Special Assignments by Boris Akunin

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

The adventures of Erast Fandorin continue…

 

I have written about several other books in this series, which I am reading in order. Here is the list - and I do recommend reading them in the correct order, because the story of Fandorin’s life unfolds along with the mysteries he solves.

 

In order:

 The Winter Queen

The Turkish Gambit

Murder on the Leviathan

The Death of Achilles

    

This book is a bit unusual, because it actually contains two different stories, each about half the length of the usual novels. I am unsure whether to count this as one book or two books.

 

Anyway, the first is The Jack of Spades, and is a fairly humorous mystery about a skilled con man. The second is The Decorator, which is literally about Jack the Ripper, imagining that he was in fact a disgraced Russian medical student who goes crazy, and returns to Russia to continue his crime spree after leaving London. 

 

The books are very different in tone. The first is lighthearted, and a true battle of wits between Fandorin and “Momos,” the con artist extraordinaire. 

 

The second is lurid, breathtakingly violent, and littered (literally) with dead and mutilated bodies. I thought maybe the author was being gratuitous, but then I looked up the stuff on Jack the Ripper, and, well, Akunin is just using the police reports as sources. 

 

I’ll look at each book in turn. 

 

***

 

The Jack of Spades

 

I very much enjoyed this book. The plots and counterplots between Momos (apparently Russian for the ace of spaces) and Fandorin escalate throughout, until it becomes breathtakingly daring. 

 

Interestingly, this is the rare case where Fandorin doesn’t entirely win. Rather, in one way of looking at it, Momos ends up winning in the end. (I won’t spoil it more than that.) At best, there is a stalemate, where everyone involved ends up agreeing to move on. 

 

Furthermore, the action that sparks the end for Momos’ career in Moscow ends up being his ill-advised decision to prey on a notorious gangster and slumlord - someone with his own level of ruthlessness and lack of conscience. 

 

One of the best things about this book is Fandorin’s sidekick, Mr. Tulipov. Unfortunately, he doesn’t get to stick around to the end of the next book, because I rather liked him as a character. And also because of his name, which is mentioned on page one. 

 

And that surname, from the word tulip! It was simply a joke. He had inherited the ill-starred family title from his great-grandfather. When Anisii’s forebear was studying in the seminary, the father rector had the bright idea of replacing the inharmonious surnames of the future servants of the church with names more pleasing to God. For the sake of simplicity and convenience, one year he named all the seminarians after church holidays, another year after fruits, and great-grandfather found himself in the year of the flowers: someone became Hyacinthov, someone Balzamov, and someone else Buttercupov. Great-grandfather never did graduate from the seminary, but he passed the idiotic surname on to his progeny. Well, at least he had been named after a tulip and not a dandelion.

 

The case starts off with the conning of an English gentleman at the expense of the mayor of Moscow (who is Fandorin’s employer starting in the last book.) It really is embarrassing when the mayor purportedly has sold his mansion to an Englishman, and the Englishman in turn has paid millions of kopeks. Ouch. 

 

Fandorin gets involved because the case would cause a huge scandal if it came to light. Discretion, of course, is Fandorin’s specialty. Well, that and a lot of other skills. 

 

After Tulipov is dispatched with a message to Fandorin, he is hired for what seems like a dream job. 

 

“From this moment on until the case of the Jack of Spades is closed, you will be at my disposal. We shall be working together for a while. I hope you won’t find it too b-boring.”

 

As if. Working for Fandorin may well get you killed, but it is never boring. 

 

I also wrote down a line about a religious group that has a lot in common (politically and philosophically, not theologically) with American Evangelicalism: Russian Orthodoxy. Momos sets up a charitable lottery using the identity of a European Evangelical group. (The book is set in 1886, when European and American Evangelicals were more alike than they are now.) 

 

And then the details had been important, of course. So that it wouldn’t just be an ordinary charitable lottery, but a European evangelical lottery. The Orthodox believers weren’t overfond of members of other creeds, but where money was concerned they trusted them more than their own - that was a well-known fact.

 

One big scene toward the end of the book is the one where Momos impersonates a hermit. I found it fun that the book he uses as a prop is Gulliver’s Travels, which he selected because the old copy was thick and looked impressive. 

 

One final line from this book comes from Masa, Fandorin’s Japanese valet and assistant. (The author, like Fandorin, spent time in Japan, and worked as a translator before writing these books relatively later in life.) He and Tulipov are talking about Fandorin’s seeming depression after being foiled in his most recent attempt to defeat Momos. 

 

“Need woman. With woman bad, without woman worse.” 

 

As I said, this book is relatively light-hearted, quite humorous, and has an ending that is somewhat unexpected.

 

***

 

The Decorator

 

As I said, this book is a lot darker, and literally involves Jack the Ripper. 

 

It starts with the discovery of a prostitute who has been murdered and carefully and meticulously eviscerated, with organs laid around her in an artistic manner. 

 

And yes, this is literally from the case histories of Jack the Ripper. 

 

The book is mostly from Tulipov’s point of view, but there are also episodes from the point of view of the Ripper, where he explains his bizarre religious views which lead him to his murders.

 

This book is definitely more of a classing whodunit sort of book, a more bloody version of Agatha Christie, perhaps. 

 

There are a number of potential suspects, some red herrings, and enough clues to figure out who the perpetrator is if you pay attention. 

 

And so many bodies. Too many bodies. And too many of them innocent women. (The murder of the nasty police inspector character is less traumatic.) 

 

I didn’t enjoy this book quite as much. I’ve never been fascinated by psychopaths like Jack the Ripper, although I know people who go for that sort of thing. The fact that he was real doesn’t make it better either. 

 

The ending is also a bit troubling, although it makes sense in context. 

 

There is one line, though, that I thought was interesting. Fandorin and his current girlfriend, the devout Angelina, are discussing beggars and charity. Fandorin makes the (rare) mistake of thinking that beggars congregate around palaces because rich people give more. Angelina corrects him. 

 

“No, poor people give more than the rich.” 

 

Which is true. And Christ pointed it out as well - the story of the Widow’s Mite isn’t an admonition to give when you are poor, but an indictment of the way the rich give pennies and then feel generous. 

 

 Both books have a decent amount of social commentary mixed in, and it is generally good and relevant to all societies, not merely the Russia of the late 19th Century. 

 

Although I didn’t love this book as much as the first one in the collection, it still was a worthy read. And those who like a bit more gore in their mysteries will probably love it.

 

    

    

 

Evil Flowers by Gunnhild Oyehaug

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

I ended up listening to this book because I had another book by the author on my reading list. I needed a short(ish) audiobook for some driving I would be doing last week, and this one came up as a suggestion when I searched for the other book, which had a waiting list. 

 

I must say Evil Flowers is one of the weirdest short story collections I have read, but also quite fascinating and fun. In a strange way. 

 

There are a total of 25 stories in the book, which isn’t particularly long. Thus, the longest stories are fairly short, and the shortest ones are more like vignettes. In print it is 128 pages, and barely over three hours in audiobook form. 

 

As the title suggests, the book was inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s poetry collection, The Flowers of Evil, and it shares some of that work’s surreal feel. The stories also allude to Virginia Woolf and Henrik Ibsen - each of those is at the center of one of the stories. 

 

There are also a number of animals in the book, often in weird and unexpected ways. A bear. A lion. Hagfish (aka slime eels) appear in two of the stories. Leaches eat fiber optic cables and become sentient. A cloud of midges reads thoughts. And so many birds. Birds are woven through the collection from the very start all the way to the end. 

 

The collection starts off with a real bang, with one of the most memorable opening lines ever.

 

“As I sat on the toilet menstruating, a fairly large part of my brain fell down into the toilet bowl.” 

 

It takes us a while to figure out what happened, but through the eyes of the narrator, we realize that she is an ornithologist preparing to defend her thesis (on Snipes), but the part of her brain she lost is the part that contains her knowledge of birds. 

 

As in, she now cannot remember what birds are, that they can fly, or that she ever knew anything about them. 

 

Other memorable stories include the old woman dying in the nursing home, who thinks about her daughter (who shares a name with the author) complaining that she was named after the evil queen. Why couldn’t she have been named after a good one? 

 

Another one involves three women who are the sole survivors of an airplane crash, who find themselves in a surreal landscape that one eventually identifies as being out of a children’s book she just read her child. As with many of the stories, we do not get an ending as such. 

 

There is the bizarre stream of consciousness story musing about how outsiders and Scandinavians perceive Scandinavia. Would they feel warmer if they weren’t always blue on maps? 

 

The title story starts off as being about a bus driver driven crazy by a passenger who gets on mostly to talk the driver’s ear off. Except that halfway through this is revealed to be a lie, and that what really happened was a creepy man at a gym. Or maybe that didn’t happen either, and only the “evil flowers” were real. Or are they? How can we know? 

 

The most pointed story - and one that is pretty horrifying - imagines a future where cell phones and guns are combined into one device - the “cell pistol.” Surely nothing can go wrong, right? As one character muses, “I think we should separate the pistol and the telephone functions, like before.” Yeah, no shit. But even though the author is Norwegian, a country that doesn’t have the fucked up lack of gun regulation that the US has, the point is clear enough. Treating weapons like ordinary consumer devices leads to entirely predictable problems. 

 

I also liked the story about three people who meet online in the comments section on a house Virginia Woolf lived in. Although the conversation starts off about a mundane but real issue: are there decent restrooms at the house? - it eventually leads to the three meeting up, before one freaks out and disappears. A lot remains unsaid and unknown at the end. 

 

The Henrik Ibsen story is all about the fact that Ibsen is not there at all. His absence dominates in a way his presence cannot. Perhaps one might read this as a commentary on the way Ibsen dominates the Norwegian literary scene? 

 

Another story has a dead narrator navigating the difficulties of booking a flight while dead - and really she just wants to see the white cliffs of Dover. 

 

There is a story about a person who may or may not be a (literal) monster, but is also pretty effective in showing that people who are mistreated all too often end up blaming themselves. (Hey, this is definitely the case for those of us who grew up under Religious Authoritarian Parenting.) It’s one of the shorter ones, but hits hard.

 

Another is an absurdity where a museum - whose title ends up misspelled as “Mational Nuseum” sinks into the ground. It truly feels like a real dream - one where everything feels real yet is substantially off. 

 

Finally, there are three that are titled “Protest.” These are kind of like the Monty Python thing where readers or viewers object to something in the show. 

 

In this case, using the royal “we,” the protestor complains about plot points. In one case, they complain about unhappy endings, and propose one where the characters get prizes - like Oprah. In another, they end up suggesting that the nursing home woman not die alone. But rather than, say, the daughter making it in time to say goodbye, instead, a lion randomly wanders in. And eats a pork chop. Yeah, that got weird really fast. 

 

But the point is excellent: too many readers do tend to get pissy about books that challenge their comfort zone. 

 

This book was translated by Kari Dickson, and narrated by Ann Richardson, who did a fine job. The only thing missing from the audiobook is the fact that one of the “stories” is merely a photograph of Baudelaire, kind of a wry response to the title story. 

 

I ended up very much enjoying this book. I acknowledge that surreal and absurd books aren’t everyone’s preference, but I have been a fan since discovering Alice in Wonderland as a kid. It is fun to discover a new author with a similar sense of zaniness. 

 

 

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay Gibson

Source of book: I own this

 

This is a rather unusual book for me. I generally avoid self-help books, but this one ended up being an exception. It was recommended by the authors of the Strongwilled blog, and I thought it might at least help shed some light on one of the issues that has led to my estrangement from my parents. 

There was a lot of interesting stuff in the book, and it definitely resonated for me. I took three pages of notes, and then decided I wasn’t really going to write publicly about most of what I wrote down. Some of it seems a bit too personal for a public blog, and for the rest, I wasn’t sure I wanted to put in that much time on stuff about my parents. Instead, I will keep the notes, and write something up for my own personal use. 

 

For this blog, I will mostly pick a few highlights that I think will be most helpful for other children of emotionally immature parents who might want to know if this book might be helpful. 

 

I would also say that I have actually understood a lot about the dynamics in my family as described in this book for quite a few years. And, to a significant extent, have followed the suggestions for maintaining at least a superficial relationship. For a number of years, this worked, more or less.

 

If the only issue were emotional immaturity, I think we would still have a relationship. The problem is several comorbidities that have rendered such a relationship impossible. 

 

I also want to say that I feel a lot of sympathy for my parents as to certain things. They both had traumatic childhoods. In my mom’s case, this included never being wanted by her parents, bad neglect followed by her being completely abandoned with relatives at age 13. It’s heavy duty stuff, and I really do feel bad for her, and understand how she ended up with serious emotional issues. 

 

My father also had parents who were not particularly emotionally available, and his mother died when he was 18, leaving him as the functional adult in the family after his father had a mental health breakdown. In a number of ways, I not only understand his issues, but I share a lot of his personality style, and I see a lot of him in how I have tended to respond to stress and trauma. Both good and bad. 

 

I would also say that while my mom fits this book completely, my dad is more in between healthy and unhealthy. At times, he was emotionally available to me, and I credit that with the degree of functionality that I have in my own life. 

 

It really is other reasons, although they are in a way connected, that led to the breakup of our relationship. Honestly, I kept a relationship with my mom for many years simply because I had to in order to retain access to my dad. 

 

As the book points out, emotionally immature people don’t come from nowhere. They are usually - perhaps always - created by parents who themselves were not emotionally functional. This is a generational trauma that is hard to break. 

 

I think my dad tried for a long time, and succeeded in some ways. Unfortunately, he was unable to sustain the effort into my teen and adult years. Instead, he ended up taking a wrong turn into self-medication using authoritarian religion - specifically with authoritarian parenting techniques, which broke trust with me, making the relationship about power rather than emotional closeness. As a result of this, I was denied the chance to go to normal college and pick my own career. This embrace of authoritarian religion in turn led later to an embrace of fascist politics to the point I no longer recognize him. 

 

I think too that his lifelong struggle with depression (including suicidal ideations) beat him down. Since he doesn’t believe in mainstream mental health treatments, he never sought actual treatment, but just “toughed it out” and decided it was a spiritual problem. Compounding this is that for my entire life, he has been the only functional adult in his marriage, a burden that has worn him out and left him with a lack of inner resources to deal with our family problems. 

 

He would have to actually deal with my mom’s mental health problems and my sister’s abuse of the rest of us. Instead, what I found was that he was emotionally available to a point, but as soon as there was an issue where what my mom or sister was doing was causing pain or frustration or harm, it was a complete shutdown. I was on my own, and it became clear he wouldn’t even admit there was a problem, let alone take action to protect me and those dear to me. 

 

For my mom’s part, she has serious mental illness - again, untreated because they don’t believe in mainstream mental health - which my dad has had to manage for decades. Keeping my mom from emotional meltdowns was a significant job, and it took a lot out of him, I could tell even as a kid. I too was expected to be a part of this management, increasingly so as I got older, and when I eventually chose to leave home and refuse to further participate in the game, this left my dad isolated.

 

Another factor here is my sister, who has a serious personality disorder, which first started appearing when she was a child. (Behaviors of both NPD and BPD, as well as significant sociopathic traits.) Unfortunately, as is common among emotionally immature parents, my parents have become enmeshed with my sister, and have enabled her abusive behavior toward the rest of the family. As my sister got older and better at manipulation, she was able to poison the well against her sisters-in-law and eventually the rest of us. 

 

This is one of the factors on which the breakup became inevitable. It is one thing to be emotionally unavailable, but another to deliberately ignore abuse from another family member and deny that it is occurring. Hence why my wife stopped contact with my sister and parents over a decade ago. 

 

The authoritarian parenting issue also continues to be a problem. As the book points out, one of the key traits of emotionally immature parents is that they are unable to respect the individuality of their children. Individuality is seen as a threat. Parents need to see their children as “predictable fantasy characters” rather than actual individuals. 

 

For parents like this, the false promises of authoritarian parenting are like crack cocaine. And, like any drug, while it makes you feel better, and believe your problems have gone away, authoritarian parenting techniques don’t actually solve the problem. And they ultimately harm your physical and mental health in the long run. 

 

This is how you get my mother still threatening me with hell because I don’t believe the same way she does. And how you get years of her browbeating a daughter-in-law over personal decisions like clothing and career until the relationship was destroyed. And finally the complete alienation of her grandchildren. 

 

Finally, there is another insurmountable problem connected with the embrace of authoritarian religion. A trait of emotionally immature people the book points out is they have closed minds, and cannot accept other points of view. They are mired in black and white thinking, where their beliefs were good and any differences were evil. This was my experience with my parents since childhood, but it has become untenable at this point in my life. 

 

I have LGBTQ children. They are who God (or nature if you prefer) made them. My parents do not and will not accept them for who they are. Instead, my mom in particular has seen them as her personal mission field, aggressively attempting to convert them, creeping out my kids, who no longer feel safe around her. 

 

This is a deal breaker. You cannot treat my children this way and have a relationship with me. Full stop. 

 

And there is no way for me to fix or smooth this over. As the book points out, to emotionally immature people, “facts, logic, history - all fall on deaf ears.” They cannot handle differing opinions or understand that their children can see things differently without being “evil.” And if they embraced authoritarian religion and politics, they cannot question those affiliations, even as they show their true nature as evil. (As both Evangelicalism and the Republican Party have in the Trump Era.) 

 

I will never be able to convince my parents to question their engrained beliefs. They were fully willing to throw away their daughter-in-law, their grandchildren, and their own son rather than do so. 

 

I’ll mention a few other good things in the book that were helpful in understanding this. 

 

The book has a lot of stories, and a common thread keeps coming up. Emotionally immature parents aren’t interested in understanding their children. They are focused on trying to convince their children that they are wrong. 

 

This so very much describes my relationships - my mom has always been like this, and my dad has retreated into this style, particularly regarding politics and religion, as he has gotten older. I can’t remember the last time I was actually listened to, rather than just seen as someone they had to work harder to convince that they were right. Probably it was before I hit puberty. 

 

The different styles of emotionally immature parents quiz helped clarify that as much as I want to admire my dad, he too has this issue, just expressed differently than my more obvious mom. 

 

The bit on how children respond was also helpful. I, like my dad, am an “internalizer,” who responded to emotional distance by turning inward. This has been both damaging and yet also helpful. Internalizers tend to be introspective, and this can actually help us in healing and forming better relationships. I managed to avoid marrying an emotionally immature spouse, and have formed a number of healthy friendships throughout my life. 

 

On the other hand, we internalizers tend to blame ourselves (I did for many years, until I saw that my wife was being mistreated in the same way I was, just more obviously) and try to fix things by being good. For me, this was a mixed effort. I bounced between trying to be perfect and blowing up in frustration and pain. 

 

I also have come to realize over the last several years that the emotional neglect that I endured as a child has left me fearful of abandonment or of being unloveable. This has driven some negative overreactions in my own relationships, something I have been working on noticing and working against. I am grateful to have a patient and perceptive spouse who understood this about me before I understood myself. 

 

Another insight: because anger is (as the book notes) an expression of individuality, I have been consistently punished for showing it, no matter how justified. (Literally the story of my teen years.) Being able to accept that I have the human right to be angry when wronged has been a journey for me. 

 

Another line that was helpful came from another story. Emotionally immature parents commonly become enmeshed with a “golden child,” and that certainly happened in my family. And, since my sister, like my mom, is an “externalizer,” demanding that others cater to their emotions, she was and is able to rule the family with her drama and tantrums. 

 

“While internalizers felt like they couldn’t get away with anything, their externalizing siblings were let off the hook repeatedly.”

 

Oh hell yes. This was and is exactly our family dynamic. It was always my fault, and I was (and am) expected to ignore my own needs and those of my wife and kids in order to placate my mom and sister. As the book puts it, this is a “predatory, indulged sibling.” Unsurprisingly, in the story in which this occurs, the predatory sibling made obviously false accusations of sexual misconduct against other family members - something my sister has done for years. 

 

As the book points out, children like me who grow up in this environment end up seeing this dynamic as “normal.” For me, it wasn’t until I saw the same behaviors directed against my wife that I was able to realise that, no, this wasn’t normal or okay. It was abusive behavior. 

 

I’ll end with a final thought about the book. A recurring theme is that part of the healing process is understanding that certain things you wanted to believe as a child were in fact lies. 

 

No, our parents weren’t wiser than we were. In many cases, they were incredibly foolish. (See: Gothard, Bill)

 

No, our parents didn’t know what was best for us. They were making it up as they went along, often listening to malignant voices. 

 

No, our parents didn’t generally have our best interests in mind. Instead, often they were trying to make themselves feel better, and that came at our expense. 

 

Yes, we have the right to determine our own lives. We do not have to live to make our parents happy. 

 

No, our parents do not have the right to dictate to us, our spouses, or our children how we should live our lives. 

 

Yes, we have the right to impose boundaries, and consequences if those boundaries are violated. 

 

And, importantly, we can do better for our own children. Another thing the book brought out to me are some of the ways that I withdraw emotionally due to a fear of hurt. I know that, like my parents, I will not be able to completely break the trauma cycle. Philip Larkin unfortunately wasn’t wrong in his famous poem. But just like my dad at least was able to do better for a long time than his parents did, I hope that I can keep moving that window toward better and more functional relationships. 

 

As I said, there is a lot more in here, and I am skipping 90 percent of my notes. I do think this is a helpful book, particularly for the internalizer sorts like myself who want to understand why our family dynamics were and are so frustrating. It gives permission to feel what we feel, including anger - and even occasionally hate - which the book points out is a perfectly normal reaction to being subjected to control for no discernable reason other than the controller's own psychological issues. 

 

I’ll say again that I do feel bad for my parents. They had hard lives, and that affected them. If it were just the emotional immaturity, I think we could have preserved something. It was the embrace of authoritarian childrearing that bled into adulthood, the turn to toxic politics, the enabling of abuse by my sister, and their choice to reject my kids that made the relationship impossible. 

 

I cannot help but wonder about the what-ifs. What if they had gotten therapy instead of toxic religion? What if they had been able to let me and my brother go to college? What if they had at least been willing to let us live our own lives? What if they had gotten my sister the treatment she needed when she showed signs of a personality disorder as a child? What if?

 

Anyway. 

 

Give the book a try if it looks like it might fit. And definitely check out the Strongwilled blog if you, like me, was raised in an authoritarian religious environment. 

ADDENDUM:

I forgot one more important thing. Emotionally immature parents rarely actually want happiness, peace, or a resolution. What they want is constant feeding of what will never satiate them. 

I realized how true this was of my mother and sister. My mother doesn't want happiness, she wants to be constantly needed. So, in a way, my apparent apostasy gives her what she wants. She can obsess, pray, cry, whatever, over the state of my soul and the souls of her grandchildren and feel that she is the most needed person in the universe.

Likewise, I realized - and my mother never will - that my sister doesn't want to feel secure in her marriage or other relationships. What she wants is constant drama that puts her at the center of the universe. Thus, she will never stop accusing other women of trying to get in her husband's pants, because she gets what she wants from lying about other women. Drama, sympathy, sacrifices to her vanity. And ultimately, she wants to see other people sacrifice their relationships and their well-being to her drama. 

Sungsook by Portia S. Choi

Source of book: I own this

 

It isn’t that often that I blog about a local author that isn’t that well known outside of my part of California. A few years back, I talked about Ardis Walker, a local poet, teacher, and environmental advocate. (I think we should rename a local mountain currently named for a Confederate traitor after Walker, because of Walker’s association with that area.) 

 

This book is by another local writer, one who is still living, and was recently named as the honorary Poet Laureate of our county. For years, she has been active in the local poetry scene, a board member of Kern Poets, in addition to her decades as a public health doctor. 

 

When our local paper did an article about her recently, I decided to get her poetry collection from our local independent bookstore, and check her out. 

With swag from a local coffee shop that hosts poetry events. 

Sungsook is mostly about Choi’s experience as a young girl during the Korean War, which erupted while her father was working in the United States. Her family was displaced, separated, and eventually reunited in the United States when she was age 8. The name itself is her original Korean name, before it was changed by her parents to something easier to say in English. More mainstream, although the Shakespeare reference isn’t as familiar as it should be. 

 

Over the last few years, I have ended up reading a number of books about the trauma and displacement of that civil war, triggered by the end of Japanese colonial occupation, and unfortunately fueled by interference from communist China and imperialist America. I’ll link to those at the end of the post. 

 

For Choi, the trauma was real and personal. Since she was very young, the perspective is that of a small child who doesn’t always understand what is happening or its significance. The book is a poignant view from inside the mind of that child. 

 

It’s a very short book - only 37 pages, of which 25 are the actual poems. I selected two of them to feature. 

 

Heartbeats

 

Up and down

up and down

rocked on back of mama.

My arms grasp her,

my legs dangle

my bottom and back

tied to mama

with strips of cloth.

 

(Before, before

inside mama’s water-warmth

her heartbeats muffled.)

 

Mama’s arms support

my bottom, her heartbeats

through her blouse like

on slow walks from church,

rocked to sleep, home.

 

Shouts, awake,

rush, frenzy;

a grandma

falling down.

 

Mama’s heartbeats.

I am on her back,

protected 

 

in the sweat-blood rush

of refugees.

 

Spring Treats

 

In the hush of early spring,

 

            sun’s brightness awakened tender sprigs beneath

                        the melting snow.

 

            Squeals of other children entice

                        me outside. I speed into the

                                    marketplace. 

 

A tan tube of billowing cloth undulates

            from pop-popping rice--

 

                        Roasty aroma fills my nose.

 

            A man takes huge scissors, snips the candy brick

                        lying on his cart.

 

            With red-puffy fingers, he picks up the candy,

                        reaches to us crowded

 

                        ‘round his cart.

 

            Ah-ah, yuh-yum. Sweetness melting

 

all around--

 

            taste safety.

 

If you are interested in obtaining this book, you can order it from Russo’s Books here in Bakersfield - they will ship anywhere in the US, I believe. If you live elsewhere, I would give them a call, as they usually find ways of making it happen. 

 

***

 

The Korean history list:

 

We Do Not Part by Han Kang

Nuclear Family by Joseph Han

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Shoko's Smile by Choi Eunyoung 

 

Stomping the Blues by Albert Murray

Source of book: I own this

 

I previously read The Omni-Americans for Black History Month, and loved it. This time, I decided to read one of Albert Murray’s books on music, since these works are considered his most influential.

 

Stomping the Blues is all about the blues as a musical genre, but more than that, about a whole philosophy and history surrounding the music. 

 

To this end, he starts with the blues in the psychological and religious sense: the “blue devils” of depression and associated emotions, the constellation of the effects of the fact that life is hard and is even more so if one is poor and of a lower social caste. 

 

To Murray, there are two complimentary approaches to this reality in black American culture: the Sunday Morning Service and the Saturday Night Function. The one looks to religion and the hope of an afterlife, and is characterized by a certain kind of ecstatic musical tradition. The other seeks to “stomp the blues” through dance music and secular revelry. 

 

The two are simultaneously in competition and yet also closely related, particularly in the musical sense. 

 

Blues music is the Saturday Night Function music - it is not an expression of self-pity as too many white critics have made it out to be. It is a means of driving the blues away through music which acknowledges the blue devils while subverting them into a celebration of life and human art. 

 

Murray also takes on the unfortunate tendency of the fans of European art music to see blues music as "primitive," or “spontaneous,” where in fact it is every bit as virtuosic, highly developed, and carefully practiced as their music. It is just a different set of rules and conventions and skills. 

 

Furthermore, as music historians are all quite aware, blues itself evolved in numerous directions over the last 150 years: jazz, rock, and pop genres are all in varying degrees descended from blues (and from spirituals, the competing genre), and represent the further development of uniquely American musical tradition. 

 

Murray also notes that the blues are uniquely American. Music by black musicians has taken completely different directions elsewhere in the world, and Murray argues that just like African Americans are a mix of black and white, blues is a mix of African elements and European music that came together in a unique combination because America is a unique place and culture. 

 

This is something I have pointed out to a number of fundie and ex-fundie acquaintances regarding the white person freakout about black music - the belief that black music gives you demons, etc., taught by Gothard and others.

 

The various forms of African American music - blues, jazz, rock - have much in common with European music, and that includes the “beat” used as a pseudoscientific rationale for denigrating black music. 

 

There is literally more in common between Bach and Chuck Berry or Duke Ellington than between the latter and traditional African music. 

 

And, let us not forget, even the “whitest” American genres of music - Country and Bluegrass - actually are themselves descended from Old Time music, a genre invented by a combination of poor Appalachians, enslaved Blacks, free Blacks, and immigrants from southern Europe. You can literally see the combination in the instruments: banjo from black Caribbeans, fiddle from Ireland and Scotland, guitar from Spain, mandolin and bouzuki from Greece, dobro from some inventive brothers from Slovakia. 

 

It’s all interconnected, and, to borrow from the previous book, omni-american. 

 

If any genre is the closed to purely black, it is the blues, however. The blues got their start and came to a high development in the juke joints and barrelhouses of the South, the dancehalls across America, and in the earliest musical recordings. 

 

It was in the late 1800s, when the new recording technology aided Scott Joplin and other pioneers of a new riff on blues idioms, Ragtime, in bringing black music to the American mainstream.

 

Naturally, this was followed by a moral panic on the part of racist white people, who freaked out that it wasn’t their precious art music that would become the American sound, but the vibrant rhythms of the formerly enslaved and currently segregated that captured the imagination of the world. 

 

It is beyond the scope of this post to get into all the stupid arguments I had with my mom over the years after she bought into the racist tripe about music that Gothard and others regurgitated from the early days of Ragtime and Jazz, but you can find bits of that story throughout this blog. Maybe someday I will do a whole post about that issue. 

 

The book covers a lot of ground for its relatively modest length, from history to culture to music. Murray was a well-regarded music critic, so his musical analyses are excellent. As both a musician and lover of history and culture, I greatly enjoyed his thoughts on this vibrant form of music. 

 

One thing I might add before diving into some quotes is that I have played more than just classical music. Starting in my teens, I played my violin for church musicals. Soon after, I would add drums and guitar to my skill set, playing mostly for church, but also for fun in other genres. 

 

My guitar skills are nowhere near good enough to do blues - I’m competent at rhythm, but not lead - but I can do some things on my violin. Over the years, I have enjoyed some great blues jams with fellow musicians, and I love improvising within the genre, with a few twists of my own borrowed from classical and bluegrass thrown in. 

 

One of these days, I hope to get some time to work on jazz improvisation - although playing in two orchestras and sometimes a third has tended to limit my free time a bit. Oh well. Anyway, I love blues, and would love to be part of a jam again in the future.

 

Anyway, here are some passages that I particularly liked. 

 

Sometimes a carefully controlled frown or even the faintest of supercilious smiles will work as much havoc as a scream or a shout. 

 

This is the underappreciated irony of blues lyrics. One shouldn’t make the mistake of taking them literally and deadly seriously. There is that layer of parody, of irony, of satire that is so often present. Don’t listen to B. B. King and decide he is a male chauvinist - he is using a specific blues convention, that of the complaint about a faithless lover, that goes for both genders. 

 

Come on, “I gave you seven children, now you want to give them back” is dripping with irony. 

 

And yes, there is the female equivalent. Here’s a bit of Bessie Smith. Although to be fair, she isn’t exactly wrong…

 

Murray discusses some problematic ways of addressing the blues: alcohol and drugs, and compares them with music. 

 

But of all the age-old ways of dispelling the ominous atmosphere that comes along with the blues, the one most people seem to have found to be the most consistently effective all told also turns out to be essentially compatible with a great majority of the positive impulses, urges, drives, cravings, needs, desires, and hence the definitive purposes, goals, and ideals of their existence. Nor should its identification come as a surprise to sufficiently attentive students of culture and civilization, and certainly not to students of the nature and function of aesthetics. The blues counteragent that is so much a part of many people’s equipment for living that they hardly ever think about is as such anymore is that artful and sometimes seemingly magical combination of idiomatic incantation and percussion that creates the dance-oriented goodtime music also known as the blues. 

 

In the discussion of the complex roots of American music, Murray notes that both the word “blue” and the concept of that color being associated with sorrow and depression are expressly European, and do not appear in African language or culture.

 

Thus the chances were that blue-oriented Afro-Americans acquired both the word and its special connotation from their European American ancestors. English usage of the term blue devils to designate baleful demons has been traced back as far as 1616. Its figurative use as a metaphor for depression of spirits has been traced as far back as 1787…

 

As a musician, I have to say I love Murray’s insistence that as important as blues lyrics are, they are a distant second in importance to blues music as the music itself. In fact, tunes without lyrics can very much be blues by themselves. 

 

As compelling as so many blues lyrics so often are, and for all the apt phrases, insightful folksy, and striking imagery that blues singers have added to the national lore, the definitive element of a blues statement is not verbal. Words as such, however well chosen, are secondary to the music. What counts for most is not verbal precision (which is not to say vocal precision) but musical precision, or perhaps better still, musical nuance. 

 

And this as well:

 

Blues musicians play music not only in the theatrical sense that actors play or stage a performance, but also in the general sense of playing for recreation, as when participating in games of skill. They also play in the sense of gamboling, in the sense that is to say, of fooling around or kidding around with, toying with, or otherwise having fun with. Sometimes they also improvise, and in the process they elaborate, extend, and refine. But what they do in all instances involves the technical skill, imagination, talent, and eventually the taste that adds up to artivice. And of course such is the overall nature of play, which is so often a form of reenactment to begin with, that sometimes it also amounts to ritual. 

 

Heck yeah. I can confirm. 

 

Talking about the skill and practice needed to make improvisation sound “spontaneous”: 

 

Obviously, such skill and taste are matters of background, experience, and idiomatic orientation. What they represent is not natural impulse but the refinement of habit, custom, and tradition become second nature, so to speak. Indeed on close inspection what was assumed to have been unpremeditated art is likely to be largely a matter of conditioned reflex, which is nothing other than the end product of discipline, or in a word, training. In any case practice is as indispensable to blues musicians as to any other kind. As a very great trumpet player, whose soulfulness was never in question, used to say, “Man, if you ain’t got the chops for the dots, ain’t nothing happening.” 

 

Again, can confirm. When you hear an amazing improvised solo, understand the thousands of hours of practice that made that possible. 

 

All of which makes what is only a performance seem like a direct display of natural reflexes, because it obscures the technical effort. But blues performances are based on a mastery of a very specific technology of stylization by one means or another nonetheless. 

 

I mentioned early in this post the conflict between Saturday and Sunday. While my experience has been far more of the racist moral panic about black music, I also got plenty of the “secular music is bad” simply because it was secular. Except for secular Classical music, of course. Go figure. 

 

Murray brings out that this is also present in black culture, with the Blues seen as an evil competition to the Sunday singing. This particularly accelerated with the advent of recorded music, which gave secular music an advantage for weekday use. 

 

As soon as records went mainstream, they “began by being condemned in so many Sunday Morning Sermons as the diabolical apparatus of the Devil’s agents of wickedness. 

 

And why not? They clearly filled some of the same psychological - and physical - needs that the spirituals did. 

 

Because such dance steps as consisted of bumping and bouncing, dragging and stomping, hopping and jumping, rocking and rolling, shaking and shouting, and the like, were (and are) precisely what all the percussive incantation was (and still is) all about in the first place; and obviously such movements add up to a good time regardless of the lyrics. Purification and celebration/affirmation without a doubt. But not because the participants proceed in such terms. So far as they are concerned they are out for a good time, which of course is not only reason enough but turns out to be the same thing in any case. And besides, aren’t the most functional rituals precisely those that have long since become the most casual conventional and customary procedures?

 

And more:

 

All the same, it is the symbolical and ceremonial aspects of honky-tonk and ballroom dancing that downhome churchfolk object to first of all. 

 

All this adds up to the conclusion that the idea of blues as gloomy misses the point. The ritual, the physicality, the symbolic dancing away of the blue devils - that is the point. 

 

This book isn’t exactly addressed to white people, per se. At times, it seems it is more directed to a combination of people who already love and care about the blues, and at a black audience.

 

But damn if he doesn’t get some sick burns in at white critics. He doesn’t say “white,” but….it is obvious they are white. Here is one of my favorite passages:

 

Many also overlard their copy with downhome and uptown slang expressions, such as dig for understand and appreciate, bad for excellent, taking care of business for performing in an outstanding manner, and so on, as if to prove that their contact with the idiom is that of a very hip which is to say sophisticated insider. But sometimes the results are even more exasperating than ludicrous. Item: The use of the word funky to mean earthy and soulful. The insider’s traditional use is synonymous with foul body odor and connotes the pungent smell of sweat-saturated clothes and unwashed bodies, undeodorized armpits, improperly wiped backsides, urine-stained and fart-polluted undergarments. 

 

Acknowledging that in the intervening decades, the white-bread use of the word has come to be accepted, Murray is right. Here is a great example of the classic usage of the term. And there is nothing more awkward than nerdy white people trying to sound hip. 

 

Later in the book, Murray talks extensively about the evolution of the blues into jazz, particularly through all-time greats such as Count Basie and Duke Ellington, who were as comfortable in the concert hall as in the dance hall. 

 

Part of this development was the fusion of the blues dance tunes with the spirituals and with the pop art song. Again, black and white, sacred and secular, all coming together to form a new genre. 

 

There is nothing at all ironic about Stomping at the Savoy and Moten Swing being written by musicians for whom the Saturday Night Function was as much a part of what life is all about as is the Sunday Morning Service. Nor does there seem to be any compelling reason why the audiences for whom such music was written and performed in the first place should not continue to be able to enjoy it in its natural setting simply because another audience now exists in the concert hall. 

 

Murray clearly shares my love for Basie and Ellington, as he discusses both of them at length. I also loved that he specifically called out Ellington’s work for the concert hall, several of which I have heard played by orchestras, and one of which, Harlem, I got to play earlier this year. (So very, very much fun, even though I am still working on getting jazz idioms to swing right.) 

 

But of course, dance is still at the heart of blues and jazz and rock and the rest. Murray argues that this is actually the case with music generally. 

 

And besides, as little as has been made of it by students of culture, not to mention assessors and technicians of social well-being, the quality of dance music may actually be of far greater significance than that of concert music anyway. Dance, after all, not only antedates music, but is also probably the most specific source of music and most of the other art forms as well. It is not by chance that poetry, for instance, is measured in feet, and that drama was originally mainly a combination of poetry and choreography performed not on a stage but in the orchestra, in other words, a dancing place! Furthermore, dance, according to impressive anthropological data, seems to have been the first means by which human consciousness objectified, symbolized, and stylized its perceptions, conceptions, and feelings. Thus the very evidence which suggests that the pragmatic function of concert music is to represent the dancing of attitudes also serves to reinforce the notion that dance is indispensable. 

 

Murray also spends a chapter looking at the differences between folk art and fine art - as well as the blurry line between them in history. This also ties in with his argument that folk art is actually highly sophisticated and stylized. Indeed, it is often more rigid than fine art. In any case, it is the pinnacle of technology for a society, not a spontaneous expression of primitive emotion. 

 

Sometimes such people seem to have as many academic pieties about the inherent merits of folk music as some others seem to have about the intrinsic superiority of the music of the European recital hall. Few hesitate to declare, if only by implication, that folk art is the most valid, reliable, and comprehensive representation of actuality - as opposed to the distortions inherent in the artificialities of fine art. And yet in the case of blues music, it so happens that their own firsthand contact with the actualities of the experience being stylized is often extremely limited, to say the least. Nevertheless, they seem to regard themselves as being fully qualified somehow to reject the professional blues musician’s preoccupation with craft and refinement out of hand. Because in their view it can only result in pretension and decadence.

 

Murray points out that the opposite is true:

 

The seldom questioned assumption that folk creativity is the primal source or wellspring of sophisticated art and technology is also misleading. Being inherently conservative or traditional, folk expression is necessarily imitative and thus not primordial in any intrinsic sense at all but derivative. Moreover, what it imitates and is itself derived from is such sophisticated art and technology as it has been able to come by and through the process of corruption and vulgarization, or in a word, popularization. Folkways are always the old ways. Folklore is the old lore. Folk music is the old-time music. In other words, folk expression is old sophisticated technology, wisdom, and art, only now it is assumed to be indigenous to unsophisticated craftsmen, sages, and artists.

…

And as for those inclined to take exception to the notion that folk craftsmen and artists are lacking in imagination and inventiveness, perhaps they have forgotten what folk expression is really like. To begin with, it is predictable, not experimental. In truth, it places no premium on newness as such. It is as far as is possible the same old stuff time and again. 

…

Invention comes from people of special talent and genus, not from those who are circumscribed by routine. 

 

Murray further notes that no small part of this notion of folk art as being more “pure” lies in a false belief about human nature generally. 

 

But after all what really seems to underlie most of the notions of those who prefer folk art to fine art are the same old essentially sentimental assumptions that make for pastoral literature (and for political theories about noble savages). Thus, much the same as pastoral poetry presents its rustics as being on better terms with life that courtiers because they are closer to nature, so would promoters of folk art as true art have you believe that a provincial musical sensibility is somehow a greater endowment than a more cosmopolitan sensibility plus a greater mastery of technique. It absolutely is not. It limits not only what folk artists can do but also what they can perceive and imagine in the first place. 

 

Thus, for Murray, artists like Duke Ellington are the pinnacle of the art of the blues, bringing in the special genius and talent as well as that cosmopolitan experience and imagination. It is hard for me to disagree. The same is true of the use of folk traditions in Classical music. 

 

I also noted the passage on the difference between hipsters and the genuine article. 

 

In any case the hipster’s application of the disposition to riff with elegance is usually limited to jiving and woofing on his street-corner hangout and to shucking and stuffing along the mainstem, as if the night club, the ballroom, the music hall, and the bars that the performers, gamblers, and the sporting crowd frequent were what life itself were all about. Indeed, some hipsters, not unlike some churchgoers, are so preoccupied with the trappings and procedures of the ceremonial occasion per se that their involvement amounts to idolatry. They misconstrue the symbol and the ritual and the ritual reenactment as the thing itself. 

 

The chapter summing up Murray’s own philosophy of the blues is amazing. 

 

What it all represents is an attitude toward the nature of human experience (and the alternatives of human adjustment) that is both elemental and comprehensive. It is a statement about confronting the complexities inherent in the human situation and about improvising or experimenting or riffing or otherwise playing with (or even gambling with) such possibilities as are also inherent in the obstacles, the disjunctures, and the jeopardy. It is also a statement about perseverance and about resilience and thus also about the maintenance of equilibrium despite precarious circumstances and about achieving elegance in the very process of coping with the rudiments of existence. 

 

Wow. Just wow. 

 

The ending is also truly badass:

 

When the storybook hero is reported to have lived happily ever after his triumph over the dragon, it is not to be assumed that he is able to retire but rather that what he has been through should make him more insightful, more skillful, more resilient, and hence better prepared to cope with eventualities. Because there will always be other dragons, which after all are as much a part of the nature of things as is bad weather. 

Nor has anybody ever been able to get rid of the blues forever either. You can only drive them away and keep them at bay for the time being. Because they are always there, as if always waiting and watching. So retirement is out of the question. But even so old pro that you have become, sometimes all you have to hear is the also and also of the drummer signifying on the high-hat cymbal, even in the distance (as it is as if it were the also and also of time itself whispering red alert as if in blue italics), and all you have to do is keep them in their proper place, which is deep in the dozens, is to pat your feet and snap your fingers.

 

If you love music, if you love the blues, if you love well-written thoughts by one of America’s great thinkers of his time, check out this book.

 

***

 

I linked a few, but maybe I can give you a handful of my favorite blues performances that I keep returning to. There are so many more - I am definitely not remembering them all. 

 

Obviously, got to have the King.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgXSomPE_FY

 

And some Joe Bonamassa.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLOJS30JeDg

 

Bessie Smith.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bo3f_9hLkQ

 

Ella.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRIs5-uur_Q

 

Howling Wolf

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M95tCfMxwiM

 

Robert Johnson

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYsnRc09csQ

 

If you like, put your favorites in the comments. 🙂