist in her own right, had organized drawing classes for the children as a clandestine educational program. The program lasted for two years. Just before she was deported to Auschwitz along with the children of Theresienstadt, she managed to stuff 4500 of the drawings into a suitcase and hide it. After the war the suitcase was discovered and given to the Jewish Museum.

When you visit the exhibition, the legends underneath tell you which ones of the child artists died and which survived. The vast majority died. They were deported to Auschwitz along with their teacher, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, where they were killed.

Drawing by Eva Wollsteinerova-born January 24, 1931. Killed November 23, 1944. Terezin Jewish Museum

Almost a month to the day later, Nancy and I went to a gathering of Yale graduates at the Cambridge Tennis Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a barbeque for old and new alumni. We had a book party to go to earlier in the afternoon just around the corner. We decided to drop in on the Yale gathering. The clubhouse was packed. There was no place to sit. We took our food outside to an empty courtside table well beyond mingling distance, glad to have a seat far from the madding crowd. A young man and an older man, obviously his father, were playing tennis. Sitting on a bench reading a book and occasionally looking up to watch was a woman. At one point I said to the woman, “If you’d like someone to talk to while they’re playing, please join us.” She did.

We introduced ourselves. Her name was Julie Baer. It turned out that she was a teacher and an artist. She gave us her website address and invited us to visit it to see her work. The next day I did just that. The address led me to a series of pictures she had drawn of children.

Girl in the Woods, 2004, 47 1/2" x 36", oil and acrylic on wood panel

I wrote to tell her that the parents of those children must have been very pleased at the results of her work because they were so good. She wrote back that perhaps I hadn’t realized that these were portraits of children who had been imprisoned in death camps throughout Europe, including Theresienstadt. It was as if I had been hit with a hammer. I felt as if I were looking into the faces of the children whose drawings I had seen just weeks before.

Travel broadens in unexpected ways.

What the F***!

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 20:33:00 +0000

Empty coat rack in a Ruzyne Airport lounge

I was sitting in an airport lounge in Terminal 2 of Prague's Ruzyne Airport when this coat rack caught my eye. It was the second hanger from the left that did it. I identified with that coat hanger, it pointing one way while all its companions pointed in another.

That is pretty much how I feel when I'm traveling. It seems to me as if everyone is going in the wrong direction. Why, for example, are so many people wearing clothes with messages? In Prague’s Old Town Square I saw a girl wearing a T-shirt that said, "I like it like that?" What does that mean? What does she like? And how does she like it? I dislike being engaged in these one-way conversations. If I want to read something, I don’t go for a walk. Nowadays you can't set foot anywhere without being forced to read what people are wearing.

I saw a kid in the same square wearing a T-shirt that said "What the Fuck?" What the f*** was that about? What was on his mind? And why isn't he keeping it to himself instead of involving me in his angst. Maybe that’s the point. To involve me.

I saw someone else wearing a T-shirt that said, "Thank you." Much easier to take, though I couldn't help wondering "For what?"

There was a soccer game last night. I think the Czech Republic lost. This morning my daughter came back from coffee to announce that she had passed a young man sitting on a corner wearing a big, floppy Mexican style hat.

"So what?" I asked.

"That was all he was wearing," she said. "He was stark naked."

Well, I thought, at least he wasn't sending us all printed messages.

We rented an apartment in the Jewish Quarter of Prague. I met the woman who lives above us on the stairs. Her name is Fletcher. She oversaw the refurbishment of the building. She lives in Prague permanently. She lived in Russia before that. I asked her what she liked about Prague.

"It’s Bohemian," she said.

"What does that mean?" I asked her.

"Relaxed," she said.

I can easily see that. Apparently the cops didn't arrest the naked reveler. They simply told him to put his clothes on.

Standing in Old Town Square two days ago, I waited for the clock tower to strike 6pm. I wasn't alone. About five hundred people were there with me. We were waiting to see the parade of the apostles through two windows above the clock. They ride by, turn just as they get to the opening to look down on the crowd below and then motor on out of the frame. I was standing next to a young woman from Bangkok who was showing me the photographs she'd taken on her iPad. A young man came up next to her. She introduced him to me as her tour guide. He said that he had just come from Phuket.

I told him that I had been to Phuket and that I had seen the "girly boys," boys who dress up like women. I told him that in my opinion the most beautiful women in the world were the girly boys from Phuket.

He looked uneasy.

"That's not my style," he said with a gesture resembling putting his finger in his collar to let the heat out.

I guess he hadn't gotten the message that Prague was relaxed.

Judgment Day

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 01:03:00 +0000

This morning I flew from Madrid to Prague. As it happened, I got to the gate early. Being first in line, I noticed a large brown bundle in the doorway that led to the plane. It looked like a tarpaulin left by a worker. Then the tarpaulin moved. It moved again. I was startled. I got the attention of the ticket taker. He glanced over his shoulder in the direction I was pointing, saw the bundle move, walked over and shook it.

From the deep brown folds a figure emerged, a sturdy heavyset woman in a red dress. She had a bandana around her head. The ticket taker indicated that she couldn't sleep in the doorway because people would soon be passing through.

She gathered up what turned out to be an ample brown shawl. With her free hand she took hold of her shoes and, barefooted, moved to a ticket counter about five feet away. The space underneath it was unobstructed. Like a bear in a cave, she lay down under the desk, pulled her brown shawl around her and went back to sleep.

I asked the ticket taker if the woman was waiting for a flight. He nodded. I was struck by the fact that her sleeping under a ticket counter was not a problem for him. As best as I could make out with my halting Spanish, he said that Terminal 4 was an international airport, that people from all over the world came through and that, all in all, he prefers to live and let live.

There was a lot to like about this incident. I liked its unexpectedness, an undulating, amorphous bundle in an airport doorway and its transformation into a hefty Venus rising up out of the folds. I liked the flowing transition of the woman from the space in the doorway to the space under the desk. I imagined that both spaces provided her with a corner and hence an enclosure and hence some sense of snug security while she slept. Three minutes, probably less, had passed between the time she got up and the time she was asleep again in her new space.

But what I liked most about the incident was the total absence of judgment on the part of the ticket taker. That, I thought, was worth a blog.

I went over to the place where the woman was sleeping and took a photograph with my iPhone. (My son advised me when I first started blogging that photographic accompaniment was an absolute necessity.)

No sooner had I taken the picture when a young man sitting nearby said, "You are being disrespectful to her."

"How could I?" I replied. "She is sound asleep."

"You should ask her permission before you take her picture," said the young man.

"If I do that, I will wake her up. I am not being disrespectful. I am being considerate."

"It doesn't matter," he insisted. "You should not take her picture without her permission. It is disrespectful."

"But her back is turned to the camera. She is wrapped in a shawl. It is impossible to see her face. She is completely unrecognizable."

The ticket counter

"It is disrespectful," he repeated in the same stern tone of voice.

So my blog turns out not to be about withholding judgment after all. It is about being judged.

So much for live and let live.

Was I disrespectful? I am not sure. If it were true that our images unequivocally belong to us, then certainly I was. But that would mean that every airport surveillance camera is disrespectful of every person it images. Ditto your neighborhood ATM, or supermarket. It is hard to say "yes" to that, at least, for me it is.

What is different about my picture taking? My guess is that it comes down to what I intended to do with the image. So here it is.

You be the judge.

The Mosque of Hassan II

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 21:42:00 +0000

View of Hassan II Mosque from the outdoor plaza.

The Mosque of Hassan II in Casablanca, Morocco is one of the world's largest. Inside it accommodates 25,000 worshippers. Add to that 80,000 in its enormous plaza and you have a religious structure capable of processing 105,000 believers at a go. The dimensions are gargantuan. The minaret is as high as the prayer hall is long, 200 meters. The mosque is half as wide as it is long, 100 meters. It sends a laser beam 18.5 miles in the direction of Mecca. Notre Dame or St. Peters would fit comfortably inside, though Ankhor Wat dwarfs all three. I suppose churches are like sailboats. No matter how big yours is, there is always one bigger. Maybe not. Saudi Arabia’s Al-Masjid an-Nabawi can accommodate a million worshippers!

Two painted cedar mezzanines capable of holding 5,000 women hang over either side of the prayer hall floor. Here, behind carved screens, the women are hidden from the sight of the men because they would otherwise be a distraction. Apparently, the relationship is asymmetric. The stairway to the women’s mezzanine is, in fact, an escalator, a consolation prize for not being able to mingle with the men.

Prayer Hall of Hassan II Mosque

The building is the kind of place that causes one to think in statistical terms. The building rests on two hundred pillars, each 60 meters deep. The roof weighs 1100 tons. It opens with the aid of electric motors. The King's door through which the king enters once a year weighs 65 tons and has to be opened, like the roof, with the help of motors. The chandeliers weigh 10 tons, except for the biggest of them all. It is twice as heavy. To either side of the sconces on the walls are stucco columns and artfully hidden in the bases of these columns are 36 speakers. So it goes.

The motif of the church is a verse from the Koran which says, in effect, that all life comes from water. Two thirds of the mosque's foundation straddles water. Beneath the main floor one can look down into an enormous ablution room, this one for males. Women, of course, have separate facilities. The ablution room is intended for ritual cleansing, of the mouth, the nose, the face, the hair, three times with fresh water before prayer.

Communal Bath for Men

The columns in the ablution room are made of a combination of sand, limestone, clay, black soap and egg yolk. The amalgam is very porous and absorbs the humidity produced by the cleansing fountains.

Perhaps the most remarkable statistic of all is that this mosque, opened first in 1993, took only 7 years to build and was the work of 6,000 Moroccan carvers, zellij (tile) designers and mosaic makers. Equally surprising is that the architect was not a Moroccan but a Frenchman, Michelle Pinseau.

It has often been remarked that belief in God and therefore the need for God's houses is a universal. Some have even taken this to be an argument in favor of the existence of God. Why would every society end up with God if there weren't something to it? I have a different view. What is universal is poverty. There is always an enormous difference between the haves and the have-nots. The way in which the former control the latter is to provide the have-nots with a place where they can be wealthy, if only for a few hours.

The Warriors with Feet of Clay

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 00:08:00 +0000

Mr. Yang, one of the discoverers of the Qin Shi Huang
mausoleum, standing between Nancy and me.

One of the most spectacular archeological finds of the 20^th century was that of the terracotta warriors outside the city of Xi’an in Shaanxi Province, China. I have been there and have brought back with me a picture book of the exhibit suitable for coffee tables. That isn’t what is special about the picture book. The book is signed, not by the author, but by Mr. Yang, one of the farmers who in 1974 stumbled upon the burial site of the 6,000 warriors while drilling for water. He lowered a bucket into the hole he had made and pulled up, not water, but a warrior. Well, part of a warrior.

It is quite something to see that wizened old farmer sitting at a desk in the gift shop outside Pit 1 where a lion’s share of the find is being put together. His signature is quite beautiful. To my unpracticed eye it looks like the work of a fine calligrapher and not that of a leather-skinned old farmer who put this part of China on the world map. He is employed by the government to sign those books. I am delighted that luck enabled him to leave off the back breaking work of family farming for calligraphy. His fate is the Chinese version of Powerball.

(The flotsam and jetsam of a Google search may have illuminated the back story of Mr. Yang and his fellow farmers. Here is a link that provides an astonishing account of how Nancy and I came to be standing to either side of him. I hope it is true. Another far more dismal account of the fate of the discoverers of the terracotta warriors can be found here. I hope it isn't true.)

A picture is worth a thousand words. I had that in mind when I wrote this blog. I took a Sony camera with me when I visited the warrior site. Instead of writing about it I made this video.

Machu Picchu and Wallace Stevens

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Fri, 18 May 2012 22:12:00 +0000

On November 28, 2011 I wrote a blog about Machu Picchu. You can see it here. I mentioned in that blog that the ruin reminded me of a poem by Wallace Stevens called Anecdote of the Jar. It is a strange poem and I have written about it elsewhere and, alas, a long time ago (“Form and Meaning in Four Poems, College English, Vol. 37, No. 6, Feb. 1976).

In the earlier blog I provided the text of the poem. Since then, I found a video I made of the ruin when I was there in October of 2011. I thought I’d post the video for you complete with music and me reading the poem. It is a short thing and won’t overly try your patience.

Truth in advertising: the music is from the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra’s CD, Aardvark Speaks Out. I play in that orchestra and am delighted to be able to advertise the CD to you. The music appears with permission of the Aardmuse Publishing Co. The name of the piece is Gil and the flute player is Peter Bloom, one of the finest reed players in the business who, in a previous life, must have been an Inca.

Roy Harvey Pearce, a distinguished literary critic, once offered the opinion that the inspiration for Stevens' Anecdote of the Jar was an actual jar:

‘ … I think it worth noting that Stevens as he wrote the poem must have had in mind a specific fruit jar, the "Dominion Wide Mouth Special."… Although manufactured in Canada, the jar has been widely distributed in the United States from 1913 to the present, The exemplar photographed dates ca. 1918; Stevens was in fact traveling in Tennessee in April and May 1918. … As a "wide mouth special," the jar is particularly notable, of its kind, as "tall and of a port in air." And its glass, compared to that of other fruit jars, is especially "gray and bare." Whether in Tennessee in 1918 fruit jars were used as containers for "moonshine," I have not been able to establish definitively. Surely, granting Stevens’ penchant for "moon" and "shine," the matter is worth investigating.

From Roy Harvey Pearce, "’Anecdote of the Jar’": An Iconological Note," The Wallace Stevens Journal 1:2 (Summer 1977), 65.

I prefer Machu Picchu.

This Joke's on Me

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 18:47:00 +0000

When Lisbeth Salander is 70 years old, she goes to a doctor for her annual checkup. The doctor says, “You’re in good shape, but your tattoo’s draggin’.”

(Rim shot)

I made this joke up. Maybe you didn’t have to be told that. It is not a very good joke, but it is my own. If I had a joke meter attached to this blog, I’d be curious to know how many of you find it funny. On second thought…

I have long wondered who makes up the jokes that our friends tell us under the rubric, “Have you heard this one?”

Challenger seconds after it blew up

Remember when the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up back in January, 1986? Within one day this joke sloshed across the country like a wave in a bathtub.

Setup. NASA changed its official soft drink to Coca Cola.

Q. Why?

A. It couldn’t get 7-up.

I remember being amazed at the speed with which that dark joke made its way around the 3,794,083 square miles of the United States. It was internet speed at a time when the internet was not in the game.

Why so fast? Was the joke spontaneously thought up by thousands of people all at the same time? Unlikely. The fact is that it is a “good” joke in the sense that it works, and good jokes, like good news, travel fast. But who started it? And where?

I have made a lot of jokes in my day, but these have been quips that came to mind during a conversation. For example, a friend was recently comparing the U.S. Congress to a bunch of Neanderthals.

I said, “You’re giving Neanderthals a bad name.”

The Neanderthal joke is really a crack. It is very context dependent. You had to be there to enjoy it. Cracks are written on water. NASA jokes are written on 3 x 5 cards.

For a joke to be more than a crack its context has to be obvious like mother-in-law jokes, or bad marriage jokes like Henny Youngman’s, Take my wife…please.

That is too bad in a way because some cracks are really memorable. I remember once being on safari in Tanzania. For some reason the long drives from one campsite to another engender a pun mania among the passengers in one’s land cruiser. I heard one of the best one liner cracks I’ve ever heard in a land cruiser. Margot Jones made it.

She said, “Anyone who thinks that a Cape Buffalo is harmless is an oxymoron.”

Now that deserves to be heard around the country in one day flat. It never will be. Which brings me to my final point.

There is an Academy Award for Best Film. There ought to be an Academy Award for Best Joke. I can see categories like:

Best Joke on a 3 x 5 card.

Best crack.

Best pun.

Best comeback.

Here is my candidate for best comeback. It comes from Algonquin Round Table lore. The Round Table—they dubbed themselves the “Vicious Circle”—met in New York City’s Algonquin Hotel for lunch for ten years between 1919 and 1929 where they traded jokes, puns and cracks that, through their various newspaper and radio outlets, sloshed around the country.

One of the Round Tablers comes into the lunchroom and runs his hand over the bald pate of one of the members already seated.

He says, “Hmm. That’s as smooth as my wife’s bottom.”

Without missing a beat the bald-headed member runs his own hand over his own scalp and replies, “You know. You are absolutely right.”

They don’t make comebacks like that anymore.

No Wonder They Want to Go to Cuenca

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 22:48:00 +0000

In my previous blog I mentioned that Cuenca, Ecuador was the home of 700 American ex-pats and probably twice that number now. I didn’t give a good reason why. Let me try.

On the morning of October 30, 2011 Nancy and I came out of our hotel just after breakfast to find crowds of people all walking in the same direction. At the corner we asked a man what was going on. He said it was Independence Day. The parade was about to begin.

“Will we be able to watch from here?” I asked.

“The best place is the park four blocks up,” he said. "You can sit down.”

As promised, we found a section of plastic beige folding chairs neatly arranged beneath a large white tent, perfect shelter from what promised to be a very hot, sunny day. A yellow ribbon marked off the area. I ducked under the ribbon, found a good seat and settled in. Nancy was happy as a clam at high tide. Now she could go off without wondering what to do about me. I was equally happy. I wouldn’t have to tag along waiting impatiently for her to take one more photograph before stopping for coffee.

The parade started. First, came the inevitable motorcycle cops followed by a police car; then a line of antique cars and trucks. In the first was Ms. Cuenca, a tall slender woman who sat on the seat back of a spiffy silver Bugatti Racing Car, circa 1935, maybe earlier; then a two-toned Buick, same vintage, silver and copper, with white walls. They were beautifully maintained. The colors were vibrant, the motors purring. Every vehicle carried a notable. As the parade went by I wondered why the two rows in front of me were empty. Then I understood. The next contingent of marchers stopped to disgorge a phalanx of dignitaries. They streamed out of the parade and instantaneously filled up the empty seats as if they couldn't wait to get out of the heat. There was a uniformed officer with lots of ribbons on his chest.

Another uniformed officer sat in front of me. I took him to be the chief of police. A young woman dressed in a simple blouse and jeans sat between the general and the police chief. She was the focus of attention. Whenever a parading group stopped with someone holding a baby, the baby was presented to this woman. She swooped it up and kissed it vigorously on its fat apple cheeks. She must be the mayor’s wife, I thought.

I settled in for the long haul. It was a cushy setup. Here I was under a tent, protected from the sun sitting just three rows back from the paraders and enjoying the spectacle when a uniformed policeman came up to me.

“You’ll have to leave,” he said. “This section is reserved for dignitaries.”

I was startled.

“I’m sorry,” I replied. “I didn’t realize.”

I started to get up to go when a voice from several rows behind me said, “Let him stay. What’s the harm?”

The policeman looked at the person who had spoken up on my behalf and started to reply when another policeman, this one with a fancier jacket and two rows of ribbons came over.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

The first officer explained.

The newcomer shook his head and then turned toward me.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Stay where you are. Enjoy Cuenca’s Independence Day.”

No wonder Americans want to come here.

A Two Way Street

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:47:00 +0000

I was prompted to write this blog because of an hour-long radio program I heard this morning about immigration into the United States from the Americas. According to at least one commentator, the numbers were falling. An article in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/world/americas/migrants-new-paths-reshaping-latin-america.html?pagewanted=all) backed him up: “The United States is simply not the magnet it once was.” Nancy and I had an encounter in the Quayaquil airport that made me wonder if the New York Times statement doesn’t work both ways. That is, the U.S. is ceasing to be a magnet for a growing number of its own citizens.

I don’t remember how the conversation started, but such conversations always start up easily outside an airline gate. The woman had been traveling all day. We told her that we were on our way back home after three weeks in Peru and Ecuador.

“Where are you going?” Nancy asked.

“Cuenca.”

“We just came from there,” Nancy responded excitedly. “You’ll love it.”

“I know,” the woman said. “I’m moving there.”

“Where from?”

“L.A.” she said.

To hear that someone was actually moving to Cuenca---from L.A.no less---surprised us.

She was a practical nurse. She had been working in Los Angeles for several years. Recently it was getting harder and harder for her to make ends meet. Two years ago she started searching the internet for the best city in the world to migrate to. After two years, she came up with Cuenca. Here she was on the verge of expatriation.

“What was so attractive about Cuenca?” I asked.

“I can live much better on my retirement than I can in L.A.” she said.

“But won’t you miss your friends in the U.S?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m not the first,” she laughed.

Later I checked online. According to one article there were over 700 Americans in Cuenca. There is even a web site for expatriates living there.

Perhaps it is not so surprising after all. Practically everyone I spoke to in Cuenca would, after a few minutes, tell me a story about a relative who was now living in the United States. According to Sylvia, our Cuenca guide, emigration is a major event in the lives of a great number of Ecuadorians, to the point of breaking up families. She said that the Ecuadorian population of New York City is 1,000,000 (Wikipedia says 695,500.)

As if to underscore Sylvia's observation, a waiter at our hotel, the Santa Lucia, told us that his mother was coming back to Ecuador—she is being deported—after living and working in the U.S. for 17 years. He said when he was ten years old, she told him and his 12 year old brother that she was leaving to make money. The two boys were left to fend for themselves while their mother, pregnant at the time—though they didn't know it—went to New York to find work. Now she was coming home again. The waiter visited his mother in New York a few months back. That was when he discovered he had a half-sister. She is sixteen years old, born in America and doesn't want to leave home for some foreign country like Ecuador. This is the kind of complication that emigration has imposed on the country that has given us, among other things, the Panama hat and Christina Aguilera.

Now, apparently, the people highway connecting Ecuador and the U.S. is becoming a two-way thoroughfare.

When times change, people are incredibly adroit at finding ways to change with them.