The Black Isle

ye olde bus route

Teenage twins discussing allowance.
Location: St Louis, MO, US
Date taken: April 1957
Photographer: Nina Leen, LIFE

Teenage girls enjoying 29 cent milkshakes at drive-in restaurant after chipping in 25 cents each to the driver Judy Johnson for gas so that they could take a joy ride together.
Location: St. Louis, MO, US
Date taken: May 1957
Photographer: Nina Leen, LIFE

From Newsweek.

From The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (pp. 258-260): 

Tancredi and Angelica were passing in front of them at the moment, his gloved right hand on her waist, their outspread arms interlaced, their eyes gazing into each other’s. The black of his tail coat, the pink of her dress, combining formed a kind of strange jewel. They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die.

The two young people moved away, other couples passed, less handsome, just as moving, each submerged in their transitory blindness. Don Fabrizio felt his heart thaw; his disgust gave way to compassion for all these ephemeral beings out to enjoy the tiny ray of light granted them between two shades, before the cradle, after the last spasms. How could one inveigh against those sure to die? It would be as vile as those fish-vendors insulting the condemned in the Piazza del Mercato sixty years before. Even the female monkeys on the poufs, even those old baboons of friends were poor wretches, condemned and touching as the cattle lowing through the city streets at night on the way to the slaughterhouse; to the ears of each of them would one day come that tinkle he had heard three hours earlier behind San Domenico. Nothing could be decently hated except eternity.

And then these people filling the rooms, all these faded women, all these stupid men, these two vainglorious sexes were part of his blood, part of himself; only they could really understand him, only with them could he be at his ease. “I may be more intelligent, I’m certainly more cultivated, but I come from the same stock as they, with them I must take common cause.”

“INVISIBLE SETTLEMENTS - and their loyal subjects, a yuletide pastiche (not even a triptych!)”: Drawing I made for my old friends Gretchen and Barry Mazur in Cambridge, Mass., tail end of 1993.

“TACKLE TANGO - Or, On a small scale everything lasts longer!”: Drawing made for Gretchen and Barry in April 1994.

Heartfelt drawing by my cousin Yao (of the mosquito book fame — will scan that again later) when he was around 10 (?). He was a stickler for realism.

Letter written for me in 1993 that granted me access to WWII materials. But I was a lousy “research assistant” and never really used it. Right place at the wrong time, I guess.

Trying out a new scanner with recently unearthed juvenilia. Until I learn how to post PDFs, this process will be marked by a series of frustratingly minute images.

Again, recounting the events of the previous week. At a secret caucus at the Four Seasons lunchroom with my sometimes-garrulous uncle, he alerted me to the fact (the first open evaluation of what I’d long witnessed and believed to be true) that irritability, irrationality, paranoia, reclusiveness and bouts of uncontrollable rage run deep in the family blood, traceable to three generations and beyond. I felt oddly comforted. (As for the congenital glaucoma, cataracts and thick trunks, not so much.) We moved on happily and chowed down on our foie gras burgers. 

I thought of this as I spat out my 10 a.m. lunch of “thin crust” pizza (supermarket brand, I curse it to hell) today — cloying ketchup on steamrollered breadstick dough topped with what looked to be globs of squirrel ejaculate — in blind fury. I had the unreasonable hunger of a jetlagged hag on Day Three (the worst day, no?) and the mental acuity of a four year old on granny’s cold meds, which was why frozen pizza it had to be (the canned soup was gone yesterday). But then I evolved. I sucked back my rage (though not the pizza) and decided I should throw it back into my writing — which I hope to return to in the next day or so, grogginess and sudden sleepy jags notwithstanding. I will evolve. I will evolve.

On the bright side, I am currently reading a THRILLING, TERRIFIC (and very, very thick) book called Darkmans by Nicola Barker, which will apparently tell the entire history of England in breezy, postmodern fashion, beginning with a dowdy nuclear family in Ashford, Kent (for non-initiates, Ashford is the train depot butthole of Southeast England, and is only in the most technical sense “the Gateway to Europe,” as Barker so impishly puts it in the opening sentence of her book). I am rapt. Rapt.

Having made the perverse decision to attend university in Canterbury (alma mater of actors Tom Wilkinson and Sam Neill and writers David Mitchell and Kazuo Ishiguro) only because I wanted to be surrounded by the ancient (the ghost of Geoffrey Chaucer, the oldest Cathedral in England, etc.) and the coastal (Victorian lighthouses, sheer cliffs, etc.), I was in fact then hopelessly bewildered by the lack of Old Things around the campus. I had been misled by the literature (all pre-war). All of Canterbury had been bombed in WWII aside from the Canterbury Cathedral (where Thomas Becket bled in 1170). The rest of it was a grey and unsightly postwar village with just one cinema that played “Free Willy” for four months (I kid you not!), indifferent motorways, bus depots, taxi ranks, a barely-walking-distance Safeway and frightful shoppes selling waxy fudge squares to pre-Chunnel daytrippers from Calais and Oostende. THIS BOOK is the first I’ve encountered that comes close to explaining to me my disenchantment with Kent and my fascination in spite of it with the local sheep and the odd pockets of olde agrarian life (like those thatch huts they call oast houses). I am rapt. Rapt. Those long-unencountered place names — Folkestone, Newington — bring me goosebumps. I can almost smell the dead squid on Margate Pier and feel the Downs syndrome man (there was an institution nearby) tugging happily at my hair and singing to himself on the bright red double-decker from Broadstairs…

And have I mentioned that the book is also ruthlessly, ruthlessly funny?

Eden Spring RIP February 2008