Samhain

They cannot abide the fires we raise
birds, trees, insects, worms, mice –

our joys do not quicken the earth; love, praise,
rise to the skies, colour crops, make meat taste
less like slaughtered trust. 

Fires mark appeasements to fate, 
we say, as we bargain for better futures
with the Potentialities, 

hoping to erase failure altogether.

Commander in Chief

At last, a hard-hitting repost.

Now, where’s that one about Boris Johnson?

A Bintel Brief, by Liana Finck

A Bintel Brief, by Liana Finck. Published by Harper Collins Books, 2014.
$17.99 paperback. ISBN 978-0-06-229161-5.

Liana Finck is a cartoonist and illustrator. She published A Bintel Brief as an illustrated book, in 2014.

What does the phrase mean? It is Yiddish for ‘a collection of letters.’ A Bintel Brief, the book as we have it here, is in fact a taster, an introduction to the earlier and more complete publication of the collection of letters that were originally published in the Yiddish newspaper Der Forverts/The Forward, from 1906 onwards.

Liana Finck’s book is subtitled Love and Longing in Old New York. The newspaper the letters are taken from was the main Yiddish newspaper for the European diaspora of Jewish and others from Europe at the turn of the 20thCentury. The letters are an important part of the history of New York.
There are many current books exploring the periods of early 20th Century New York. This is an important addition.

Liana Finck’s book also plays with perspectives.
She frames her book with the illustrated story of her relationship with the letter-page creator, editor of the newspaper, Abraham Cahan. It opens with the discovery of a notebook of newspaper clippings in Yiddish, which she could not read, at her grandparents’s house. She was later sent the notebook.
Abraham Cahan rises into her modern world from the letters; he tries on new clothes’ styles.
Which is he, now?

We read here the questioning of what the letters could mean to our modern sensibilities.
She gives six letters from the collection.
Read and discover.

The Watch, for example – this is the door-opener.
A poor Jewish family in a run-down apartment block in 1900s New York. They scrimp and save, go without, in order to buy… a watch. A watch? ‘From now on,’ the mother says, we will not starve again. We will have something to pawn to buy food, when the times are hard.’

And then the watch goes missing.  She swears, she writes in her letter, she can hear it ticking in her neighbour’s room. But they are worse off than they are. They had no watch to pawn.
What should she do?

In a way the answer Abraham Cahan gives does not matter, what matters is the humanity of the woman: they are worse off… what should she do ie that does not leave them even more worse off?
That is what we get from the letters: the humanity of people.

Liana Fink suggests we go to the collected letters and read and read. 
Here, humanity is wide open to us.

Maybe she should have reported her neighbor to the police? If you think so, then read The Former Assistant Detective.
A young man, trainee detective. His boss is very pleased with his progress. He would earn his badge soon.
How about this little job? He has to trap a certain restaurant owner selling liquor. He poses as a customer, orders a meal and Scnapps. It is all delivered. As he goes to confront the owner; he looks around: there are the owner’s wife and children, emaciated. They were barely paying their way. How could he possibly report them? It would have broken them.
He confronted the ex-waiter not paid his wages, who reported them. He got the man his money, and he in turn dropped the case.
If this was to be his job, though….
The editor replied to this letter, saying guard against… ‘sinking into the corruption of immoral police practices.’

The downtrodden always bear the brunt of institutionalised corrupt practices.
And so it still goes on.

You could say that his mode of conduct there was proper policing, real policing, community policing. Ah, but that was 1906/7.

So what of humour? Try Nasye Frug, and the wedding presents. 
Every letter has its own wide range of emotions.

Liana Finck’s illustrations really bring it all to life. Her illustrations are clear, atmospheric, succinct.  
As we read we picture bits, get impressions. Liana Fink has researched properly; through her illustrations we get authentic detail, we actually ‘see’ properly what we read.

I mentioned earlier that perspectives shift.
Here we have six letters from a whole collection. Of these six Liana Fink has edited and shaped their content and style to the book’s format.
And then she tops it all by having the editor, Abraham Cahan, say that he actually wrote some of the letters.
What! 
He needed to fill space, maybe. But he used actual life incidents, lost experiences, unresolved cases.

In this connection she has him say, one day, in The Bobalink when asked what the bird had taught him:
‘For the first time in my life I knew who I was (and who I wasn’t): 
I was not an advice-giver, not really; 
I was not a newspaper editor, either; 
I was not a story-writer. I was not a novel-writer. 
I was not a socialist. I was not a capitalist. I was not a Yiddishist. I was not an American or Lithuanian or a Jew. 
I was a birdwatcher!’

That is, he was an obsessive, and yet meticulous in his observations. He was avid, compulsive, and revelled in all the varieties of life before him.
But this was fiction. 
Or is it the fact on which fiction is based?

I became so enthused about this book, I now have had to stop myself saying: you must read The Melancholy Cantor! Or, the illustrations to Father? are outsTANding.

All I can say is the humanity of the people shines out of their letters, even now.
No matter what clothes they wear.

Not only that, but you also get a traditional soup recipe!

For more on Liana Finck, see:

https://lianafinck.com

Reblog: Brutalism

He walked out of there into a mechanical world. It should have been a new world, the old world new again. But it was a mechanical world.

The hearing aids were the new part; they were calibrated to the loss of the higher frequencies, and so upped the treble for him. The simple laws of materials and their resonances meant those upper frequencies had the tinny sound of some ipod ear pieces.

He walked out of there expecting to hear the world as he had known it; it was not that world. What he heard was a mechanised version: a bird flew by, flapping its wings for take-off and height-gain. There was instant visual and environmental recognition, here was an urban pigeon entering onto a length of flight, the road to the next junction, maybe. It was too built-up for wood pigeons, though they had the same flapping-slap of flight. But this time it sounded like a rustling newspaper, a large broadsheet. This was not that familiar sound to vision connect he knew so well.

His cotton trousers brushed soft cotton socks; it was a rasping sound. That was wrong. He was so intent on this hearing phenomena, these anomalies, the car just missed him. The slightly off-centre focus of his hearing, a little further to the back of his head, skewed his balance; he felt he was lurching around. By the side of a road this was not good.

He came to that junction in the road and turned, off the curb again, on then off.

‘Did you see that fool, then?’

‘Drink. Or drugs.’

‘Shouldn’t be out.’

‘What a tosser.’

He walked away quickly. This is what he got the aids for, to hear conversations again. But this…. All those times outside of conversations, anything not one-to-one, anything with background music, or just sounds blanking out all finer sounds…. And this is what he needed them for? To hear this kind of thing? Everything has its plus, and its minus.

He was in the shopping precinct now; all around were conversations. He was no longer shut out, separated by a blurred barrier of sound, now he could hear. And what did he hear? Conversation as social glue, as recognition codes among women, and among men; the youths uttered a kind of blank-faced vowel-heavy monosyllabic talk. Back with their girlfriends they were animated and fully vocal again. This was bonding, rather than intercourse: all had come outdoors to re-register themselves as social beings of a certain type, place, age, social level.

That hiss. What was it? It was the hair over his ears, the ear pieces. Whenever his ears moved, and it was surprising how often, or his scalp moved – that too – whenever all the continual physiological responses of his head occurred it gave a hissing sound, like a simmering. It should be a lower sound, a rustle of hair on plastic, on packed plastic, not hollow; but a rustle.

It was then he began to notice the changes in the new sounds, a mismatch of known sound from recognised stimuli, and this altered sound. His sense of balance, ok, that was expected and explainable: his mind listened to these new sounds despite himself. His mind was so taken up with this that it left his vision to fend for itself. And so, that object glimpsed for a second, and which he had glimpsed so many times and knew to be a faded flower head over his high garden wall, now gave him a sudden alert.

He was home, and brushing up the soil he had just walked in with a hand brush. What was that? A crow cawing somewhere close. It was his shirt brushing the flock wall paper as he moved. Nothing was matching with anything else. His mind supplied the correct explanations, but the cause was not the right one. Although vision was always king, sound was the council of ministers, the underlying sense and explanation to everything seen.

Now every sound had borders again. Things you are not aware of, things taken for granted, things slowly accustomed to, building up, accumulating, as your own sense of self grows. And now how very untidy this house – everything overspilling. My god, he thought, Where’ve I been?

The week was taken up with tidying, only, the clarity was like a razor. He became ruthless; everything went. His comfortable apartment became… stark, sharp edged, with high-lumin light bulbs that gave no mercy.

A part of him found he could not stay indoors longer than needed. He interpreted this as being focused, energized. This mismatch set up a sense of restless energy that frequently tipped into acts of anger, sudden bursts, that made no sense to him. He’d leave whoever he had hurt, and walk away amazed at himself, appalled at himself, and thrilled.

He searched out the cleaner parts of the city. The Business sectors? No; vacant buildings accumulated there, closed-downs. It became a tumbleweed centre. No, the places he gravitated to were the financial sectors. Behind their black windows they generated as much energy as they had before. This time, they did it clandestinely. Their offices were… sharp-edged, minimalist, with high-lumin light bulbs. This was his new home.

But even there, a part of him shrank away from full commitment.

The straight abrupt angles of the building in front of him was the promotion of common sense and business confidence, of four-square achievement; solid, dependable. This was the crown of the great city.

Now, however, it and many of the ones in this style, especially in close proximity like this, their own financial sector, now radiated to all an overbearing feeling of dullness, of deadness of spirit and enterprise. They had come represent the hubris and failure of an economic system that was flawed at heart.

His hearing was now like that; it dictated to sight a different, diminished repertoire of sounds to meaning.